I'd love to know the story of this "human error" (that led to tank man being censored on Bing). Like... what were they trying to do? Why do they this capability at all? Was it unauthorized removal from Bing search results? If so, by whom? Why?
Try and get the auto-caption on Tiktok to recognize "Tiananmen Square".
It sets a really bad precedent to allow or accept Western companies (yes I know Tiktok is Chinese) kowtowing to China in the hopes that those companies will gain access to the Chinese market. It's widely suspect that not having the American flag on the moon landing in the movie "First Man" was to cater to the Chinese market.
Let me clue in all the investors and the Western big-tech CEOs on a little secret about China: you, as a Western company, will never "win" in the Chinese market. The CCP will make sure that happens. You are literally wasting your time and debasing yourself for something that will never happen.
Take any Western company like Google, Uber or Amazon and the dominant player in China will be some homegrown clone of that. This is not an accident and it will never change.
It's time the developed world woke up to this as it is openly mocking WTO rules about equal access to markets.
You're absolutely right. But from a Chinese perspective, they see open access to American companies for what it is: neocolonialism. They don't want American companies coming in, buying up all of the local brands, and siphoning off the profits back to America. The Chinese also don't want these large American companies using their business power to direct local politics.
Just look at the attitude that Google, Palantir, and similar have for Europeans. I bet there are times that Germany wished they had their own Baidu. China is doing what it can to stop from becoming an American vassal.
I've found there are largely two kinds of people in the world: those who have experienced something like food insecurity, housing insecurity, poverty or the like and those that haven't. People who have never experienced any of these tend to have a completely different outlook, attitude and relationship to money. People who have often have it in the back of their mind that at any point it can all go away. This is why you'll tend to find a lot of poorer people who will get a windfall and then splurge on a big TV or some other big purchase. It'll just whittled down by bills otherwise. And it never really matters how much you have. For many people that fear never leaves you. People who have never experienced that food insecurity (or the like) can almost never comprehend it.
I see China much the same way. Think about it. China was bossed around by the British Empire (it's literally the origin of the term "gunboat diplomacy"). With Mao's revolution there was a long period of famine. One of China's closest allies, the Soviet Union, collapsed around them.
The point of this is, from an outsider's point of view at least, there seems to be a similar kind of cultural fear, a fear of a return to instability, chaos, famine and being a plaything to the West.
So take Tibet. Many, myself included, see this as an invasion and occupation. That kind of criticism is seen through the Chinese lens as an attack on China itself, a threat to this period of prosperity and stability and a potential return to chaos.
Put another way: any criticism of China or foreign dependence of China is seem as a potential existential threat.
So I understand why China, say, protects its markets. But I also understand that China is "cheating" in an international trade sense and the developed nations don't have to put up with that. Nor should they. But developed nations and corporations are being bewitched the carrot of a market of over a billion people and that will never materialize so there's literally no point in turning a blind eye to China's human rights abuses or supporting the totalitarian regime.
Germany kinda does have its own Baidu - just in sectors it actually has competence in. Retail, heavy industry, etc is full of German brands. The problem with software is it's simply a bad fit for German culture, which is generally slow, cautious, and interested in stability over short term profit.
I don't think it's exactly vassalization - I think it's more that the 'international rules based order' was created by the USA and EU, and as such, to an extent, represents their interests. If all markets are open, it gives current market leaders and incumbents a unbeatable advantage. What's more, rich countries typically play the system for all that its worth.
China is controversial because unlike Germany, or France, it plays the system to win, but it also has the growth potential (size, population) to upturn the global order. So when France cheats the system to protect french farmers or cheese or whatever, nobody cares, or when Germany's KfW behaves in a neocolonial manner, again, it's just not a threat to the global order. When China does stuff like this, even in milder forms, it couples with their extreme lack of basic soft-power competence (listen to chinese leaders speak, they sound like assholes) to make a stink.
> The problem with software is it's simply a bad fit for German culture, which is generally slow, cautious, and interested in stability over short term profit.
Tangential point but slightly disagree: Germany has a presence in lots of fast-moving technological markets. Personally, I think the problem with software development in Germany (and many other places) is that software developers are put into the same basket as sysadmins, which in turn are still seen as glorified janitors by upper management. This is reflected in the lower salary compared to their American or even British counterparts.
> I think it's more that the 'international rules based order' was created by the USA and EU, and as such, to an extent, represents their interests. If all markets are open, it gives current market leaders and incumbents a unbeatable advantage.
This is the most succinct critique of the open market doctrine I have ever come across.
> China is doing what it can to stop from becoming an American vassal.
More accurate would probably be China is doing everything possible to create its own vassals via soft-power initiatives like Belt and Road, predatory debt lending, etc.
It’s kind of interesting you mention neocolonialism because that’s exactly how China’s actions in Malaysia have been described…
> China is doing what it can to stop from becoming an American vassal
If our countries weren't so tightly intertwined with complicated trade partnerships and mutually beneficial enterprises, I'd be inclined to agree with you.
Is it neocolonialism when American companies move into Canadian or German markets, or when ikea sets up in town, or when South Korean films displace Japanese films?
It's neocolonialism when the interest of American companies are backed by the full force of the American government at the expense of the desires of the local people.
The scale is sliding though. On one side, you have countries which have had military force used against them for denying American companies favorable access to resources (Iraq, the Banana Republics of South America). On the other side, are countries who play ball be accepting American intellectual properties laws, don't interfere with American business interests, and make enough investments in America.
The people in those countries might not want to accept IP laws designed specifically to protect Mickey Mouse, but the alternative is economic arm twisting which is too much for most countries to handle. China is one of the few countries with enough power to stand up to the USA in this respect.
> It's neocolonialism when the interest of American companies are backed by the full force of the American government at the expense of the desires of the local people.
I don't mean to defend the US, but if you replacing "American" with "China" in that statement is basically the Chinese policy in a nutshell.
It's certainly seen as neo-colonialism, or at least exploitation, by some people. Here are a couple of examples of Australian protest songs about American economic and military expansion into our country:
I think it's a question of scale (and the term has historical connotations as well obviously). I probably wouldn't call it neocolonialism but as a german citizen I do think that the less dependent on american companies we are, the better.
then they shouldn't have agreed to join the WTO and abide by their rules then. you don't get it both ways. If you want access to the rest of the worlds markets you have to let yours open up too.
It has a wikipedia page and is used to describe when a large, powerful country uses soft power to ensure that a smaller country grant favorable economic trade concessions. This is in contrast with classical colonialism, where military force was used to achieve the same ends.
Is there any evidence regarding that “First Man” anecdote? I remember this being a big thing in the conservative culture sphere in at the time but it seems like a manufactured controversy. Are there not American flags in all manner of big blockbusters that do huge numbers in China? The character “Captain America” doesn’t seem to have stopped the MCU movies from succeeding there. The whole thing feels like people just looking to get angry about something.
The American flag planting on the moon is one of the single most iconic and culturally significant events in American history, ever.
The movie is based off of a book written by an American.
The movie was directed by an American.
The movie was produced by an American.
For the movie to exclude this without it being a deliberate decision would be an oversight or coincidence beyond reasonable belief.
Yes, American flags appear in other movies. Captain America is a fictional character in a fictional universe. Use of the American flag in that context is not in the least bit comparable to the first time humans stepped foot on solid ground that wasn't named Earth.
The moon landing was also an iconic benchmark for world civilization as whole. Given that we have concrete knowledge of China forcing studios and actors to parrot China's values, it is certainly plausible that China did not want the crowning moment of this iconic human achievement to prominently feature America at that moment.
It's also plausible that foreign sentiment against the US at that time--not just from China-- was also a factor.
It is also possible the film creators wanted to present the moment as an achievement for all of civilization, without a focus on the US in particular.
But given the history, book, director, and importance for the US, I absolutely believe it was deliberate, and as such people upset about it do not represent a manufactured controversy. If you grew up during the height of the Cold War and the arms race with Russia and watched the moon landing, or have heard--as I have-- stories from my parents and grand parents how much that gave them hope during a very dark time, you also might be a little upset that your country's role had been erased in the crowning moment.
As an American, it seems like a perfectly reasonable creative decision to me. The film quite consciously is focused not on the moon landing specifically, or even the space program more broadly, but on Neil Armstrong as an individual. In this context having a lot of fanfare about the flag would distract from the focus of the movie and feel out of place, IMO. The idea that the only explanation for this omission is meddling by the Chinese is ludicrous to me.
My comment was intended in the context of the accusation that the situation was a manufactured controversy.
I can certainly understand your point of view and that there might have been an honest choice for that creative direction. But I also think it is completely understandable, and not manufactured, that some people were very upset by that decision, a decision that be could nothing other than deliberate.
I also think it's possible the decision was made for less than purely creative decisions. It's a business, decisions are often made on the basis of money, and it's not unreasonable to entertain the possibility that this particular decision was monetary in nature.
Tank man is banned in China. Someone at bing probably was told to censor it in China but did it for the entire world instead. I really don't understand this argument that western companies shouldn't operate in China. How is not censoring and being banned any more productive than the status quo? China is too politically powerful for anything to be done, especially by activist fortune 500 companies.
Saying it's censoring China to not operate there is both a matter of semantic spin and also misses the point:
1) Operating there helps support a repressive regime that often uses the tools and services of foreign companies to facilitate that repression. I don't think a refusal to operate there is censorship, and if you do, that is a broad enough definition of censorship that the Montgomery Bus Boycott would also fall into that category.
2) It is also a bad long-term business decision. Between forced IP transfer, IP theft, piracy, and enormous subsidies for home-grown competitors, most companies are not truly growing in an emerging market, they are filling a short term gap until China can replace them with their own alternatives, bootstrapped by those short term interactions with foreign companies. At that point, it is happy to expand those homegrown options out to the rest of the world, bootstrapped by not having to make the same R&D investments, complete with its repressive values embedded in the products & services.
China is not truly interested being a partner country on the world stage. It's implicit and explicit goals are self sufficiency in service of not needing to even pretend it respects anything but its own power. This is revealed every time there's a Bing "accident" or another actor is made to embarrass themselves in kowtowing to China, or a movie changes a Tibetan character to anything but Tibetan, or a Hotel corporation like Marriot is forced offline in China until it similarly embarrasses itself.
China's goal is to have enough power to forced anyone that interacts with it to adopt its own repressive values.
Now at this point in the conversation someone will say "What about the things the US does"?
To which I respond:
1) That's irrelevant to the issue of China. Whatever the US does isn't an excuse to allow China to get away with things, and other countries and corporations are free to avoid dealing with the US in the same way I advocate they avoid China.
2) That's a false equivalence. The US may do objectionable things. But when it comes to repression of it's population, at it's worst levels of privacy intrusion it still gives it's citizens more freedom by an order if magnitude than does China.
>How is not censoring and being banned any more productive than the status quo?
Any company that does this for content in China, but "only" in China raises serious doubts when they say they are not doing it anywhere else. If you add this ability, it will be misused/abused either by "rogue" employees, being hacked, or being forced to by gov't because of "terrorism" or "the kids".
Companies have to comply with differing laws and regulations based on the jurisdictions they operate in. I honestly don't have serious doubt that Microsoft does this in the US other than because of a technical error because they simply have no incentive to.
They can add this ability at any point anyway because putting a phrase into a word filter takes about 10 minutes I guess.
What is the logical alternative here, every American company leaves every other market because they have differing censorship laws? How is that helping anyone else?
You are way too scoped in on this specific issue. View the topic of bending to CCP will in other areas of tech, not just search. Cloud providers operating in China is a big area of concern. If these providers have built in the ability for the CCP to access user data, then there's no way they could ever stand up to US gov't asking for the same access. That's just a single example.
"If these providers have built in the ability for the CCP to access user data, then there's no way they could ever stand up to US gov't asking for the same access"
There are plenty of good reasons to refuse to cede to CCP demands but this makes no sense.
The only tech company that were able to mount serious resistance against a serious data access request by the US government were Apple and a couple of things:
1. They are a trillion dollar company.
2. They are primarily a hardware company, not a cloud services company
3. There is no guarantee (and I would argue rather unlikely) that if the FBI were unable to break the encryption of that phone independently that they would not have kept mounting pressure on Apple till they cracked.
It's a complete fantasy to believe that any individual or company has guaranteed data protection in the US or indeed most nation states. Once the government really want your data, they will get it with enough time.
I'm not sure I'm following this argument here. When the US government calls any major internet company and say "Hey we found this and this information on this page of yours and it's illegal to host the information, so please take it down, or else," does anybody seriously think that these companies will say no?
* Now, I'm definitely not a fan of the Chinese government, but the truth is that every government has power to order around any corporation that wants to do business in its border. The difference is how much you agree with each particular government, not whether they do it or not.
It seems fairly common for companies to deny and disclose requests from the US government. Not only is it a good publicity stunt advocating free speech / privacy, but what can the government do if it's not illegal content?
If the provider in question is hosting publicly visible pages with "offending" content, then of course anyone is free to "report" it or "request" it. If the provider is hosting end-to-end ecrypted data, then nobody should have access to it other than those with the proper keys. That includes the provider of the services. In that case, the provider can only say no to the gov't requests. If the provider has a different version of their platform available in China so that they conform to CCP demands of being able to access user content, then the provder would be lying to the US gov't request for access to user data too. So the suspicion that a US company operating in China with CCP approval immediately brings doubt onto their entire "we protect user privacy" into question.
> How is not censoring and being banned any more productive than the status quo?
It lets the Chinese Communist Party pretend their citizens don't live in a curated bubble designed to reinforce feelings of nationalism and loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.
Some Chinese are allowed to travel abroad. If they discovered a totally different Internet abroad, they might start asking uncomfortable questions back home. Instead, CCP bosses hope that they simply won't notice that the domestic Bing isn't the same as Bing everywhere else.
You don't need to qualify that with "once they get home". Chinese who talk or write about the wrong things will be hunted down wherever they are in the world. China managed to get the UAE to detain a US permanent resident for almost two months when he was traveling from Istanbul to New York with a connection in Dubai.
If it was deliberate it’s much more likely that this was an employee behaving outside their remit than it being a company policy. “Human error” can be used euphemistically like this when you aren’t prepared to throw a junior employee to the wolves.
I m in China and while I understand where you're coming from, from my point of view, you insisting on showing an american flag on the moon is a bit what we're saying about shadow colonialism.
You only ever like or accept vassal and submissive partners. It's still hard for us, but maybe we'll give up our pride for the american money, like so many others :)
This ofc doesnt excuse the communist crimes and lack of trust in us, the population, a problem totally independent from our conflict with the US, whatever excuse the US found at the spur of the moment.
> It's widely suspect that not having the American flag on the moon landing in the movie "First Man" was to cater to the Chinese market.
I didn't watch that movie, I guess it surprised you as an (allegedly ?) American the same way it surprised many Europeans watching the numerous WW2 movies about the US saving the old-world.
It's all about catering the most profitable market in the end.
( I'm not here to throw oil on fire by the way, I guess that the same... process ? )
Before we even get to the political side of "you will never win in the Chinese market", how do we explain that Amazon lost to jd.com, and Walmart (and a slew of other retailers) lost to local retailers? The Chinese government didn't favor the local retailers in anyway. Another case is Uber vs DiDi. The Chinese government didn't favor Didi either, yet DiDi managed to beat Uber hands down. Specifically, Didi managed to be profitable in short trips while losing money on long trips, and Uber's biz team found it out months later. Kinda shameful, if you ask me.
Should it be the other way around, namely do we have proof that the Chinese government interfered? I do acknowledge that it's hard to know for sure that something does not exist. It's just that there's plenty of news on how Chinese government play favors for its auto industry, for Baidu, and for media companies. But somehow I didn't see any report or even anecdote on retailing, and certainly not for Did (some cities tried to regulate both Uber and Didi).
I see this as slightly resembling the "EV in a coal-fired electricity generation regime.
Yes, using an EV in a location where the present primary source of generation* is coal has relatively minor impacts on the immediate carbon emissions profile of transportation.
But decoupling an activity from immediate reliance on a specific mode makes future progress more viable.
DuckDuckGo was also strongly criticised for the Tank Man image censorship, despite "merely" being a consumer of Bing's image search. DDG themselves have a reputation to be concerned with, and have been increasing their own public outreach and advertising over recent years, including radio spots (my principle commercial media exposure presently).
So, no, it's not a complete fix. Given the limited options and degree of search market monopoly, it does remain a signal. Though it's also a sharp reminder of the extreme limits of the "consumer choice" argument in a case in which that choice simply does not exist.
Less a choice, more a consequence. It’s not like DDG wants to replicate MS’s search policies, it’s just that DDG lacks the infrastructure to do it on their own. Until they do, this is going to keep happening.
That's because Microsoft got caught censoring the results, then they lied and claimed it was a "human error," which absolutely nobody believes.
Then Microsoft manually took an action to restore the image results in Bing for the query "tank man." Which then filtered down to DDG since it relies on Bing (previously DDG's image results were similarly devoid of the proper results).
> That's because Microsoft got caught censoring the results, then they lied and claimed it was a "human error," which absolutely nobody believes.
Oh, I don't know. If we can label "accidentally using the wrong scope" as a human error, I could easily see a situation where someone meant to remove something from Chinese search results but accidentally did it worldwide. I don't know what their infrastructure is like, what kind of safeguards they have in place, or even what they do to block a result from the all-seeing algorithm. Which is more likely: that Microsoft would allow China to dictate what the rest of the world can/cannot see or that someone made a mistake and blocked something globally instead of regionally?
I find it baffled that a company of that caliber don't have regression tests that can verify region-bound changes wouldn't affect results intended for other regions.
Seems it can be narrowed down to the form= parameter. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tank+man&form=QBILPG has Tank Man, without the form= it doesn't. The actual value of the form= parameter doesn't value either, as long as it's not empty.
I have no idea what they're doing in the backend.
Edit: Another weird thing - https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tank+man with JS enabled redirects to a different page with additional querystring parameters, and this page does have Tank Man. My testing above was done with JS disabled, which is why I got the pre-redirect page that doesn't have his pictures.
they probably need the query string for pagination and if you don't have it they redirect you with some javascript which you turning it off breaks. i don't think there's any grand conspiracy there.
Yes, I didn't claim they were doing it intentionally, just that the website's behavior is weird. That's why I said:
>I have no idea what they're doing in the backend.
The pagination theory doesn't make sense to me though. The relevant parameter is called "form", its actual value doesn't matter as long as it's non-empty, and surely a sane implementation would treat the lack of a page parameter as page 1 and not page whatever-the-stormtrooper-image-is-on.
I agree it's pretty meaningless [Edit: in fact i posted this in the hope that someone would actually say that]. Didn't Google have the same issue? (correct me if i'm wrong). But still, bing's "explanation" was so incredibly pathetic, weak and opaque, it deserves to be dropped just for that
"This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this.” In their own words. That's it!? They should be tripping over their feet in their haste to apologize! Executives should be coming out of the woodwork apologizing to everyone in sight and offering explanations to congress. But that's just my humble opinion.
No, Google didn't have this issue, because unlike pretty much all other search engines on the market Google isn't a frontend to Bing (well, I guess there are also a few frontends to Yandex, but they're more rare).
At least at that point Bing just becomes an implementation detail of DuckDuckGo rather than something Notepad++ uses directly. But yeah, this is definitely not intended to do anything other than be a political statement from Notepad++.
I searched the term in DDG when this was on HN previously; the search was not censored on DDG. [edit] I recall it was at the time bing's search was still blank but I don't have a technical explanation for the different results.
Besides Notepad++ making a statement (which I think does matter), their code change will be relatively ineffective, as DuckDuckGo gets lots of results from bing anyways.
I see this really as more of a social statement and less as a technical solution.
The lack of search engine competition - viable alternatives - remains a rather massive problem in tech. Notepad++ doesn't have much in the way of options, unfortunately.
By that logic we should just throw in the towel and use Google/whatever the biggest player is. I refuse to play by those rules, even if my resistance is ultimately futile.
So by that logic you should use Google (wrong, but let's play along). And by Notepad's logic you should use Google (because it's Bing and Google, that's it). Good job?
DDG is (largely) a pass-through proxy for search from Bing (both Web and image) and for Russian-language media, Yandex. It maintains a number of specific search bots that mostly provide its intsant-answers content.
(This is based on interpretation of very unclearly worded statements and comments from DDG over the years.)
DDG may not censor results itself, but it inherits the censorship policies of its search providers.
(Disclaimer: I've used DDG as my primary Web search for nearly a decade, and Images since DDG image search came online. I'm strongly critical of DDG's relationship to the Tank Man image censorship issue.)
You make a good point in the difference in active choice but to say duckduckgo doesn't censor results is inaccurate is it does even if by proxy of where it sources those results from. I do feel this is a no-win situation for DDG and I don't think anyone should hold this situation against them as they seem to be caught up in it against their will.
I think that is what they were intimating in that last sentence. That the Notepad++ devs are implicitly supporting MS (and so Bing) by writing a Windows application.
Notepad++ has been a Windows application long before Bing was even a twinkle in its creator's eye.
Cancelling your technical platform over decisions that its vendor made decades after you originally picked it (and discarding N*17 man-years of your own hard work) smells of a logical fallacy, though I can't pinpoint which one.
You can't pinpoint which one because it's not a logical fallacy. Which makes it extra funny you're reaching for one, just because you find what I have to say uncomfortable. I'm afraid you'd have to satisfy yourself with emotional downvoting and no explanation why you feel this way.
Notepad++ was a Windows app before Bing existed, and Bing was a search engine in Notepad++ before they filtered Tank Man.
The question is are you doing symbolic knee-jerk gestures, but stopping right before it matters, or are you that clueless not to realize everything you do is Microsoft related, before you try and pretend you're going against Microsoft.
You see, everyone wears FUCK THE SYSTEM t-shirt, but then they play along with the system. Communicating one thing and doing another is quite pathetic IMHO, and counter-productive. It shows the cognitive dissonance behind our "pop-morals" if I can call them so, the things we get "outraged" on social media, and the lives we actually have.
I think an intelligent, thinking individual works on those discrepancies in their mind until they arrive at a cohesive (albeit not as simple) worldview where their actions and words match.
But for the rest, there's always the FUCK THE SYSTEM t-shirts, and the SAVE THE NATURE stickers for your gas SUV bumper.
That's what Notepad++ is. Pretending to go against Microsoft by deleting Microsoft's search engine on Microsoft's GIT hosting of their app written for a Microsoft OS.
My worldview is that we have two search engines worth a damn in this world, Google and Bing, and everything else uses their results more or less (yes, including Duck Duck Go). And Google has done a lot more shit than Microsoft to merit a ban if any one should be banned. Yet no one is comfortable banning Google because they dominate. Bing is easier to ban, because they don't matter much. so everyone is directing their cheap outrage in their direction.
Although the Tank Man decision is likely the actions of one person in a tens of thousands of people department, and rejecting their work wholesale due to one transgression like this is ridiculous. Also everyone knows about Tank Man. Even the dogs in China do. So what is this, if not the armchair symbolic issue of the day, where you get to feel you're making a difference by hopping on the right symbolic bandwagon? It's the online version of a bumper sticker.
Related, UK embassy to China posted a virtual candle on June 4 to mark the occasion, and was attacked by thousands of message "RIP the Queen" by Weebo's users. I found hilarious that Chinese users, or bots, chose to react that distastefully to something they pretend didn't happen:
Ironically, the change replaces Bing queries with DuckDuckGo, which gets its results primarily from Bing, and also showed censored results for "tank man".
I quickly forgot Notepad++ existed after starting to use VScode. This just reminded me to uninstall it. I’m very much against censorship but I’m far more annoyed by “everything is politics”
This would be my guess. MS just can't openly admit they censor in China even though everyone knows this is how they are allowed to operate in China, so they use "human error" as a bad excuse.
I doubt it's a lie. The explanation is simply shit enough to cover all possible outcomes.
Really internally it's now being pondered by the Corporate Apologetics team at Microsoft which will follow the standard 3 point plan:
1. Quick everyone, explain it away as "human error".
2. All we have to do now is stick our fingers in our ears and hope it stops trending on Twitter and then we're good.
3. Well fuck, that failed so we better make some large marketoid gesture about never doing it again which will consist of hiring someone in the position of "Senior Vice President of Never Getting Caught Doing This Particular Thing Again".
Of course the last point will fail miserably in this case as they will of course immediately hire someone who posted something nasty on Twitter several years ago...
I think it's certainly a lie. Even if what they mean is "We accidentally censored in more locales than we wanted" they are lying by trying to conceal what happened rather than reveal it with misleading statements. Microsoft is censoring search results at either the explicit or implicit request of China. It's despicable.
> "We accidentally censored in more locales than we wanted"
If that actually did happen to be the reason, then "human error" would be completely accurate. Not even just technically correct, but a reasonable description.
No, it wouldn't be either. It's an incomplete description that intentionally creates the misleading interpretation that this wasn't intentional censorship but a mistake. In reality, this was intentional censorship, possibly applied in an overly broad way.
Saying things to intentionally cause your audience to come to incorrect conclusions is lying. A reasonable description does not omit relevant details.
Similar, if I said "My car accident was caused but human error" that would not be a correct or reasonable description if it were actually caused by my driving while drunk. I could as easily say it was caused by physics. The problem is that these lies elide my wrongdoing.
It seems an odd thing to lie about. It's so easy to get caught at it, and they seem to have done it very clumsily. And the upside seems so small -- both for China (if they requested it) and for Microsoft (if they were volunteering).
It does seem like the kind of thing that could happen in error, albeit an error that would probably produce millions of other problems (such as other missing images). Did that happen and none of the others attracted enough attention?
If they said, "Yeah, we patched a bunch of servers, but some data center was temporarily down, they didn't get the patch, and that just happened to be the one having that image," I'd say, "Yeah, that seems reasonable." No idea if it's true, but it sounds enough like other bugs I've committed.
Why oh why are so many people just buying what Microsoft is selling here? For a person give them the benefit of the doubt sure, but this is a feature which isn't turned off and on with a simple switch. Either:
1) Microsoft did this intentionally and want to shift they blame anyway the can (which is bad)
or
2) They censor tons many topics and had a whoopsie on this one (even worse??)
Unless they give a deep explanation of how this happened quickly I am personally giving them no benefit of the doubt
Not the first time this has happened and attributed to an "error"
2014: Bing has been filtering out both English and Chinese language search results for politically-sensitive terms such as "Dalai Lama" and "Tiananmen" [0]
Thanks for the link. I presumed it was a one time thing.
As other commenters said, may be it's intentional but the change was supposed to be visible only inside China and then someone messed up and it leaked to search results outside of China. (for example : a bad update to the rule censoring the subject inside china made it visible worldwide)
For me, it seems unlikely that they did it on purpose. not because they are good but because no company wants this kind of publicity.
Probably because they aren't buying the lazy excuse that coincidentally on the anniversary there was an issue. Another point is that the author is politically outspoken.
As I said in another comment, for me it seems unlikely to be deliberate because of the bad publicity it will generate.
I'm not defending Microsoft. It just seemed to me a little bit weird to "punish" them for a one time mistake. But as another commenter showed me, this kind of stuff happened before.
Still, I'm finding it hard to believe it was deliberate. Mistakes happen. (maybe I'm naive :))
It’s free and open. You _are_ allowed to choose, and are in no way obligated to use notepad++. Similarly, it’s author is perfectly in the right by omitting bing as an expression of protest against unethical censorship.
I’m not expressing an opinion on the matter myself.
But I would like to say that the project lead and primary developer of Notepad++ has political opinions, and uses his software as a platform to occasionally exercise them.
This appears to be another example of this whether you agree or not with it.
I am surprised that the search engines were hardcoded in the C++ file. Support for OpenSearch would be a better way that allows customisations. So if anyone wants Bing, Baidu or another search engine that is not included by default, they can add it without having to recompile from source.
While you're at it, make it a plugin, like I recall most things being in Notepad++ (even many things that other text editors have by default).
I use Notepad++ for txt files only because it's fast, but I've never had a need to or even knew you could "search the internet" directly from Notepad++. I have a browser for that purpose.
We have all been taught that two wrongs does not make a right. But I was also taught that not standing up to bullies keeps them coming back. More applications should boycott Bing.
If you're that adamant about a specific search engine, then you can fork or patch. Notepad++ is open source, so these are both possible options if you feel that strongly about the issue.
Yeah, it feels quicker and lighter to edit small text files. If NP++ didn't exist, I'd still use notepad.exe rather than opening VSCode for these light edits.
He was not run over, and this was news to me. There is no evidence either way what may have happened later, but the only ones claiming for sure that he was later executed are U.S. government officials.
These empty moves are not even incremental. They're completely irrelevant. He switched to DuckDuckGo which uses mostly Bing results. He hosts on GitHub (Microsoft) and his app runs on Windows (Microsoft). This patch is theater for idiots.
You're comparing the right of a company to censor something that promotes violence or hate on their property and does harm to their business versus a large US corporation pandering to, though censorship of their citizens' struggle for democracy, a totalitarian government that oppresses its citizens and commits genocide against certain ethnic groups.
That's what the Chinese government said, the students were promoting violence and hate in their property
See how that works?
Also Trump did not promoted hate or violence, he just stated what many people believe, the Democrats forged the 2020 election. And for that crime he will be banned from social media for at least 2 more years
These two things are simply not connected. The author can do what he want, he can also make it play Chinese national anthem when starting the software, and it'll be the same. It's not connected to the reliability of the software. He's free to do whatever, as long as it doesn't violate other people's rights.
I think OPs point is that the difference in reaction is enlightening. When someone uses software to create some largely meaningless statement on Chinese politics it's received positively, when someone does the same to address American politics we would have 400+ pages of people decrying wokeness or political posturing.
Remember when “developers” tried to update the license on their code to preclude ICE and the US government from using their open source projects due to the “kids in cages” thing? This is much more mild but just as pointless an effort. Do they think google and many other institutions are not bending over backwards for the CCP? Might as well shut the whole project down and quit.
I couldn't find the "tank man" censorship problem, and I looked. I'd never heard of "tank man" as a meme; I'd have looked that up under Tienanmen Square.
I've been familiar with "tank man" as a meme specifically in reference to the famous photograph. PBS Frontline ran a great documentary in 2009 on the photo and its subject, titled "The Tank Man":
Then educate yourself. The tank man photo taken during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre is widely considered one of the most important and iconic images of the 20th century.
Let's assume good intent on the part of the parent and grand-grandparent poster. Not everyone is aware of all the issues, and we're all subject to the rule of today's lucky ten thousand. [0]
Try and get the auto-caption on Tiktok to recognize "Tiananmen Square".
It sets a really bad precedent to allow or accept Western companies (yes I know Tiktok is Chinese) kowtowing to China in the hopes that those companies will gain access to the Chinese market. It's widely suspect that not having the American flag on the moon landing in the movie "First Man" was to cater to the Chinese market.
Let me clue in all the investors and the Western big-tech CEOs on a little secret about China: you, as a Western company, will never "win" in the Chinese market. The CCP will make sure that happens. You are literally wasting your time and debasing yourself for something that will never happen.
Take any Western company like Google, Uber or Amazon and the dominant player in China will be some homegrown clone of that. This is not an accident and it will never change.
It's time the developed world woke up to this as it is openly mocking WTO rules about equal access to markets.