In early August, website sinhvienIT.net announced it would stop operating after more than 10 years.
Before the shutdown, the website sinhvienIT.net was recording 700,000 traffic per month, ranking more than 700 among communities on the Internet.
Pirated software is shared publicly on a forum in Vietnam.
SinhvienIT’s disappearance is quite sudden, but this is a predicted end for websites sharing `pirated` software and digital content in Vietnam.
According to Tran Tuyen, an IT engineer working in Hanoi, these software sharing forums used to help many generations of information technology students, but now they have unintentionally become a barrier to their development.
`Fortunately, today’s users are gradually becoming aware of respecting copyright and understanding the risks of using cracked software, so these sharing communities are gradually running out of space,` Tuyen commented.
Downloading software of unknown origin from forums poses many potential information security risks.
Meanwhile, copyrighted software is increasingly easy to buy in Vietnam.
In addition to turning away members, software sharing forums now also have to deal with Facebook and Google.
In 2012, Google updated its filters to detect websites that violate the Digital Millennium Copyright law (DMCA).
At the end of last year, a 12-year-old computer forum, Vn-Zoom.com, announced its closure because the managing unit no longer had the manpower to maintain it.
Before SinhvienIT or Vn-Zoom, the online community in Vietnam also witnessed the decline of many once famous pirated content sharing forums, such as Chiplove, VnSharing, DiendanBaclieu…
