A faulty firmware update caused Samsung's roughly $4,000 Bespoke AI 4-Door refrigerators to shut down across South Korea, according to Star News Korea. Affected units displayed an error message and stopped cooling even after being unplugged and restarted, and the failure hit just before the Chuseok holiday, forcing some owners to discard food. Samsung reportedly told customers the earliest repair appointment was October 1.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-23
South Korea's K-pop industry is increasingly incorporating artificial intelligence and robotics into aspects of music creation and live performance. The move has drawn scrutiny from fans and performers who have voiced concerns about the technology's role in an industry built on human artistry.
wsj.com
· 2026-09-22
Rapid7 reports that a stealthy espionage campaign has compromised South Korean automotive and media companies since early 2025, with medium-confidence attribution to North Korean APT37 based on overlapping command-and-control infrastructure. The attackers exploited the open-source HAProxy load balancer to install a custom Linux toolkit called TED, granting them visibility into and control over victims' network traffic.
darkreading.com
· 2026-09-16
A new category of 'dopamine sites' lets users browse, checkout and 'track' orders for products and food they never actually buy. The trend began with Park Seohyun's South Korean site 'Food Never Arrives,' which estimated money and calories saved by skipping real orders, and has spawned imitators like 'FakeHaul' and 'Food Never Comes,' the latter drawing over 2.7 million views since June.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-13
Matchmaking firms in South Korea report that professionals at semiconductor giants like SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, along with AI industry workers, are now the most coveted partners in the country's dating scene, overtaking traditionally prestigious fields like medicine and law. The shift follows massive profit-sharing bonuses, with SK Hynix employees reportedly earning around 700 million won annually, more than 15 times Korea's average salary, fueled by stock surges of 95% and 135% at Samsung and SK Hynix respectively this year.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-04
Galway Robot Park, a 16,500-square-meter venue near Seoul, South Korea, has opened with the goal of merging artificial intelligence and robotics with theme-park entertainment. The operating company says it wants to demonstrate how robots can serve as attractions rather than just novelties.
bbc.co.uk
· 2026-09-03
Samsung has rolled out the eighth One UI 9 beta update for the Galaxy S26 lineup, starting with the Galaxy S26 Ultra in South Korea. The 513MB Android 17-based update carries firmware ending in ZZHM and the August 5, 2026 security patch, with the changelog citing only stabilization fixes for device operation. It arrives alongside the first One UI 9 beta for the Galaxy S25 series.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-01
South Korean officials have dismissed a House Judiciary Committee GOP report accusing them of unfairly targeting Coupang, the Seattle-based e-commerce firm often called Korea's Amazon, over a data breach. The report followed South Korean hearings, threats of criminal charges against Coupang's interim CEO, and a record data-privacy fine, actions Coupang says were disproportionate to what it calls a minor breach. Congressional sources and people close to Coupang tell CNBC the standoff is now souring US-South Korea relations and could trigger retaliatory measures.
cnbc.com
· 2026-08-31
South Korea's government will roll out a free generative AI program called 'AI for All' starting with beta testing in September, expanding to the whole population later this year. Three consortia, including groups led by the nation's top telecom carriers and Kakao's operator, will build apps that connect to government systems for tasks like booking medical appointments, apartment hunting, and tax filing, with no token limits on usage.
techspot.com
· 2026-08-29
South Korea has launched a national program giving every citizen free access to AI chatbots developed domestically. The initiative is designed to widen public exposure to homegrown AI tools rather than relying on foreign systems.
wsj.com
· 2026-08-28
South Korea's government-backed startup support platform, Modu-ui Changup, suffered a data breach that exposed personal information and startup idea summaries of roughly 5,000 successful applicants. Investigators from the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, National Intelligence Service, Cyber Security Center and National Police Agency traced the root cause to an encryption key that had been embedded in an API response, allowing an outside party to harvest it via web crawling and decrypt supposedly protected data.
bleepingcomputer.com
· 2026-08-24
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