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Microsoft's Bing Search Engine Goes Offline In China (france24.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from France 24: The Microsoft-run search engine Bing was unavailable in mainland China late Wednesday, raising concerns among some social media users that it could be the latest foreign website to be blocked by censors. Attempting to open cn.bing.com results in an error message, though users can still access Bing's international site using a virtual private network (VPN), which allows people to circumvent China's "Great Firewall" of censorship. It is not clear whether or not Bing has joined China's long list of prohibited websites or if its China service is experiencing technical difficulties.

On Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media site, people complained about the lack of access, with some speculating that Bing too had been "walled off." Others aired their dissatisfaction about having to use Baidu, China's largest domestic search service. "I can't open Bing, but I don't want to use Baidu -- what to do?" wrote one user. "Bing is actually dead -- is this to force me to use Baidu??" said another, cursing. Update January 24, 00:10 GMT: Microsoft says it is aware that some users are unable to access Bing in China and says it is investigating the matter.

34 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Please censor yourself off the net China. by Seven+Spirals · · Score: 2

    Nobody would miss your port-scanning, spamming, and teenage pen-testing. Please please, show us how superior you are China, build your own Communist paradise Internet. I'm sure it'll be fine.

    1. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by Luckyo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They already have that. Essentially every service your average Chinese citizen uses is now located in China. They could sever themselves from internet entirely and average citizens wouldn't really care. They'll still have their wechat, baidu, etc. Tencent et al have more than enough capability to replace whatever is needed within months should such need arise.

      Which is why they can block at will. Their own people won't really care, beyond the certain small percentage. And that certain percentage is exactly the kind of people that authoritarian regime would want to look at carefully and limit freedom of.

    2. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      They already have that. Essentially every service your average Chinese citizen uses is now located in China. They could sever themselves from internet entirely and average citizens wouldn't really care. They'll still have their wechat, baidu, etc. Tencent et al have more than enough capability to replace whatever is needed within months should such need arise.

      Which is why they can block at will. Their own people won't really care, beyond the certain small percentage. And that certain percentage is exactly the kind of people that authoritarian regime would want to look at carefully and limit freedom of.

      Exactly. They already block (or rather "fake news!") anything the state deems inconvenient. The funny thing is WeChat actually captured the headlines and even put a little mark beside it saying the link was banned. This was especially common around the Huawei CFO arrest - any non-Chinese site not stating the party line got blocked, but amusingly, WeChat users saw the headlines still and noted that there was more "broken links" and "fake news" marked on them than normal.

    3. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      China needs the open internet to see what is selling and in demand in the free West.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    4. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by Seven+Spirals · · Score: 1

      I realize that and agree completely. So, why should they endlessly hack and scam on servers outside China that they "don't need" ?

    5. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by Luckyo · · Score: 1

      Because it's beneficial to them in their view to act this way at the moment?

      Literally, the same reason why all states act in any way they do.

    6. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

      something like 20% of all attacks are of US origin so blocking china isn't going to fix that problem.

    7. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by Luckyo · · Score: 1

      Pointless racism. Nice. Show us on this IQ chart just how much smarter average Chinese is than you?

    8. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by Seven+Spirals · · Score: 1

      Of course, they act in their own interests. So should the others. However, wouldn't it then be rational for the other states which are victimized by them to gut them outta the root DNS servers root and branch? Why should we kowtow while they are vandalizing our shit? That seems like a bitch-move to me.

    9. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by Luckyo · · Score: 1

      Because it is beneficial to those states? Are you under some kind of misguided impression that countries neighbouring China are not finding having direct access to the internet far more valuable then trying to sever themselves from the Chinese portions of the internet?

    10. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by Seven+Spirals · · Score: 1

      I track scans and NIDS exploit attempts myself on about 70 servers. That percentage is laughable in my experience it's around 90% from China. Maybe others have different data, but I get about 1% from the USA. So, it'd be well worth having them fuck off. That and it'd be extremely satisfying because of their actions. China is the enemy of the West. Anyone who thinks otherwise is probably Asian or has some other bias explaining their blindness.

    11. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by Seven+Spirals · · Score: 1

      No, I'm not under any impression at all about them other than "That would then be their own fucking problem."

    12. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

      I track it on about 4500 servers. 20% from US, about 40% from China and the rest dotted all over the world, lot of eastern block countries.

    13. Re:Please censor yourself off the net China. by Seven+Spirals · · Score: 1

      Fair enough. Perhaps our different scales and/or server types has some kind of bearing. In either case, if the Chinese decide to self-censor themselves off the net, that's a lot less to put up with. It doesn't eliminate the need for security, but it'd be a lot less annoying.

  2. Too early to know for sure. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    This is a country where you can buy the most expensive apartment in Beijing and it still doesn't have screens on the windows, so when Chinese people open the windows, which they often do, they get eaten alive by mosquitoes. Some days random websites go offline for seemingly no reason. Some days even sites like Slashdot won't open via my cable connection but work fine via 4G. If the problem lasts more than a week, then it's real.

  3. It's certainly news, but by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

    People probably should wait and see if this is just a technical glitch. Websites do go down, occasionally.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:It's certainly news, but by Froboz23 · · Score: 1

      A search engine disruption can mean only one thing.
      Invasion.

      --
      Take off every Sig. For great justice.
  4. Re: Disappointed Customers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Obvious anti-Microsoft troll makes obvious anti-Microsoft joke. Actually, Bing had a large following among the expat community here.

  5. China is making itself an island of technology by SysEngineer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When species are isolated on an island they evolves differently becoming a different species. In my experience, Baidu does not give quality technical results compared to Google. As China isolates it self from the world socially and technically it will evolve down a different technical path and because tech is changing so fast I wonder how long before a totally new "species" of tech will evolve.

    1. Re:China is making itself an island of technology by Gavagai80 · · Score: 1

      Different language = different results no matter what search engine you use. Chinese-speaking people and English-speaking people are always going to be reading different materials, at least until true AI comes and provides quality automated translation.

      And there are as many Chinese speakers as English speakers in the world, so they're not really a smaller island.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
    2. Re:China is making itself an island of technology by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      In my experience, Baidu does not give quality technical results compared to Google.

      But Google is playing ball with the Chinese government now. So now we know what at least part of the other side of the deal was. Block other American competition.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    3. Re:China is making itself an island of technology by _merlin · · Score: 1

      No it's not just a language issue, Baidu is rubbish - everyone knows this, or at least that's the opinion held by the finance industry and software developer types in Shanghai I've hung around with. The general opinion is that Baidu promotes sponsored results without marking them as such, and is incredibly easy to game with SEO techniques. The two factors in combination mean the first page and a half of results are useless.

      That said, Google is pretty bad at dealing with Chinese-language searches. I sometimes even get better results with DuckDuckGo. There's definitely a market opportunity for a search engine that deals well with Chinese language and doesn't suck.

    4. Re:China is making itself an island of technology by _merlin · · Score: 1

      It provides rubbish when you search in Chinese, too. See my other replies elsewhere in the thread.

    5. Re:China is making itself an island of technology by greylion3 · · Score: 1

      But Google is playing ball with the Chinese government now.

      Source?

      Project Dragonfly seems to have been droppped, due to protests from employees, and from human rights organizations.

      --
      Privacy begins with ..
    6. Re:China is making itself an island of technology by houghi · · Score: 1

      If the other big island is any measurement, they will develop drop bears and others things that will kill you.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  6. Re:And nothing of value was lost by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    As much as Microsoft has been a super-mega-slimebag for decades, Google needs search competition to reduce their slimebaggativity and monopoly games.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  7. I Use Bing In China by knoledgesponge · · Score: 1

    I use Bing daily in China. I also used Yahoo but that was blocked while I was outside the country several months ago. It was difficult when I first arrived here, habituated as I was to using Google services but I got used to it.

    I went to bed after using Bing for search queries and woke up this morning at 4:30 with it being blocked. Now that Yahoo and Bing are gone, I need to find another English search engine that doesn't require a VPN :'(

    1. Re:I Use Bing In China by _merlin · · Score: 1

      Just SSH to a VPS somewhere in Europe and use it as a SOCKS proxy (-D option on the command line with OpenSSH, or choose "Dynamic" in PuTTY). Or you could get a business connection that doesn't block L2TP - often the same ISP will block L2TP on personal use connections but not business connections, because they know they'd kill a bunch of businesses outright if they did that.

  8. Really got binged by fubarrr · · Score: 1

    Got Binged! Truly

    Global.bing.com seems to work still

  9. Re: Disappointed Customers by _merlin · · Score: 1

    It's popular with locals as well for certain kinds of searches. Baidu actually doesn't have a very good reputation - it's generally regarded as being very vulnerable to SEO and guilty of promoting the rank of results for people who pay them such that the first page-and-a-half of results are often useless.

  10. China no longer needs western markets by aberglas · · Score: 1

    They have a huge domestic market. A large and growing middle class.

    They are actively disengaging from the West. It has become more difficult to get money out of China to buy western goods. The less interaction with corrupting influences the better.

    Let us just hope it goes back to the old days, when China was completely separate. But I fear that they will soon invade Taiwan, and then put huge pressure on their other neighbors.

  11. A VPN is a red light in China by aberglas · · Score: 1

    Do you really think that they do not notice use of a VPN?

    How will it affect your social credit score?

    1. Re:A VPN is a red light in China by _merlin · · Score: 1

      It's all a song-and-dance to make people self-censor. When the rubber hits the road, they still want businesses to operate in China, and that means some degree of pragmatism. Businesses use L2TP VPNs as well as SSH in and out of the country all the time. I know this because I'm SSH'd into my production servers in China from outside the country now, and when I'm in China, the guys in China are SSH'd to the servers in Europe and Australia. Also, do you think market makers like Optiver are going to trade Chinese markets without being able to run secure connections to their regional head office in Sydney?

  12. Ouch by nospam007 · · Score: 1

    So there will be 2 angry people in China.