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Vietnam aims to become IT powerhouse in 10 years

April 27th, 2011

In the hope of becoming an information and communications technology (ICT) powerhouse within 10 years, Vietnam will continue to create favorable conditions for investors.

Announcing this, Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan said Vietnam needed international partners to help build infrastructure and organize technology transfer.

Nguyen Trong Duong, director of the ministry of information and communications’ information technology department, said the telecommunication infrastructure in Vietnam had been growing at an extraordinary pace.

He said preferential treatment for the industry was reflected through investment law and taxation policies.
“For example, software enterprises are exempt from corporate tax for the first four years after they make a profit,” he said. “After that, they will have to pay only half of the required tax for the next nine years.”

In addition, material imported for software production is also tax-free.

Duong said that for large-scale investment projects, such as the Intel Corporation’s US$1 billion assembly and testing plant in HCM City and Samsung’s $1 billion mobile phone manufacturing plant in nothern Bac Ninh Province, further incentives would be granted.

“For example, as the Samsung plant in Vietnam exports a large volume of mobile phones, a special Customs office will be based inside the factory to enable faster clearances.

“Not every area in the sector will receive preferential treatments, only those with high added value,” he said.

Nhan said Vietnam would continue the administrative reforms so as to create a more attractive business environment for ICT enterprises.

Duong said top priority would be given to software engineering.

He said the strategic orientation for the emerging software sector was to provide offshore software development involving Vietnamese enterprises developing software as required by foreign clients instead of developing their own software.

“We are realistic enough not to target manufacturing packaged softwares, such as operating systems, which would involves billions in investment,” he said.

“If we ever develop packaged software, it would be to provide domestic products at an affordable price to replace international ones rather than compete in the global market.”

Duong said some of the hesitation among foreign investors was the poor infrastructure and inadequate workforce.

“To many people’s amazement, the telecommunication infrastructure in Vietnam has been growing at an extraordinary pace and now we are confident that the current infrastructure can totally empower Vietnam to catch up with the global trend.

“At the same time, the quality of fresh graduates is getting better and better as long as they have proper time for training, normally from three to six months, before actually getting into work,” Duong said.

Nguyen The Dung, from World Bank Vietnam, said Vietnam should mobilize different resources, even Official Development Assistance whose conventional domain were for transportation infrastructure, to boost ICT development in Vietnam.

Dung, who manages a $93 million project funded by the World Bank to help boost IT application in State agencies, said although the project was started in 2006 and expected to end next year, disbursement was slow due to limited capacities.

“This is understandable because Vietnam is still new to this type of project,” he said.

Dung said Vietnam should improve its capacity to be able to effectively utilize financial assistance.

The ICT sector in Vietnam achieved $7.4 billion in revenue last year, growing at a rate of 15 to 20 per cent. By 2020, it is expected to contribute 8 to 10 per cent to the GDP.

Source:http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/04/27/vietnam-aims-become-it-powerhouse-10-years.html

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Tags: IT Software Vietnam

Google Criticizes Vietnam’s ‘Net-Sniffing App

June 11th, 2010

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Google on Thursday criticized a regulation recently enacted in Vietnam that will require retail Internet locations to install an app that Google said will allow the Vietnamese government to monitor and block Web access.

The decision, which was handed down April 26, affects Internet services at retail locations in Hanoi City. This could be Internet cafes, or any hotel, restaurant, office, airport, bus station, or other location that provides access to the Web.
To “guarantee system safety,” retail Internet locations must install a copy of “Internet Service Retailers Management Software recognized by the authority,” the order said.

There are few details on that software, but Google said in a blog post that “the application will likely allow the Vietnamese government to block access to websites, as well as to track user activities.”

“The implementation of an application like this one would choke off access to information for many in Hanoi — given how popular Internet cafés are among Internet users in Vietnam,” wrote Dorothy Chou, a Google policy analyst. “If the regulation spreads beyond Hanoi, it will impose these vague and non-transparent restrictions on users all over the country.”

Internet users in Hanoi are not allowed to do anything online to: oppose the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam; endanger national security, stability, public safety; disrupt the united harmony of the people; propagate war; create hatred, conflicts between minority groups, religious groups; provoke violence, pornography, crimes, social unrest, stereotypes; impair cultural values; or call for illegal demonstrations, boycotts, unlawful gatherings for grievances and complaints, the order said.

In March, Google said it had uncovered a cyber threat targeting computer users in Vietnam. Google said that tens of thousands users who downloaded Vietnamese keyboard language software might be infected with malware that can be used to spy on the users and coordinate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Vietnamese authorities denied the allegations.

That cyber threat, coupled with “intermittent blockages of Facebook and other social networks [present] a troubling example of a government threatening free expression online and an open Internet,” Chou wrote.

Earlier this year, Google stopped censoring its search results in China and redirected Google.cn traffic to the unrestricted Google.com/hk in Hong Kong after Google discovered a coordinated attack against the company that originated in China. Individuals were reportedly trying to gain access to Google intellectual property as well as the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.

Source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364950,00.asp

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Tags: Google Vietnam

Activists worry about a new ‘Green Dam’ in Vietnam

June 5th, 2010

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Human rights activists are worried that new software mandated by Vietnamese authorities may lead to an Internet clampdown in the country’s largest city.

In April, local officials issued new regulations covering Internet cafes and service providers in Hanoi, ostensibly designed to crack down on hacking and other service abuses. Buried in the regulations is a mandate that service providers must add special software to their domain servers, used to authenticate systems on the network.

Under the new rules, domain servers must install a copy of the “Internet Service Retailers Management Software,” the regulations state.

Nobody quite knows what the software is, but activists in the U.S. worry that it may be used to clamp down on Internet usage in a country that has seen more and more grassroots information-sharing on social networks over the past year.

“There are now 25 million Vietnamese online and the government is afraid that the people have a venue that is relatively free of censorship where they can exchange their views,” said Duy Hoang, a spokesman with Viet Tan, a pro-democracy political party that is critical of the Vietnamese government. “The government doesn’t want independent sources of information,” he said.

“This recent move by the Hanoi authorities is definitely an obstacle toward Vietnamese people using the Internet,” Hoang added. He worries that the government-mandated software will be similar to China’s Green Dam censorware.

Last year China tried to force PC makers to ship Green Dam with all computers sold in the country, saying the software would help crack down on online pornography. But Chinese authorities eventually backed off from their plans after critics raised a host of privacy, security and system stability concerns, and Chinese Internet users showed no interest in installing the program.

Whether the Retailers Management Software is censorware is unclear, however. Given the government’s vague description of the product, it’s unclear what it does, said Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan assistant professor who analyzed Green Dam last year. “This might be for blocking; it might be for surveillance,” he said. “We don’t know. This isn’t enough information.”

Still, he’s interested in studying it.

There is at least one major difference between this software and Green Dam, however: the Retailers Management Software lives on a server, not the desktop.

Local media reports say the software was developed by the National University of Hanoi, and is expected to be installed in all of the city’s 4,000 Internet cafes by 2011, Hoang said.

The Embassy of Vietnam in Washington, D.C., did not return messages asking about the software on Friday.

No matter what Hanoi’s new management software actually does, the fact that government-controlled software is going into Internet cafes will have a chilling effect on Internet usage, said Kim Pham, outreach director with AccessNow, a group that provides technology support for human rights activists. “This is a public directive intended to let people know the government wants to monitor communications,” she said.

Source:http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177703/Activists_worry_about_a_new_Green_Dam_in_Vietnam