Service was so unpopular, getting rid of it was an election policy Share Copy South Korea on Thursday shuttered a government-run digital certificate service that required the use of Microsoft’s ancient ActiveX technology. Microsoft launched ActiveX way back in 1996 and it was effectively the company’s riposte to Java. An evolution of Microsoft’s COM (Component Object Model) and OLE (object linking and embedding), ActiveX made it possible to embed elements of other applications in a web page and even inside other apps by using an “ActiveX control” and a plug-in. The pre-.Net tech was Microsoft’s big mid-90s play for a cross-platform application delivery platform and lives in on technologies like ASP.net.