
Bing Goes Full-On Censorship in English Search Results Within China - jhonovich
https://thenanfang.com/search-engine-bing-com-featuring-skewed-results-china/
======
joolze
Same with Yahoo in the past week. I think about new years eve the search
results suddenly shifted to what they should look like using a Chinese only
training set.

Results were all Xinhua and such, wikipedia, imdb, etc are no longer results
numbers 1, 2, 3 anymore instead seeing a lot of qq, baidu, xiami etc results
for song lyrics, movies, etc.

But it seems to be closer to normal today.

The normal internet speed has been maybe halved or thirded since about the
week before Christmas, VPNs are all sketchy, there seems to be a regular
interval when all connection is cut for a short time. You see pings oscillate
between 40 and 400 ms quite regularly.

Chinese domains are always rock solid though. Can stream music off qq or xiami
or stream youku without issue for extended periods of time when ycombinator,
bbc news, etc are down. Yahoo and Bing stay up when most western sites are
down.

However haven't been seeing as much total blockage as usual when they kick up
the security. Lots of social sites that usually go black for a week or two are
up just fine.

~~~
ethbro
Gee, it sure would be helpful if the Chinese government had a switch they
could flip at will to slant the internet to a pro-Chinese position. Why, that
would be almost the definition of _" secure and controllable"_ when faced with
periods of civil unrest...

~~~
ihsw
Disinformation is a natural progression after total information awareness.

~~~
ethbro
Well, I see it as the typical (and smart) Chinese straddling of control and
efficiency.

The government would like the capability to render the internet more favorable
to their interests.

The government also recognizes that a modern economy cannot run at competitive
efficiencies with incomplete/mis- information.

Ergo, it'd be perfect if you had a propaganda switch you could throw to
influence the chokepoints (search engines) only when you needed to. Economy
keeps humming along with mostly full internet during status quo: when dissent
breaks out, you restrict information and take the hit to economy efficiency in
favor of order and security.

Pretty evil genius, actually...

------
yzh
I cannot believe after all these years China is still banning the whole site
instead of using some keyword or content-based method. Not that those methods
are right, but at least it would save a lot of programmers and researchers
time. How can people make progress on anything related to scientific research
without the help of Wikipedia? seven years ago I was a college student in
China and I sure remembered how I have to set up VPN to check on wikipedia
pages for my thesis. And needless to say, the school doesn't have the up-to-
date paper collection from either IEEE or ACM. I have to directly visit the
author's sites. I really wish the government could realize how harmful this is
to innovation...

~~~
JohnTHaller
The answer is HTTPS. Unless China can compromise the whole country's OSes by
forcing them to install a security certificate that lets them impersonate
Wikipedia, Google, etc, they can't block individual pages on sites that only
serve over https * They can only block whole sites. Wikipedia forces https
sitewide for just this reason. Selective censorship isn't permitted.

Fun fact #1: That's believed to be why the Chinese government orchestrated the
attacks against github in April 2015 using the great firewall to distribute
infected javascripts via Baidu. They were trying to force github to take two
projects offline that were being used to get around the great firewall and
gain access to the unedited NY times online. The Chinese government can't
selectively block those projects because github enforces https sitewide.

* Fun fact # 2: An intermediary of China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) issued several fake certificates for Google-owned domains in March of 2015. Google untrusted the certificates in Chrome and Android and Mozilla did the same in Firefox.

~~~
Ezhik
Well, you could make everyone install a compromised SSL certificate...

[https://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/perpass/current/msg019...](https://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/perpass/current/msg01979.html)

~~~
Spivak
So you force your citizens to install a compromised SSL cert and can now
impersonate any website. Now what? If you want to monitor someone don't you
have to proxy all their traffic? Is that even feasible on a country wide
scale? Because you can't do it intermittently since a user can just check
which cert the key is signed with to tell you whether you're currently being
monitored.

~~~
xorcist
I would think it's not only feasible, but also more simple than what the Great
Firewall already does.

You could probably do it on on 0.1% of the NSA's yearly budget. (Which, after
some Googling, turns out to be 10M USD. That's even more than I expected.)

~~~
dcposch
10B, not 10M!

------
blisterpeanuts
This would be a powerful argument against turning over ICANN's
responsibilities to an international agency (i.e. an agency dominated by
authoritarian governments like China). I hope the EFF and other advocates of a
free, borderless Internet will take notice.

Who knows, maybe Microsoft did this on purpose as a not-so-subtle hint of
what's to come.

------
bitmapbrother
The things Bing will do for market share. I recall they even paid people to
use it at one time. I wonder why they still continue to operate in China.
They'll never be a factor in China, but are more than happy to bend over
backwards to serve state sponsored results for their pittance percentage of
search engine market share.

~~~
funkyy
Probably to please stock owners - it is better to show 200 million active
users, rather than 50 million active users from prime locations. I imagine
Bing must have been crazy money wasting machine for MS so probably they do
everything in their power to show MS management how "futuristic" is to look at
them like on investment rather than liability.

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benmarten
I am trying to understand what the purpose of this blockade is? By the way
here is a great talk about how the Great Firewall works
[https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7196-how_the_great_firewall_disc...](https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7196-how_the_great_firewall_discovers_hidden_circumvention_servers#video&t=3564)
by CCC the biggest European Computer Club ;)

~~~
yzh
I think mostly it is for political related contents. Especially things like
this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989)
and this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo)

------
privong
A more accurate title might be "Bing tries full-on censorship..". The author
of the post notes:

> This isn’t happening anymore (as of January 2), but we’ll keep checking to
> see if any further changes are made.

But it's worrying that Bing seems to have enacted censorship (maybe they
pushed a change to production too early and rolled it back?). Certainly
something to keep an eye on.

------
Animats
I wonder if someone at Bing, ordered to do that, deliberately overdid it to
make it clear Bing was censoring.

~~~
fucking_tragedy
Doubt it. Money is a bigger motivator to corporations than moral outrage.

------
mtgx
It's not just China:

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/02/internet-
cen...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/02/internet-censorship)

I still remember when Google exited China and Microsoft tried to take
advantage of that by being an even bigger lapdog than it was before to the
Chinese government. Unfortunately for Microsoft, that didn't even work in
gaining it more market share, so it may have been trying to please its Chinese
masters for nothing:

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-china-insight-
id...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-china-insight-
idUSKBN0UE01Z20160101)

Of course, when Google got hacked back in 2010, it was through its own
voluntarily setup PRISM-like access point for the NSA, so I guess there are no
"innocent" parties here. It's still disappointing to see these companies
making it easier for governments to control/arrest/assassinate their citizens
through censorship and surveillance. Hopefully history will not look with
favor upon these actions (although IBM still seems to be doing pretty well
decades later after its Nazi genocide collaboration and Cisco is still making
a lot of money after starting to sell surveillance-enabled routers in China
and worldwide many years ago).

~~~
skj
Any source about this "voluntary PRISM-like setup for the NSA"? And that this
thing was the hack vector?

~~~
magicalist
I assume it's

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-
security/chine...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-
security/chinese-hackers-who-breached-google-gained-access-to-sensitive-data-
us-officials-say/2013/05/20/51330428-be34-11e2-89c9-3be8095fe767_story.html)

but it wasn't "PRISM-like", it was an internal database of accounts under
court ordered surveillance (in this case, orders specifically "issued under
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act"), and it wasn't the attack vector,
it was apparently the attack target.

~~~
skj
Sounds like the typical twisting of facts from a conspiracy theorist.

That said, I welcome evidence of the original claim.

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oneJob
Thanks programmers! Wouldn't have been possible without you!!

------
contingencies
Skeptical. I've been using Bing as my primary search engine for awhile here
and haven't noticed any changes of late. When I can't be bothered running a
VPN, it's the only foreign-language (ie. English) indexing search engine with
reasonable results that is accessible (Duckduckgo and Google are blocked). For
all the problems, Chinese internet has its perks though: we have many great,
instant media streaming services, pervasive mobile payments and Taobao!

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ck2
If you want to de-index yourself from Chinese spammers, just put "tank man" on
your pages.

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akerro
Search engine show what they want you to see. It's no longer search results.

------
kafkaesq
It's the dominate ethic among the big players these days: "If we don't bend
over and do their dirty work for them, they'll just ban us, and find someone
who will."

------
yyhhsj0521
Can't help laughing upon the "USA" to "About us" :-）

------
incepted
All companies doing business in a country have to abide by the laws of that
country. What's the big deal?

If anything, I'm surprised to learn it wasn't already the case.

~~~
morganvachon
There's a difference between "following the law" and eagerly participating in
state-sponsored censorship.

There's also the fact that, in countries with basic human rights codified in
their constitutions (i.e. most of the Western world), companies like Apple,
Google, and Microsoft make a lot of noise about protecting the rights of their
users. But in less free nations, they tend to silently flip to the other side
and go out of their way to appease the governments of those nations,
especially wealthy ones like China. Hence the ease with which their services
are manipulated in those countries.

