I have been obsessing over trying to solve my connectivity problem. It annoys me that it only seems to apply to one specific type of internet connection: Home-to-typepad (where typepad is my blog hosting service, where you're reading this). All other connections I've tried work just fine, with zero problems. I can do: work-to-typepad; home-to-anything-else; work-to-anything-else.
I got a prompt answer from the typepad helpdesk, today. Basically, there is not nor has there been any kind of outage at typepad. And, since I'm able to connect from work, it's not a Korea-wide problem. Although… I got a bit of a hint of what might be going on, when, as an experiment, I tried connecting to my blog using the raw IP address rather than the name: I got a notice from the Korean Police State that they prohibited that particular connection.
I reckon there may be something involving Korea's "national firewall" – just like China (and, in fact, like most countries outside of North America), Korea monitors and surreptitiously manipulates the contents of the DNS's (Domain Name Servers) in-country. These are the devices that tell the internet how to find things for you. The result is that if they don't want you going somewhere, they can "block" it in some way.
Still, I don't think my blog host (typepad, blogs.com, sixapart.com, etc.) is being intentionally blocked, because I was still able to go there from work. I think there may be problems with my particular at-home DSL provider's commitment to correctly maintained DNS's. Regardless, I successfully solved the problem, at least for now. I found a list of inside-Korea proxy servers, and configured firefox to connect to the internet using one of them. That way I can piggyback on that other Korean service's DNS, and still get fairly speedy connectivity.
Why not use a proxy outside Korea? Because doing such is impossibly slow. Most connections will time out long before you get anything back, because the browser has to handshake with its proxy through undersea cables, I guess. I'm speculating… I don't really understand this stuff. Just enough to hack around a bit, to try to solve my problem.
And here it is, solved, I guess. I'm posting to my blog, using firefox connected to a Korean proxy, thus bypassing my apparently imcompetent DSL provider's DNS. Now, back to your regularly scheduled narcissistic caveatdumptruck.