Vietnam shares a border with China, and it’s possible that Vietnamese authorities are starting to share the Chinese government’s low opinion of Google, too.  Today, a spokesperson dismissed Google’s claim that Vietnamese computer users were infected by politically motivated malware.

As you may remember, Google said last week that "infected machines have been used both to spy on their owners as well as participate in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against blogs containing messages of political dissent."  Which seemed to imply that supporters of the Vietnamese government might have performed a little hacking.

But Google’s entirely incorrect, according to Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Nga.  As reported by Jason Folkmanis, she said in a statement, "The comments are groundless.  Vietnam law puts in place specific anti-virus and malware regulations and information security and confidentiality."

Those remarks appear to express an unusual degree of certainty and a certain measure of annoyance.  Much like China’s statements regarding Google’s decision to break Chinese laws/not censor search results, perhaps.

It should be interesting to see if Google pursues the matter and makes a habit of aggravating Asian governments.  In this latest dispute, neither side’s threatened any sort of action yet, at least.