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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.

4 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.

  2. 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.