Technicians reassemble my broken Dell Inspiron 530s' parts into a new case with a working power supply.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)Editor's note: CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo is spending part of December in his homeland of Vietnam. This is the last in his series of dispatches chronicling his impressions of how technology has permeated the culture there. Click here for more of Dong's stories from abroad.
HANOI, Vietnam--Prior to my trip to Vietnam, I bought a Dell Inspiron 530s desktop computer as a special American gift for my 11-year-old niece in Hanoi.
Despite the relatively light weight and small form factor of the PC, at San Francisco International Airport, I ended up having to pay a $60 overweight fee. This was mostly because the airline significantly lowered the allowed weight for checked-in luggage, and I wasn't aware of that.
Upon arriving in Hanoi, I personally delivered the gift and set it up for the little girl. Everybody gathered around with excitement as they waited for the moment of truth. As I plugged the power cord into the wall socket, we heard a "pop" sound and smoke came out of the tower. I was dumbfounded. "So much for American-standard quality!" I thought to myself.
But it was not America's fault, it was me. As it turned out, Vietnam uses a 220-voltage power standard, while America uses a 110-voltage one. Out of excitement and ignorance, I plugged the computer in without switching the power supply unit (PSU) of the computer to support 220 volts and, of course, it burned! It was pure physics.
What was hard to quantify was my niece's level of frustration and my own disappointment. I personally picked the specs and rebuilt the machine to run Windows XP (from its manufacturer-installed Windows Vista). Just one moment of negligence, and everything seemed ruined.
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The bootlegging in operation at a store in Hanoi, one of many such shops that sell pirated goods.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)Editor's note: CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo is spending part of December in his homeland of Vietnam and is filing occasional dispatches chronicling his impressions of how technology has permeated the culture there. Click here for more of Dong's stories from abroad.
HANOI, Vietnam--You say you can't afford the $699 price tag on Adobe Photoshop CS4? How about a $698 discount?
That's the kind of deal you'll get here in Hanoi, where pirated software--and virtually any other kind of digital content--is sold indiscriminately at many local shops for about $15,000 dong (90 cents) per DVD, or half of that for a CD.
These shops are open, just like any legitimate business. I checked one out and was impressed by the number of software titles it carried. While there, I also learned a thing or two about the piracy industry here in Vietnam.
The store I visited is a small shop facing a busy street, with walls covered in CD and DVD sleeves--all black and white copies of those found in the original software package.
Vietnam
Virtually any PC software application I've ever heard of can be found here: Windows operating systems, popular Office suites, and high-end professional software such as Photoshop, AudoCad, and Corel Draw, are available in any versions. I even found different builds of Windows 7, which is currently still in pre-beta and is supposedly available to only a limited few.
These software applications, of course, come with "crack"--a hacking application that allows for bypassing the vendors' antipiracy mechanism. All are guaranteed to work; if not, you'll get another copy that does or get your money back.
Out of curiosity, I asked one of the shop's two operators, Nam--a friendly 24-year-old man--where this copious amount of software comes from. He said there's somebody who gets his shop the "master" copy of any titles he wants, and the master copy costs just about $5.
I made up a fancy name of a nonexistent software title and asked for it. After searching his large database to no avail, Nam indeed picked up the phone and made a quick call. After that he told me to come back the next day. "They don't have it now, but they probably will soon, don't worry!" he said, sounding very sure.
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Solar water heaters like this one are getting popular in Ho Chi Minh City.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)Editor's note: CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo is spending part of December in his homeland of Vietnam and is filing occasional dispatches chronicling his impressions of how technology has permeated the culture there. Click here for more of Dong's stories from abroad.
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam--It took me a few minutes to realize how crowded Ho Chi Minh City is, and a few hours to experience the first power outage. Welcome to the dry season of the South.
The season lasts from November until April. It's when this part of the country experiences its most severe energy shortage, with rolling blackouts taking place in HCM several times a week, if not daily.
(Unlike the four-season North of the country, the South of Vietnam has only two seasons--dry and rainy. Nonetheless, it's generally sunny all year around in Ho Chi Minh City. It's hot, too, with the exception of a few weeks around Christmas when it gets a little chilly, around 60 degrees F. However, it's always humid here and you'd probably want to shower a few times a day.)
Most businesses, and even some households here, have a backup power generator. Drive around the city at any given time, and chances are you'll see some of these in operation.
With the sharp population increase, Ho Chi Minh City, now home to about 10 million, is facing an apparent energy crisis. According to HCM City Power Company, the city's power demand is now in excess of 1,000 to 2,500 megawatts every day.
To battle this, the city has turned to a source of energy that it has a lot of: the sun. Since July, it has been developing a program to support businesses that produce and sell solar-powered appliances, including water heater and lighting systems.
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This is how some young people in Ho Chi Minh City socialize at cafes--by firing up their gadgets and being antisocial together.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)Editor's note: CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo is spending part of December in his homeland of Vietnam and is filing occasional dispatches chronicling his impressions of how technology has permeated the culture there. Click here for more of Dong's stories from abroad.
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam--I visited Ho Chi Minh City for the first time in 1998 with no laptop, no cell phone, and no idea what the Internet really was. Ten years later, I am here in HCM again, accompanied by an unlocked iPhone 3G, a Dell XPS 1330 laptop, and a Nikon D80 camera.
I thought it might seem like a little much to carry all my gadgets around in my backpack at all times. Very soon, however, I found out that young people in Vietnam's biggest city are a lot more aware of technology--and to some extent even more obsessed with it--than I am. Most interesting of all, they can afford tech better than I expected.
The first moment of truth came when my new friend, Xuan Nguyen, a 23-year-old student, told me what she considered to be a deal breaker in my iPhone 3G: it doesn't have a front-facing camera. "It can't do video calling," Xuan said, "and if I pay that much for a phone, I would want to be able to do all that 3G has to offer."
(Xuan, by the way, graciously spent much of her school break showing me around the city, which I really appreciated.)
Like most people my age, I started out with MS DOS and typewriters and mobile phones as big and heavy as bricks. But over time, people like me grow to overappreciate technology, becoming so enamored with it that we sometimes overlook its mediocrity.
This is probably why we are OK with Apple's deliberately crippling the iPhone and iPhone 3G so it can gain control over their usage, and why cell phone carriers in the United States can get away with charging for incoming calls and text messages. (Little does Xuan know, I would be very happy if I could just use my phone's 3G mode at all times in the States. Most of the time, I have to turn it off to have stable voice connections.)
Anyway, her comment about a front-facing camera made me realize just how demanding the new generation in this country is, when it comes to technology. This is probably because its young people grew up as cell phones, laptops, and the Internet became commodities. And yet they live with parents who don't know or care much about e-mail or instant messaging.
Tech users here look at technology with the eyes of owners who want to get the most out of their devices, rather than just conform with what is given to them from the vendor or carrier. They also spend a lot of time with their gadgets--possibly too much.
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This is me being enrolled by the Y430's Lenovo Veriface III authentication software to be a legitimate user of the computer.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)Updated at 1:14 p.m. PST Friday, December 5 with comment from Lenovo.
Editor's note: CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo is spending the month of December in his homeland of Vietnam and plans to file occasional dispatches chronicling his impressions of how technology has permeated the culture there. Click here for more of Dong's stories from abroad.
HANOI, Vietnam--Regardless of what some people seem to think, we Asians do not all look the same. But according to the current face recognition algorithm used in laptops, our faces are all about as flat as a piece of paper.
That's according to BKIS, the Vietnamese Internetwork Security Center that makes the antivirus software I mentioned in a blog post Monday. At a press conference here Tuesday, the company demonstrated vulnerabilities in laptops' face recognition-based authentication mechanisms that let anyone log in to a computer easily with a "special" photo of the legit owner, even at the highest authentication level.
Using your face as the password to log in to a computer--an alternative to the fingerprint method or the traditional username and password--marks a new trend found in laptops from Lenovo, Asus, and Toshiba. As far as I know, only these three vendors currently offer this technology in their laptops. These computers come with a built-in Webcam that's used to capture and analyze faces.
I've been impressed by this new way to log in and have found it to be so much more convenient than the fingerprint reader of my Dell XPS 1330. The finger scanner is a pain when my finger is wet or dirty. Unfortunately, on Tuesday I discovered that this new and exciting technology may not be such an effective security measure.
I participated in a demonstration on a Lenovo Y430, running Windows Vista, and here's how it panned out:
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Hien Nguyen and her trusted love communicator: the Sony Ericson S500i.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)Editor's note: CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo is spending the month of December in his homeland of Vietnam and plans to file occasional dispatches chronicling his impressions of how technology has permeated the culture there. Click here for more of Dong's stories from abroad.
HANOI, Vietnam--Love, or the lack thereof, is an ongoing global issue. I offer no solution, but if you want to look for the one here in Vietnam, a word of advice: learn to text and know your emoticons.
While online dating services are rampant in the States (personally, I believe many young Americans aren't really sure what to look for in a partner and being impatient as usual, think spending money somehow helps solve this), things are a little different in Vietnam--in the big cities that is.
Here, there are no dating services (at least none that my friends and I can spot), and young people still mostly meet the traditional way--through friends, school, family, work, and so on. Those who do meet online most often become friends through blogging, forums, or online social activities.
(In small villages like the one in Ha Nam where I was born, dating hasn't changed much in the past 50 years. Kids are sort of matched up at an early age, oftentimes jokingly, by relatives or friends. When they grow up, if neither goes away to find a job elsewhere, chances are they will marry each other.)
But it doesn't matter how a relationship here starts; it seems all of them go through something I'd call the "@ phase of love," in which the courtship continues via cell phone texts and Yahoo instant messaging. Unlike in the States, where couples tend to move in together, people in Vietnam generally only live together once married. In between, they rely on cell phones and the Internet to stay close.
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Quang Tu Nguyen has changed the landscape of network and computer security in Vietnam.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)Editors note: CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo is spending the next month in his homeland of Vietnam and plans to file occasional dispatches chronicling his impressions of how technology has permeated the culture there. Click here for more of Dong's stories from abroad.
HANOI, Vietnam--If you use any Internet-connected computer in Vietnam--and there are lots of them, with Internet cafes and Wi-Fi spots abounding in any city--chances are you'll find a little red plus sign at the bottom-right corner of the screen.
That's the icon of the most popular antivirus software here. It's called BKAV.
(A bit of background: if you've recently read reviews of Internet security products by our security editor Rob Vamosi, know that I am the one who designed the methodology involved in testing these applications. It's therefore natural for me to be curious about how people in various parts of the world are protected against malicious software.)
BKAV is short for Bach Khoa AntiVirus, with "Bach Khoa" being the Vietnamese name for the Hanoi University of Technology. The software was originally developed as a hobby by Quang Tu Nguyen, a student-turned-lecturer at the school. It's currently the flagship product of Bach Khoa Internetwork Security center (BKIS), of which Quang, now 33, is director.
Quang still lectures once in awhile, but he's primarily known as the man who has changed the landscape of network and computer security in Vietnam. His creation, BKAV, is in many ways just about the best security software you can find.
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Tuan Anh Do shows off an unlocked iPhone 3G at one of his cell phone repair shops in Hanoi.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)Editor's note: CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo is spending the next month in his homeland of Vietnam, and plans to file occasional dispatches chronicling his impressions of how technology has permeated the culture there. Click here for more of Dong's stories from abroad.
HANOI, Vietnam--Every obstacle presents an opportunity. I saw this firsthand in Hanoi.
Tuan Anh's shop on Nguyen Du street.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)The obstacle in question: the iPhone 3G. Since its launch, it has proven a much tougher nut to crack than the original iPhone. Without a viable software-based unlock solution, the only way to make the phone work with any GSM carrier has been the use of a proxy SIM. Put this piece of very thin circuitboard in the iPhone 3G atop the carrier's SIM, and you can make calls and text on a new network.
(I did experience some problems using the proxy SIM, including short battery life, instability, and, most seriously, incompatibility with iTunes.)
Unfortunately, the recently released 2.2 software update, for now, has made the iPhone 3G impossible to unlock--unless you happen to be in Hanoi. Here, I met a man who takes the job quite seriously and gets it done the hard way, literally.
His name is Tuan Anh Do, and he's a 29-year-old businessman who owns five cell phone repair shops. A big part of his business is servicing the iPhone and iPhone 3G, and that often involves getting those devices unlocked at the hardware level.
One of his shops is on Nguyen Du street, a relatively small, quiet block in Hanoi. It's located in a typically narrow four-story house, with one floor serving as a reception area, and another holding the accounting department. The top floor is the workshop, where the magic happens.
Here I witnessed a brand new iPhone 3G getting its hardware unlocked and was really impressed. This is how it happened.
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Kentucky Fried Chicken: in case you're worried Hanoi might be too exotic for you.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)Editor's note: This is the first in an occasional series of dispatches by CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo, who is spending the next month in his homeland of Vietnam. He'll be looking at the country through his now nerdy and Americanized eyes, in particular exploring how people there do the sorts of things he does every day in the States: play video games, use a cell phone, and try to stay safe online.
HANOI, Vietnam--There's a standing joke that goes like this: "What do you call an Asian who gets lost? Disoriented." Not really funny, but if you want to meet one Asian who gets lost in his own neighborhood, that would be me.
Originally from Hanoi but now living in San Francisco, I visit friends and family in Vietnam as often as I am financially able, which is not as often as I would like.
The country has been changing so fast, every time I go back to the place I still consider home, I experience a little reverse culture shock. This time is no exception.
It took 20-plus hours of travel time to get here from San Francisco. The first morning in Hanoi, jetlag woke me at 4:30 a.m. and I decided to get up for a jog. In the States this would be super early; over here, nobody is remotely impressed.
The moment I left the house, it felt somewhat like a national holiday, noisy and bustling. Restaurants and makeshift breakfast places selling sticky rice, pho (noodle soup), and other delicious morning edibles were just being opened. Some were already serving their first patrons.
On the sidewalks were already people everywhere--running, walking, playing badminton, doing Tai chi, or just simply sitting and looking. There were scores of scooters and bicycles, and once in a while, small trucks weaving back and forth, carrying vegetables, chickens, or other food-related items in bulk, honking all the while.
(There are many things you will need to get used to when in Vietnam, and one would be the honking. Nothing personal, it's just that people want to make sure their existence on the street is well-noticed. And considering the crazy nature of the traffic here, this totally makes sense.)
It was, indeed, just another day.
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Dong's advice to Vietnamese coming to America? Keep your names people! Let us Americans deal with all that tonal stuff.
Then Dong nerds out over the range and throughput of the Belkin N+ Wireless Router. I think I hear wedding bells.
After that, we discuss the big news of the week. You can probably guess what that is. You've been warned.
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Eric Franklin's colleagues once had the following to say to him: "Eric, you've been doing this performance testing thing for over 10 years now. How about you try something different?" To which Eric responded, "How about you shut the #%$@! up?" This candid attitude
allows him to go toe-to-toe with the most extreme of personalities, including that of Dong Ngo. This bio was written by Eric Franklin.
Dong Ngo is a knowledgeable, opinionated individual who wants to convince the world that he's just a normal person; but he hasn't had much success. According to him, this is because the world itself is abnormal. Dong loves traveling and is well-versed in several languages. He, unfortunately, is not so well-versed in English. Still, it's best to ask him questions. From networking and how to optimize your system, to turning a strange place into home or what the meaning of life is…most of the time, he has the answers. The question is: Will he make himself understood? Subscribe and find out!
