
Microsoft confirms Bing is down in China - obahareth
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/23/microsoft-confirms-bing-is-down-in-china/
======
idrios
This actually surprises me for how much effort Microsoft puts into being
compliant with China. Last year China took down Yahoo! too, despite Yahoo's
relationship with Alibaba.

I was an expat last year and with Google (& DuckDuckGo) blocked I already had
pretty few options of search engine. Short of learning enough Chinese to
manage Baidu, I can't imagine how hard it would be to use internet as a
foreigner in China now.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
is it possible to use a VPN in the PR of China?

~~~
slickbuntu
It's tricky. But doable. I know because I have done it on all three of my
trips there.

~~~
cocoggu
I've been there for a while (2 years straight and more than 6 years since my
first trip), I used many different VPNs providers and even setup my own
servers.

Although the company is a bit shady and I'm pretty sure they have some
connection with the party, Astrill is the best to use in terms of performance,
bandwidth and ease of use. They recently added WireGuard support which is
blazing fast.

However, if your priority is privacy, probably you should use your own server,
or just stay out of China.

------
amaccuish
Apparently it's just technical problems:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-24/china-
is-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-24/china-is-said-to-
block-microsoft-s-bing-due-to-technical-error?srnd=technology-vp)

~~~
tenmadlead
Wouldn't surprise me if the leaders reversed the decision, instead of it being
a technical problem. They've been known to reverse _some_ bad decisions
before, like taking coals away from average citizens during winter time.

The government seems to be in panic mode, what with the recent news of luxury
brands sales crashing 30-50%, lowest economic growth since 1990, 30% of
factories have left while another 30% are looking to move within the next
year, lowest level of birth since 1961, population set to shrink in 8 years,
etc.

~~~
paradoxparalax
"lowest level of birth since 1961"

This is a good thing that shows(if not proves)that they are getting out of
poverty.

And is something they pursued for decades, so this is pointless info for the
point you make: "China gov in Panick mode"

Now, The current President, was already born with the lack of confidence, it
means, the first day he assumed China's Gov, He was already in Panick mode.

He needed to break a lot of the internal stability and a lot of power lines
Inside the Party, to arise to power, So , His government was born with this
crucial weakness already,

And thats the reason the first week of assuming presidency he ordered to place
absurdly ridiculous warmongering Ads in all the subway screens....

..Absurd and ridiculous even for the Chinese, the chinese average Joe is much
smarter then what you think.

When a ruler start talking too much about war, you know he is afraid and
Scared of loosing his power.

Master Margareth Tatcher explained that if you need to Show Power, It is
because you don't have the power.

But taking google or yahoo down for days was already normal 15 years ago (when
google was not totally blocked) ...

Is not anything significant, just a collateral datapoint, at least for me, who
have much more Older and Broader data about this issue.

Luxury brands crash is not because of economic reasons, Luxury Buyers don't
care about economical crisis, they are already freaking Rich, They are Rich in
any situation, they are not affected, specially in China, where are
Billionaires every corner. So why the sales dropped??

Because this wealth people got their moneys from corruption, and chinese
people is fed up with this,( fight corruption, same as WarMongering, is the
bulshitt the new president use to try to look better , because of his lack of
confidence)...

And this people are afraid of the Security Police hunting down "grey" or
"black money" , So they don't go near a Louis Vitton Shop even with a 10 feet
pole.

Economy is bad because of incompetence of current government, Economical
Incopentence, political incompetence, all Incompetence you can think.

That't the reason, but despise His Incompetence, our economy is still doing
not so bad. So the wishful thinking of China Moon land deniers ( people who
believe that the chinese space craft landing in the dark side of the moon is a
fake video)...

And this wishful thinkers Deniers, will wait until the end of their lifetimes,
if they think China economical Apocalypse is coming.

The Bible's Apocalypse will come before that, believe me.

I have been listening to "China will brake anytime now" for at least 25 years,
before I even dream to be approved of the Economy University in China.

So I don't worry about economy, but I am extremely worried about the current
government Malice and Incompentece,

...exactly the opposite of the former Hu Jin Dao and Wen Jia Bao ruling
period, a period of Competent and wise ruling, that is unfortunately not the
case right now.

~~~
baybal2
I'll enlighten you. Totalitarian regimes tend to croak not when repressions
are maxed out, unlike what the popular opinion suggests, but when they run out
of steam to sustain them.

It is especially true when they run out of steam right midway during a major
purge.

Venisuela now is a textbook example of that.

~~~
paradoxparalax
What you say is a complete Bullshit. Your writing is so bad that your logic is
completely mumbo-jumbo. Will not waste my time with brain-less people.

Don't tell me you are a programmer, please.

A few years ago, Hacker News decided to change It's Spirit, and become more
like reddit, because normal people like me feel shy or embarrassed to show
ignorance in front of the Highly Intellectual High Level people who used to
comment here....

By that time, I thought that decision made by HN rulers was a Wise decision,
not to become the manure field Named Reddit, but become a little bit more fun
and relaxed and have more human communication...

I am starting to think i was wrong....

I miss the TempleOS[1] guy, really...

OH MY GOD!!!

I just went to wikipedia and saw that last year Terry A. Davis has passed
away.

R.I.P Terry TT :( :( :(

This should be in a headline in Hackernews.

TempleOS will never be forgotten

I am crying. Tears for Terry, will never forget you, Man...

------
afpx
And, Microsoft even follows China’s censorship rules.

Employees of tech companies protest when their companies collaborate with
defense departments. But, yet those employees aren’t very loud when it comes
to censorship.

~~~
dep_b
Microsoft never promised to be a world-healing company.

~~~
viivaux
Quick tip: when people give out about a massive company (one with a real
influence on the world, mind you) doing something they feel isn't right,
that's :not the same thing: as assuming the company has a moral duty to heal
the world.

------
ardy42
So, Google's Project Dragonfly is probably dead in the water now. If the PRC
has banned Microsoft, despite it playing by their censorship rules, I don't
see why they'd let Google in.

------
jtokoph
It honestly makes no difference. Bing search in China was absolutely useless
the last few times I was there. Searches for any keyword, including technical
terms, just returned a list of unrelated “news” articles.

~~~
Cerium
Bing in China fills my needs when I visit. Taking a look at my recent browsing
history I was able to use Bing in China to find: hotels that accept foreign
guests, terminals for flights, train maps, etc.

~~~
motdiem
Same for me - it was fine when looking for touristy stuff, restaurants opening
hours and things like that.

------
chillacy
> Bing,..., is active on 320,000 unique devices monthly, according to third-
> party research firm iResearch. That’s dwarfed by Baidu’s 466 million and
> Sogou’s 43 million.

Wow, bing is even less popular there than it is here relative to google.

~~~
carlmr
I mean Bing also means sick in Chinese, so it's not a good choice of name.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
False, for reasons others have already pointed out.

Why do people believe this myth? Microsoft has plenty of Chinese employees and
Qi Lu was the executive VP of Bing for quite a few years. If there was an
issue with the name, it would have been addressed by their marketing
department long ago.

~~~
HAL9000Ti
It's not a myth, "bing" does means "sick".

It also means other things like "ice", but "sick" is the first thing that
comes to mind, and in China this is especially a big deal due to
superstitions. Naming things is very important here.

amusing anecdote: I remember a discussion about someone who wanted to name his
shop 森林木 (three trees symbol, two trees symbol, one tree symbol) and everyone
told him it was a bad idea and it would fail because the trees where getting
fewer and fewer and that this name was an omen of bankruptcy, and if anything
he should put it in the opposite order. (He ended up choosing a different name
entirely)

Bing is a really bad name, even tho this had probably nothing to do with it's
relative failure

~~~
ThrowawayR2
No, "bing" _by itself_ does not mean sick. The sound "bing" maps to at least
59 possible characters across the 4 tones[0] of Mandarin. Only one particular
character that maps to "bing4" means sick and it's one out of at least 21
possibilities[1], though I'll grant that it's the one that people are most
likely to think of first.

Moreover, as it's normally pronounced by westerners, Bing would most likely
map to "bing1" anyway.

[0]
[https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=chardict&cdqman...](https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=chardict&cdqman=bing&cdmantmce=0)

[1]
[https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=chardict&cdqman...](https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=chardict&cdqman=bing4&cdmantmce=0)

~~~
naniwaduni
> Moreover, as it's normally pronounced by westerners, Bing would most likely
> map to "bing1" anyway.

Sounds more like bing4 to my ear, but see for yourself:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Zh-
bing1...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Zh-bing1.ogg)
([https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bing1#Mandarin](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bing1#Mandarin))

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Zh-b%C3%...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Zh-b%C3%ACng.ogg)
([https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%ACng#Mandarin](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%ACng#Mandarin))

------
kenneth
I'm not surprised they were having issues if their systems are optimized for
less than a million monthly unique users. The article says 320,000. A single
popular news article could easily absolutely overwhelm that level of traffic.

------
yzh
I started using this meta-search engine: searx.me It works fine for me.
Integrates results from different search engines.

------
ngcc_hk
The western culture all accept china should have a firewall. That ...

It is abnormal you know.

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
Noone said that. If anything we accept we have no control over China's
policies.

~~~
jadeddrag
Boycotting is one small lever of control.

~~~
51lver
But then you'd have to boycott some of the most loved US brands in history!
Surely you wouldn't want to harm THEM? Just because they gave china so much
money to become a world power doesn't make THEM part of the problem, right?
Have a heart! You wouldn't want to possibly impact the retirement plans of
those dearly loved brand CEO's would you? Naaaa.

(/s)

