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.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
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