Notepad++ drops Bing after “tank man” censorship
github.com
github.com
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.
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.
I am quite sure that Chinese people travelling abroad are 100% familiar with what they should not talk or write about once they get home.
https://apnews.com/article/europe-china-dubai-middle-east-he...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute
Also, they tend to have family back home that can be pressured.
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".
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?
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.
* 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.
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.
Do you have proof of this?
JTI? Of Japan? The one where the Japanese government is legally required to own at least a third?
We know Hollywood gets tax cuts for bigger, more numerous and slower-mo shots of American flags in their films.
Clearly "First Man" was making a statement about this special treatment.
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.
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.
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.
If our countries weren't so tightly intertwined with complicated trade partnerships and mutually beneficial enterprises, I'd be inclined to agree with you.
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.
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.
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.
it generates probably 100 made up words a day.
your critique is meaningless.
The expression is clear to the reader and conveys a conceptual expression of thought -- that of an idea of a new form of colonialism.
The opinion of whether or not, in what form, or to what degree it exists in the world are entirely different things from the word itself.
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…
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2018/4/6/17206230/china-tra...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-trap_diplomacy
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/magazine/a-malaysian-inst...
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.
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.
Just say you’re censoring it on behalf of China. We don’t believe your “human error” lie, and it’s insulting to our intelligence to even try.
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.
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 ? )
These actions are usually meaningless, but that makes it extra meaningless.
Maybe DDG corrected it earlier? But DDG is as affected for many on here.
At any rate right now I see no obvious censorship: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=tank+man&iax=images&ia=imag...
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).
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?
Human error knows no bounds.
However although you don’t intentionally make a mistake, you do intentionally carry it out.
In that case, no amount of safety checking will stop a human being from implementing bad logic.
Did they? https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tank+man has no results of Tank Man. https://imgur.com/a/U5fDs7P (If you do see Tank Man images, see the edit at the end of this comment.)
If you press enter on the search box with the pre-filled "tank man", then you get a URL with more query-string parameters - https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tank+man&imgurl=&cbir=s... , and that page does contain the actual Tank Man.
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.
>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.
"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.
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.
I see this really as more of a social statement and less as a technical solution.
(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.)
I know what you're thinking. That's my point.
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.
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.
https://www.whatsonweibo.com/uk-embassy-lights-a-virtual-can...
Microsoft says error led to no matching Bing images for Tiananmen 'tank man' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400774 - June 2021 (10 comments)
“Tank Man” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397486 - June 2021 (54 comments)
The story of the Tank Man photo by its photographer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 - June 2021 (138 comments)
There are no results for tank man - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635 - June 2021 (529 comments)
The iconic ‘Tank Man’ photo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 - June 2021 (4 comments)
Tank Man - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394943 - June 2021 (15 comments)
Ask HN: “Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 - June 2021 (126 comments)
This is what I'm seeing: https://imgur.com/a/P9l23Di
Microsoft said the issue was "due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this."
It was not intentional and not a result of a request from China, so why ban the search engine?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-con...
Is there any further explanation? Sounds like an obvious lie.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
2014: Bing has been filtering out both English and Chinese language search results for politically-sensitive terms such as "Dalai Lama" and "Tiananmen" [0]
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-denies-accusations-o...
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.
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 :))
Free software has always been political but judging by the reaction here and on the github commit, its philosophy is becoming less and less vocal.
Maybe it's time to switch to Atom instead. At least there it's my choice.
edit: Beaten to the punch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27428383
Not a Windows user, but I were I'd be using Notepad++.
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 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.
Worth seeing if you've never seen it in motion. Glad he survived.
i don't even know if those 'pancake' photos actually happened
PLA has been successful in that regard.
I don't think the Tiananmen Square democracy protests qualify as a "momentary political fad".
Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Uighur, et al. independence/democracy is an important, ongoing issue.
A multi-party, democratic China would be dream come true for the world.
Only if it works better than Russia. I suspect it takes generations to inculcate a love of free speech and public participation in government
Yeah, totally the same.
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
You can just search for tank man to get a picture of it: https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_au/news/b/bing-image/bing-image...
> I'd never heard of "tank man" as a meme; I'd have looked that up under Tienanmen Square.
It may not be the ideal search, but look at how there are no results. Clearly some kind of censorship mechanism triggered.
this code change is in response to the fact that bing was not serving up results of the tank man image on the image's anniversary.
The Tienanmen square protests were protests for freedom, and censoring images does not seem very free.
I have never heard of "tank man", and Tienanmen square is not my first thought
And what about google? It is still there after several recent controversial issues
And yet I’ve not once heard it referred to as “tank man” until this incident with Bing.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/etc/transcr...