Bing Goes Full-On Censorship in English Search Results Within China | Hacker News Reader

Bing Goes Full-On Censorship in English Search Results Within China

thenanfang.com

222 pointsjhonovich53 comments

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.

Makes sense, considering Bing powers Yahoo!

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...

Disinformation is a natural progression after total information awareness.

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...

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...

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.

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

https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/perpass/current/msg019...

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.

> don't you have to proxy all their traffic?

and that is one part of what the gfw does.

google 'how does the gfw work' if you want a broad overview. there was a really in-depth explanation on HN not that long ago. sadly, i'm unable to find it at the moment.

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.)

10B, not 10M!

That's what I was referring to. It's easier in some countries than others.

Wikipedia is available in China without VPN. I just got onto it.

Oh, yeah? Click on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

If you live in expat areas you quite likely get your internet served through HK or Macao which isn't filtered.

The roaming packages of foreign mobile users also don't get filtered.

If you are a Chinese citizen you most likely will be filtered, I've been to China multiple times companies will usually have a dedicated work station with HK internet the rest will be filtered hotels usually also get internet through HK not sure if this is only for foreign guests or not, on normal internet connecions Wikipedia and the likes were definitely blocked at least as recently as February 2015(last time I visited main land China£

They basically already have this. Qihoo 360 web browser and anti virus will open you up wide to spying by the Chinese government and a lot of Chinese people prefer using these because they're better tailored for Chinese culture. If HTTPS truly become adopted by mainstream Chinese people then they'd be highly "encouraging" that browser.

Baidu's Baike is a truly gigantic wiki. Often whole articles from the Chinese version of Wikipedia show up there, but Baike is actually much larger.

I agree that blocking the international internet is harmful to innovation and the economy, but the question of how harmful is largely based on how large the market is. In China's case, Baidu isn't as extensive as Google, Youku doesn't have the Khan Academy or a lot of other things YouTube does, but they're still huge and it's not that bad.

China's internet isn't as rich as that of the entire world, but it's still large and vibrant. For the Russian internet it's a bit worse. If a country the size of Denmark decided to only their own versions of fb, youtube, wikipedia, etc, it would be a catastrophic loss.

Youku rips a lot of content directly from YouTube; 90% of the past popular stuff is there, and of course, piracy.

As a laowai, I'm beginning to feel more isolated. If it wasn't for the pollution, it would be the biggest problem in living here.

Yeah, this and the pollution is what made me leave China two years ago. Looking back, I don't regret it.

Why are you beginning to feel isolated? Because of internet connection censorship? Or some combination of factors?

yeah, to believe or not, 'user generated content'

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.

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.

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.

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... by CCC the biggest European Computer Club ;)

Thanks for share this.

I think mostly it is for political related contents. Especially things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1... and this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo

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.

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

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

It's not just China:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/02/internet-cen...

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...

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).

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

I assume it's

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chine...

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.

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

That said, I welcome evidence of the original claim.

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

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!

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

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

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."

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

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.

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.

Not all the lawful methods of making money are morally acceptable and people should refrain from using them.

IMHO this is an example of that. Morality is probably subjective and you might disagree on this example but I'm sure you can find others.

Yeah and Harriet Tubman should have been arrested for illegally smuggling stolen goods /s

It's not such a big deal unless you happen to be in the business of making politically relevant information available.

Helping a dictatorship shield itself from criticism and spread its propaganda is not quite the same as compliance with, say, food labelling rules.

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