Vietnam has rejected accusations by Internet giant Google that Vietnamese computer users have been spied on and political blogs hacked into.
The US-based firm last week said infected machines had been used both to spy on their owners as well as to attack blogs containing messages of political dissent.
“These are groundless opinions,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Nga told reporters.
Vietnam has “specific regulations against computer viruses, harmful software and for ensuring information security and secrecy,” she said in comments received over the weekend.
Google said the malicious software infected computers of users who downloaded Vietnamese language software, and possibly other legitimate software, that was altered to infect the machines.
Leading Internet security firm McAfee said perpetrators of the Vietnamese attacks “may have political motivations and may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”
Google announced last month it was redirecting mainland Chinese users to an uncensored site in Hong Kong, making good on an earlier pledge not to go along with the Chinese Communist Party government’s censorship rules.
Its decision to defy Beijing was based on what it called concerns over censorship and cyber-attacks it said originated from China.
Vietnam’s restrictions on news media and Internet sites such as Facebook threatened Vietnam’s rapid economic progress, Western donors said in December.
Meanwhile, Google’s Hong Kong Web site resumed the use of the company’s Chinese name, “Gu Ge,” a symbol of its presence in China since 2006, one day after replacing it temporarily.
The logo on www.google.com.hk was changed yesterday to Google “Zhongguo,” or Google China in Chinese, from Google “Gu Ge,” the Chinese translation of the company’s name.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained