VPSKeys is a
freeware input method editor developed and distributed by the
Vietnamese Professionals Society The Vietnamese Professionals Society (abbreviated VPS; vi, Hội Chuyên gia Việt Nam) is a non-profit worldwide membership organization of Vietnamese professionals of various technical, economic, medical, legal field. Its mission is to increase ...
(VPS). One of the first input method editors for Vietnamese, it allows users to add
accent marks to Vietnamese text on computers running
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
. The first version of VPSKeys, supporting Windows 3.1, was released in 1993. The most recent version is 4.3, released in October 2007.
[VPSKeys homepage.]
Features
VPSKeys supports the
Telex, VISCII,
VNI, and
VIQR input methods, as well as a number of
character encodings. One of its unique features is a "hook/tilde dictionary" (), which provides
spelling suggestions for distinguishing words with or tones. This feature is helpful for speakers of
dialects in which these two tones have merged.
VPS character encoding
The "VPS"
character encoding for
writing Vietnamese replaces several control characters, including several
C0 control characters, with letters while including the
ASCII graphical characters unmodified, a similar approach to
VSCII-1 (TCVN1) and
VISCII.
Trojan incident
In March 2010,
Google and
McAfee announced on their security blogs that they believe that hackers compromised the VPS website and replaced the program with a trojan. The trojan, which McAfee has code-named W32/
VulcanBot
Vulcanbot is the name of a Trojan (malware), Trojan botnet predominantly spread in Vietnam, apparently with political motives. It is thought to have started spreading in late 2009.
The botnet began to spread after the website of the Vietnamese Pro ...
, creates a
botnet that could be used to launch
distributed denial of service attacks on websites critical of the Vietnamese government's plan to mine
bauxite in the country's
Central Highlands.
McAfee suspects that the authors of the trojan have ties to the
Vietnamese government.
However, Nguyễn Tử Quảng of
Bách Khoa Internet Security (Bkis) called McAfee's accusation "somewhat premature".
The Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement calling Google's and McAfee's comments "groundless".
VPS discovered a breach on their website on January 22, 2010, and restored the non-infected software then, but did not publicize it widely because they did not realize the serious nature of the matter.
References
External links
Vietnamese Professionals SocietyDownload VpsKeys 4.3
Vietnamese character input
Windows-only freeware
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