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

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

#31

Post by Ezhik »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #28
yzh wrote: post #24

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…

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 Chine…

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

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

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

#32

Post by pmontra »

incepted wrote: post #21

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.

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.

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

#33

Post by aianus »

incepted wrote: post #21

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.

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

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

#34

Post by ihsw »

ethbro wrote: post #6
joolze wrote: post #2

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…

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.

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

#35

Post by Spivak »

Ezhik wrote: post #31
JohnTHaller wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Chine…

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.

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

#36

Post by funkyy »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #29

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.

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

#37

Post by xiaoma »

yzh wrote: post #24

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…

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.

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

#38

Post by seanmcdirmid »

xiaoma wrote: post #37
yzh wrote: post #24

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…

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 ot…

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.

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

#39

Post by fauigerzigerk »

incepted wrote: post #21

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.

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.

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

#40

Post by MVf4l »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #14
[deleted] wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> But why is it bad that a commercial party wants to respect local laws? Let's say for sake of argument that it is not bad. But what are those laws? What does the law say and how do you interpret it? The way China does censorship is very vague: "don't allow anything indecent (by any standard) or that disturbs social harmony (in any way)." Oh, and there is no such thing as safe harbor, you must pro-actively check that…

You don't have to report anything. Of course you can if you want. You may have heard of the Chaoyang Masses?

Basically following that law is kinda like following the DMCA, you don't know if you are pirating, but if the copyright owner think you are, they'll send you notices, what you can do next is to argue if the contents are legal or just to delete the contents. Though in China it may cost you a fortune if you want to argue if it's legal.

> It is not a vague threat

Well, unless there are people associate normal images and child porn, like someone did to Winnie and Xi. But I don't think it's going to happen widely in the U.S. IMHO, if the Chinese government stop pushing so hard, there will be less cases like insulting their leader metaphorically.

edit: spellings

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