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"Bing has launched a new intelligent search feature which provides the exact piece of code a developer is looking for," writes Search Engine Journal. An anonymous reader quotes their report: The code snippet will appear right on the search results page itself, which means users will not have to skim through long threads and articles to find the one thing they're looking for. Bing calls this new feature a "Code Sample Answer" and says it's designed to help save developers' time. "Many of us are developers too, and we thought: what if Bing were intelligent enough to do this for us? What if it could save users' time by automatically finding the exact piece of code containing the answer to the question? That is how Code Sample Answer was born..."

A Code Sample Answer will trigger only when Bing intelligently detects the coding intent with high confidence. "To achieve this level of precision for query intent detection, Bing's natural language processing pipelines for developers leverages patterns found in training data from developer queries collected over the years containing commonly used terms and text structure typical for coding queries. The system also leverages a multitude of click signals to improve the precision even further"... [I]t also covers other tools used by developers. For example, a Code Sample Answer can be triggered when searching for git commands and their syntax.
Bing extracts "the best matched code samples from popular, authoritative and well moderated sites like Stackoverflow, Github, W3Schools, MSDN, Tutorialpoints, etc. taking into account such aspects as fidelity of API and programming language match, counts of up/down-votes, completeness of the solution and more."

JAXenter.com notes they obtained similar results using the privacy-friendly search engine DuckDuckGo, and ultimately asks whether this functionality could affect the search habits of developers. "Is this new feature enough to make Bing a viable search engine tool for programmers or will Google be the go-to for hunting down source code?"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSPoweruser: Today, Microsoft announced that it is releasing 124 Million building footprints in the United States to the OpenStreetMap community. Bing Maps team used Microsoft's CNTK Unified Toolkit to apply its Deep Neural Networks and the ResNet34 with RefineNet up-sampling layers to detect building footprints from the Bing imagery. OpenStreetMap currently has 30,567,953 building footprints in the U.S., thanks to editor contributions and various city or county wide imports. Using DNNs and Bing Imagery, Microsoft has extracted 124,885,597 footprints in the United States and making it available for download free of charge.

theodp writes: The Official Microsoft Blog hopes a letter from a Nevada middle schooler advising Microsoft President Brad Smith to "keep up the good work running that company" will "inspire you like it did us." Penned as part of a math teacher's assignment to write letters to the businesses that they like, Microsoft says the letter prompted Smith to visit the Nevada school to meet 7th-grader Sky Yi in person as part of the company's effort to draw attention to the importance of math and encourage students and teachers who are passionate about STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. In an accompanying video of the surprise meeting, Smith presents Yi with a new Surface Laptop that comes with Windows 10 S, a version of the OS that has been streamlined with schools in mind. "Not bad for a little letter," the Microsoft exec says.

Speaking of Microsoft, Nevada, and education, Bing Maps coincidentally shows the school Smith visited is just a 43-minute drive from the software giant's Reno-based Americas Operations Center. According to the Seattle Times, routing sales through the Reno software-licensing office helps Microsoft minimize its tax bills (NV doesn't tax business income) to the detriment, some say, of Washington State public schools.
Microsoft's state and local taxes will drop to just $30 million for the last year (from an average of $214 milion over the previous 14 years) according to the Seattle Times. "A Microsoft spokesman said the decline in 2017 was caused by the company's deferring taxes on some income to future years and the winding down of the company's smartphone business."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: If you're a wealthy techie looking for a way to establish your legacy, the City of Sarasota has a 117,000-square-foot children's science museum that's vacant and could use a little TLC. Housed on prime Bayfront property, the building that once housed the Gulf Coast Wonder and Imagination Zone might make a fine children's computer museum.

So in case any of those CEOs who stress the importance of getting children interested in CS are reading and want to put their money where their mouth is, any suggestions about what a kids' version of the Computer History Museum should look like? Something like an Apple Store? Microsoft Store? Something else?
There's often criticism about the ways computer science gets taught in schools -- so leave your suggestions in the comments. What would a good children's computer museum look like?

New submitter Miche67 writes: As part of the July 2016 update to Office 365, Microsoft is adding several features across the board to Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. Word, however, is getting the biggest new features -- Researcher and Editor -- to improve your writing. "As its name implies, Researcher is designed to help the user find reliable sources of information by using the Bing Knowledge Graph to search for sources, and it will properly cite them in the Word document," reports Network World. "[Editor] builds on the already-existing spellchecker and thesaurus to offer suggestions on how to improve your overall writing. In addition to the wavy red line under a misspelled word and the wavy blue line under bad grammar, there will be a gold line for writing style." The new features are expected to be available later this year. In addition to the two new features added to PowerPoint last year -- Designer and Morph, Microsoft is offering Zoom, a feature that lets you easily create "interactive, non-linear presentations." "Instead of the 1-2-3-4 linear method of presenting slides, forcing you to place them all in the order you wish to display, presenters will be able to show their slides in any order they want at any time," reports Network World. "This way you can change your presentation order as needed without having to stop PowerPoint or interrupt the display." As for Outlook, Focused Inbox is coming to Office 365. Focused Inbox separates your inbox into two tabs. The "Focused" tab is where all of your high-priority emails will be found, while everything else will be in the "Other" tab. Outlook will learn from your behavior over time and sort your mail accordingly. In addition, @mentions are coming to Outlook 365 and Outlook for PC and Mac, "making it easy to identify emails that need your attention, as well as flag actions for others."

mpicpp (3454017) writes with news that Bing has joined Google in removing search results upon request by EU citizens. From the article: The company has asked European residents, who want Microsoft to block search results that show on Bing in response to searches of their names, to fill out a four-part online form. Besides the name and country of residence of the person and the details of the pages to be blocked, the form also asks if the person is a public figure or has or expects a role that involves trust, leadership or safety. ... The information provided will help the company "consider the balance" between the applicant's individual privacy interest and the public interest in protecting free expression and the free availability of information, in line with European law, Microsoft said. You can always visit a non-EU version of Bing to receive uncensored results.

Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "In 2007, I wrote that you could find troves of credit card numbers on Google, most of them still active, using the simple trick of Googling the first 8 digits of your credit card number. The trick itself had been publicized by other writers at least as far back as 2004, but in 2013, it appears to still be just as easy. One possible solution that I didn't consider last time, would be for Google itself to notify the webmasters and credit card companies of the leaked information, and then display a warning alongside the search results." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

If you have a Visa, Mastercard, or Discover Card number handy, do a Google search for the first 8 digits in the form "1234 5678" (don't forget the double quotes around the numbers, and the space in the middle). The odds are that you will find at least some pages among the search results which include other credit card numbers that begin with the same 8 digits. Those Google hits will frequently be in the form of a spreadsheet or document that looks like it was made for someone's internal use and wasn't meant to be leaked on the Web, and some of those documents will include entire lists of other credit card numbers as well. (The search trick doesn't work for American Express cards, since their card numbers are usually stored in the form "3xxx xxxxxx xxxxx", and it's far less likely for your card to share the same initial 10 digits with someone else's credit card. But of course if you hit on a page that contains a list of credit card numbers, there will probably be some AmEx cards in that list.) Of the pages that I found containing leaked credit cards, often they would also contain other sensitive data like passwords and social security numbers. Don't do anything I wouldn't do.

In my 2007 article, I wrote, "Of course, it's not the card companies' fault that these card numbers are leaked onto the Web; it's the fault of the merchants that allowed them to get leaked. But the credit card companies are the only ones who are in a position to do something about it." I suggested for credit card companies to run a Google search every day or week for all of the possible 8-digit prefixes that could correspond to their card numbers, and then to deactivate any card numbers that were found in this way. They could also send a request to Google to remove the page from Google's index because it contains credit card numbers (there is already a public-facing removal request tool for this purpose). And finally, if it was a merchant that leaked customers' credit card numbers online, then the merchant should be sanctioned as well.

The problem with all of these suggestions is that there doesn't seem to be sufficient incentive on the part of the people who have to implement them. If a credit card company has to refund a fraudulent charge, they usually just take the money back from the merchant who originally received it, and it costs the credit card company nothing. (During my brief stint running a company that accepted online credit card payments, sometimes a "customer" that we had interacted with and who definitely knew who we were, would decide to call their credit card company and "dispute" the charge for no reason, and the card processor would just take the money out of our balance and hand it back to the customer.) So credit card companies themselves apparently lack the incentive to fix the problem.

So perhaps the easiest fix could come from Google, a company that actually has no incentive at all to fix the problem, except for the fact that it would be a neat idea. Although their "Don't Be Evil" motto has taken a lot of beatings, they still do some basically responsible things for reasons that don't seem to contribute directly to their bottom line. (The fact that they have a tool at all for requesting the removal of pages containing credit card numbers, for example.)

It should be pretty easy for Google to run its own queries internally, based on all possible 8-digit credit card prefixes, to find pages that list any sequence of 16 digits beginning with those 8. Then could do a quick mathematical test on the 16-digit sequence to see if it's a valid credit card number. Then scan their own cached copy of that web page to see how many other valid credit card numbers they can find. Then propagate all of those numbers back to contact points at Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover, saying, "We found this credit card number leaked onto the Web; you should cancel the number and issue a new one."

After that point, should Google delete the page from their search results themselves? On the one hand, it clearly helps reduce credit card fraud to remove pages from their index that contain working credit cards. On the other hand, the purist in me doesn't like the thought of Google removing information from their index. After all, if the problem is that a list of credit card numbers has been leaked on a webpage, having that page show up in Google shines a light on the problem; removing it from the index doesn't make the problem go away. (The page could still be found through other search engines; or credit card thieves could have already found the page on Google and saved a copy before Google de-indexed it.) Perhaps a compromise could be that once Google has received confirmation from the credit card companies that all of the card numbers on a given page had been de-activated, it could restore the page to their index, but it would be displayed in search results with a warning saying, "This page contains personal credit card account information; all of the credit card account numbers listed have been de-activated."

Unfortunately this doesn't work if the page also contains other sensitive information that can't be un-compromised just by closing an account — e.g., Social Security Numbers, or addresses and phone numbers. (In any case, Google's removal policies specifically say that they won't remove a page from their index just because the page contains a person's address or phone number.) So maybe the better answer really is to just leave the page out of the search results permanently, over the objections of the "purists."

(I may or may not have found some evidence that Bing is more aggressive about removing pages from search results that contain credit cards. I took a "trove" of 11 credit cards that I found through one of my Google searches, and for each of the 11 card numbers, ran a query on both Google and Bing for the first 8 digits. On Google, 8 out of the 11 queries returned at least one page containing more credit card numbers, not counting the original page which had had supplied the "trove" of numbers that I started with. On Bing, however, only 3 out of 11 queries returned pages with more card numbers. This could indicate that Bing is more conscientious about removing pages from search results that contain sensitive personal information. Or it might just mean that they're not as good as Google.)

Of course the fundamental problem with credit card number security has always been that you have to use the same "token" — your credit card number — for every purchase, with every merchant. (There are card companies that let you generate one-time-use numbers for every purchase, but almost nobody uses those.) Maybe in a few years, credit card numbers will be supplanted by more secure payment protocols and fall by the wayside, but that's also what I thought in 2007.

eldavojohn writes "As the presidential race heats up, the smear ads on TV are also increasing. But Microsoft isn't going to site idly by and let the politicians engage in all that song and dance — and Microsoft really does employ both song and dance. Their Youtube channel appears to be slowly transforming from trade show videos and launches into a marketing attack or propaganda campaign that only targets Google (both videos I've watched seemed to have nothing positive about Microsoft in them). Under a month ago, they launched a spoof called GMail man, a creepy guy that flips through all your GMail and serves up super personal ads that are wrong (although they never say if Hotmail engages in targeted marketing). And a few days ago Googlighting shows up to spread fear and uncertainty about Google Docs. Most amusing to this viewer was that I found no such trace of 'Googlighting' on Bing's video service."

Tiek00n wrote in with something that might sound familiar, saying, "Microsoft on Monday expanded its use of Facebook within its Bing search engine, adding 'likes' and recommendations from friends and strangers into search results. Going forward, if you search for something one of your Facebook friends has 'liked,' Bing will note that in its search results. Did your sister and roommate 'like' a nearby Italian restaurant? A small photo, the Facebook 'thumbs up' icon, and a note that said they approve will show up in search results, Microsoft said."

eldavojohn writes "In a blog post titled 'Setting the Record Straight,' Microsoft's senior vice president of online services, Yusuf Mehdi, addressed Google's 'Bing Sting' operation saying, 'We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting.' Mehdi went on to claim that Google engaged in 'click fraud' in order to rig up their alleged 'experiment.' Mehdi added, 'That's right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results. What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn't already know.' The struggle for Bing to usurp Google as number one in search continues."

angry tapir writes "Microsoft is rolling out some enhancements to its Bing search engine, including some that rely on computational information delivered by Wolfram Alpha. That means that people will be able to search for some complicated information, and the search engine will be able to compute the answers. In a blog post, Tracey Yao, program manager, and Pedro Silva, product manager at Microsoft, give some examples."

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Bing search engine has a vulnerability with its cash-back promotion, which impacts both merchants and customers. In traditional Microsoft fashion, the company has responded to the author of the breaking Bing cash-back exploit with a cease & desist letter, rather than by fixing the underlying security problem. It is possible for a malicious user to create fake Bing cash-back requests, resulting in not only fake cash-back costs for the merchant, but also blocking legitimate customers from receiving their cash-back from Bing. The original post is currently available in Bing's cache, although perhaps not for long. But no worries, the author makes it clear that the exploit should be painfully obvious to anyone who reads the Bing cash-back SDK."