Notepad++ Drops Bing After 'Tank Man' Censorship Fiasco (bleepingcomputer.com) 138
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The latest Notepad++ release has removed support for Bing search from the app after the "tank man" fiasco Microsoft had to deal with on Friday afternoon. "Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ settings for Search on Internet command, due to its poor reliability," the Notepad++ v8 announcement reads. Don Ho, the creator of Notepad++, one of the most popular open-source Notepad replacements, revealed on GitHub that the motivation behind this decision is Bing censoring results instead of doing "its job." "When a search engine does the censorship instead of its job, the search result loses its quality and it's not reliable anymore," Don Ho said in the GitHub commit removing Bing support. "Hence, Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ for "Search on Internet" command." "While there was no immediate explanation to the problem, it is a widely known fact that China forces companies with businesses within its borders to abide by its censorship rules requiring to block references to China's 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protests," notes BleepingComputer. A Microsoft spokesperson said it was "due to an accidental human error."
In August 2020, China banned Notepad++ after Don Ho protested against China's human rights violations of the Uyghur people and the Hong Kong political unrest by releasing two versions dubbed 'Stand with Hong Kong' and 'Free Uyghur.'
In August 2020, China banned Notepad++ after Don Ho protested against China's human rights violations of the Uyghur people and the Hong Kong political unrest by releasing two versions dubbed 'Stand with Hong Kong' and 'Free Uyghur.'
Why software does need to be political ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Point the finger in the right direction. (Score:2, Informative)
Because people motivated by politics endangered others.
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It is free software. The authors can use it to make a stand. This works better if the software is any good. Notepad++ is pretty good and pretty hard to replace on Windows.
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It's risky. I agree that the author has every right to do it, and I might even agree with his cause, but I disagree that expressing his view through the software's functionality is an appropriate method of expressing that view.
Obviously the fact that it is free software is relevant. End users are not financially damaged, have the opinion of forking or using a historical version etc. So it's not "as bad" as if it were proprietary software involving money exchanging hands.
The problem is that it exposes a new
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While I see your point, I think that this exposes a larger question.
When the kind of systematic oppression and potential genocidal activities of a major nation go unchecked, unstopped by other nations, global forces, the UN and other appropriate level responses, what do we do?
If absolutely no major entity with the ability to drive corrections is willing to take a stand, isn't it implicitly necessary for individuals to start pushing for change in every way that they have at their disposal, in order to collec
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" the expected behaviour of their software may change with little notice" This also happens in propietary software (although rarely due to political reasons) and the user usually has no recourse except switching to another piece of software.
IMO it's their choice whether to make a political stance with their software and I might choose to switch to another piece of software. This
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This particular scenario may be relatively benign, but imagine if the Linux kernel were to drop support for certain network cards because the devs want to protest the actions of the manufacturer. End-users wouldn't be screwed but they'd have good reason to feel slighted and companies might start thinking twice about their financial commitments to FOSS.
This scenario just points out that life is political. You mention end-users not being able to use a particular video card as a bad side effect of politics, but that is still pretty benign. If you want to use a bad example of politics screwing over people, war is much better example. Government going to war to protect the interests of private companies is not some far fetched thought exercise.
Everyone should think twice about their dependency on any proprietary software or FOSS application. Proprietary compa
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Re:Why software does need to be political ? (Score:4, Informative)
The funny thing is that since DuckDuckGo uses Bing search, it was censored there, too.
Re:Why software does need to be political ? (Score:5, Informative)
False. DuckDuckGo aggregates results from numerous (over 400) sources, including Bing, and it's own web crawler. If Bing censors a result, DuckDuckGo won't find it there, and will produce results from other sources.
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If Bing censors a result, DuckDuckGo won't find it there
False. If Bing censors a search term, DuckDuckGo won't find it there. If Bing censors a result then DuckDuckGo would be absolutely none the wiser.
You're right though DuckDuckGo is larger than Bing, but the 399 other sources it uses pale in comparison to Bing, as does it's own crawler. You're very much reliant on the chance that enough of those other sources know that Tank Man is referring to the specific picture when the primary source just pretends it doesn't exist.
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If Bing censors a result, DuckDuckGo won't find it there
False. If Bing censors a search term, DuckDuckGo won't find it there. If Bing censors a result then DuckDuckGo would be absolutely none the wiser.
You're right though DuckDuckGo is larger than Bing, but the 399 other sources it uses pale in comparison to Bing, as does it's own crawler. You're very much reliant on the chance that enough of those other sources know that Tank Man is referring to the specific picture when the primary source just pretends it doesn't exist.
You're not comprehending how aggregation works.
Stop talking. Slow down. Stop arguing. Listen. Think. Look up aggregate. Think carefully about if you prove positives or negatives. Are they the same? If you don't get an answer from one source, and you have multiple sources, do you think you proved a negative, that it doesn't exist? Would you ever get to a second source if you were doing that?
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You're not comprehending how aggregation works.
Oh no I am. Here's a hint: If you aggregate one major comprehensive source with 399 irrelevant sources which very much likely don't have the content you're looking for, you're still very much fucked.
Duckduckgo results look *VERY* much like Bing results for a good reason.
Now you slow down and realise I addressed this in my previous post.
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Except that 1 source doesn't have the content. That's a really weak attempt to cover up your mistake with a new one.
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Except that 1 source doesn't have the content.
The most authoritative source doesn't, and you're relying a lot on your perception of what the other source cover, quick name 399 search engines. Go!
Your big problem is you assume ever source is of equal value, and provides equal content. It doesn't. DuckDuckGo is Bing moderated with a bit of additional information which they get from over 400 places.
Learn the difference.
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I suspect the result aggregation is only for normal search, not image search. During the censorship outage image searching for "tank man" on DDG, the normal search worked fine, but the image search showed only 2 results, neither of which had anything to do with Tiananmen Square.
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It is only one image, so it sounds like it still worked? You still found out what the image was? And with less spam?
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No, during the outage the entire image results page was empty except for 2 or 3 images of a person sitting on a tank that had nothing to do with Tiananmen Square.
It is pretty rare for an image search with such generic terms to not result in at least a full page of images.
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Why shouldn't software be political? He wrote it, he can use his soapbox however he pleases. You are free not to listen.
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Can is different from should. For me it goes against the grain of the Linux philosophy of doing one thing only (similar to software decomposition). It's a complete mismatch of low-level (edit text files) and high-level (support a particular political issue) functionality.
I can see the social value in the modern trend of demanding ethics from companies, but the demanded ethics seem to quickly form a complicated web of intersectional and bipartisan politics, and then you end up with gridlock.
Re:Why software does need to be political ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you seen Notepad++? It's very much the opposite of the Unix Philosophy, it's got masses of built in functionality.
The bigger issue though is that demands to "don't be political" are really demands to maintain the status quo politics. There is no neutral position because ignoring the issues is itself a position.
Don't misunderstand me here, I personally licence most stuff under the GPL which means I give up a huge amount of control because I feel that the freedom GPL brings is the most important thing. I'm just aware that I'm making a choice by doing that, one under constant review.
Re: Why software does need to be political ? (Score:2)
Any text editor that connects to the Internet doesn't care about the Linux philosophy.
Since this is a Windows app, it makes sense.
But in fact I don't know of many Linux code editors outside of GEdit that don't connect to the Internet. So, even Linux the Linux philosophy isn't widespread.
Which makes sense. The Linux philosophy was never intended to apply to GUI apps.
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If you have an issue with some political issue use the mailing list, don't embed it in the software.
Multipolar world much? (Score:2)
Ah, what fun it must be to list USA alongside with China and Russia — how relieving of your own country's impotence it must be to "stick it" to the Yanks...
Well, as we say here, bullshit. USA has not problems with anything on your laptop — except, perhaps, with child pornography. Travel to China and Russia remains, well, its own reward...
Re:Multipolar world much? (Score:4, Interesting)
Encryption (PGP I think) used to be illegal to have on your laptop in the USA, or there was a version you couldn't have or something.
There was some issues with the PSX encryption key as well.
Some guy spent 4 years in jail for refusing to give the encryption keys to his hard drive.
I don't follow every hiccup or fart that comes out of the USA, some of the above is old and I'm not sure it still applies, it's just stuff from memory??
Don't pretend everything is just rosy in the USA land of the "free".
In case you haven't noticed because you are smack bang in the middle of nutjob land, America is fast losing it's "land of the free" image around the world.
Assange, Snowden, Manning, the poor confused fuckers who "stormed" the capitol building that are being hunted down like dogs.
The censorship of your media. Trump was a twit, but he sure did highlight the blatant bias in your news reporting and tech giants.
Your two party "democracy", even Iran has more political parties to vote for.
The most people in prison anywhere in the world, including China.
The corruption (sorry, you call it "lobbying")
The racism.
I used to want to visit and travel from coast to coast - a long road trip on Route 66 and see America, until a friend said he'd done it with his father.
Don't bother, they paved over it, it no longer exists, it's just one long ass highway now filled with trucks, all the towns along the way are empty ghost towns.
Oh well. Scratch that off the bucket list.
The USA is now right next to Australia on my list of places I don't want to go to.
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What are you whaffling about?
I make no such pretense — about any country. There may be troubles of different degrees in the Elven kingdoms and even in the Shire. But to equate with Mordor over it takes a severely butt-hurt Eurotrash...
Re: Multipolar world much? (Score:2)
Encryption was never illegal on a laptop in the U.S. There was a brief time period through which it was illegal to export strong encryption. At the time, pretty much no one used laptops.
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Australian here. Out of interest what did we do to get lumped in with America?! ?
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USA has not problems with anything on your laptop
Now that's just utter bullshit.
https://it.wisc.edu/news/know-... [wisc.edu] was written explicitly because of overreach by border officials.
They're not searching for child porn when they demand random people grant access to devices and social media.
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Now that's just utter bullshit. Your own article says nothing about what they may be looking for.
The topic was "political software". They are not searching for that, just as I said.
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Why shouldn't software be political? He wrote it, he can use his soapbox however he pleases. You are free not to listen.
Sure, but it's ironic that he is responding to censorship by effectively censoring Bing. I can see him removing it as a default, maybe even putting a complaint about it in the UI, but it seems silly to remove functionality altogether, as though his users aren't smart enough to think for themselves about tank man.
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Why should a text editor use a search engine? (Score:5, Insightful)
When I want to search the Internet, I launch Firefox. When I want to read or edit a text document I use a text editor.
One thing I have never needed, and will never need, is a text editor that searches the Internet!
What's next? Should "grep" hit Google? Should "ls" reach out to Yahoo and bake what it finds into its results?
In case it isn't obvious, the answer to these questions is a resounding "NO!"
Keep it simple, stupid.
Re:Why should a text editor use a search engine? (Score:4, Informative)
One thing I have never needed, and will never need, is a text editor that searches the Internet!
I agree, BUT given that the Software DOES search the internet, and contains multiple search engines: you should have a choice of how. I would strongly advise anybody Not use a software program that has removed a major search engine as a choice while retaining others for users to search with for reasons other than technical ones.
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"for reasons other than technical ones"
A search engine failing to return results for a search string is a technical reason.
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A search engine failing to return results for a search string is a technical reason.
"Service X has chosen to block some content" - when given some particular query, is not a technical reason. A technical reason would be the service is broken or changed the APIs or interface so that it now crashes the program, or the service otherwise just doesn't work as expected anymore. Accordingly the bing function was working and not causing an incompatibility issue Or rendering the application unstable.. there's
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'"Service X has chosen to block some content" - when given some particular query, is not a technical reason. '
That is also not the reason I claimed.
"Search engine returns zero results" is not only a technical reason, it is the only purely technical reason. It also has the advantage being an objective reason: there is no dispute about what kind of zero it is.
"Service X has chosen to block some content" is not technical, but at least it is non-political. If as you desire you want to qualify that with the sea
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Or you could recognize that a search engine that returns zero results is not much of a search engine..
In that case, all search engines must be removed based on that criteria, since All of them reply zero results to the following search: "ogjzoigrrrgjx"
In fact Bing does Not return zero results, except that ALL search engines returns zero results if you search for something that it currently contains no pages for, that is not accepted by a particular search engine, or may be due to intermittent conditions --
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"is proven to be a Non-technical criteria"
No, it's is proven to be a silly criterion, but it is also a criterion that is a strawman that you made up out of whole cloth and then lied that I proposed it. The entire article about about a specific search that is known to have applicable results.
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No, it's is proven to be a silly criterion, but it is also a criterion that is a strawman that you made up out of whole cloth
It's not a strawman. Technical reasons are in reference to functional behavior of code - And reasons for the choice existing which are dependent only on functional traits and interest from users - Not dependent upon anybody's subjective opinion about how Good that service provider is. If a search provider Does not work or is not supported any more, as in something changed and th
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You're confident that none of the other search engines left untouched do not censor search results? I wouldn't be.
I have made no claim about other search engines.
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Well you might be happy to hear that when you search for something in Notepad++ it'll launch Firefox (or whatever your browser is) and do the search there. It's just a shortcut for launching the browser and entering the search term. Handy for looking up error messages or API references
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It sounds like you want Notepad instead of Notepad+ or Notepad++. What did you think the + stood for? Hint: they don't stand for minimalism.
Re: Why should a text editor use a search engine? (Score:2)
Name three GUI code editors that don't connect to the Internet.
This isn't Notepad. This is an editor made for writing code. If you don't code, your opinion on this matter isn't valuable. If you do code, then please let the rest of know what editors you are using to avoid such things.
Bonus points if the editor supports plugins or some sort of customization framework, as most coders prefer to be able to tailor their tools to their job.
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Because it scratches the developer's itch, and you're not paying him so he can do whatever the hell he wants. He *has* made his software GPL and the complete source history is on github, so it's actually pretty trivial to add bing back in if it really bothers you.
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Your software didn't arrive from the ether. It has authors and they have opinions.
And it's called "A silent agreement". You can bet Microsoft wouldn't take action to change it back if no one had called them on it.
Re: Why software does need to be political ? (Score:2)
Don't assume wifi.
All of my software arrives over the ether.
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There is nothing political about "We wont support people who deny atrocities against innocents".
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So when politics clashes with someone's ideals, he would want to express that. Creator's work is a natural venue for that. It is not very dissimilar to music or art in general.
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Because otherwise, it would ultimately mean war. And in a battle between Notepad++ and EL Couz, we already know who'd lose. Quit whining while you're ahead.
I think there's an Emacs mode for that ... :-)
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some people are only interested in the inconvenience that politics imposes on them.
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Yeah, it's nonsense. Sundar Pichai literally supported the Chinese Communist Party in hunting down dissidents using Google, but because someone at Bing accidentally put Tank Man in the global filter list rather than the regional filter list they're somehow worthy of being dropped?
The first thing that came to mind when I read this article was that while I couldn't think of specific examples off my head, I would bet Google has at some point done something at least as bad as what Microsoft just did (although honestly I cannot find this search feature in the app so maybe they don't have Google there either). So this particular action from Notepad++ seemed quite disingenuous and largely PR driven.
Then I realized that this decision was made by Don Ho, the Notepad++ creator and not some la
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CCP shill spam false reports, all it takes is one contractor asked to confirm "Image reported as offensive, true? (Y/N)" to respond wrong cause a temporary block.
https://nypost.com/2019/05/18/... [nypost.com]
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It's all a misunderstanding (Score:5, Funny)
The guy wasn't blocking the tanks. He was merely asking the tank crew for directions to a nearby tea shop. In fact, at one point they offered him a ride - so he climbed onto the tank. But then the crew realized they were heading in different directions, so he had to get back down.
Eventually workers from the tea shop, dressed in blue, came and guided him to their store. A happy ending for everyone!
How? (Score:5, Insightful)
A Microsoft spokesperson said it was "due to an accidental human error."
How is "human error" possible in this situation? Under what circumstances would anyone need to fiddle with a specific search result on a specific day, when that same search on any other day brings back what is expected? What possible reason could Microsoft give for "human error" to happen in this situation?
Re:How? (Score:5, Insightful)
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But games like this do make all of it's search results questionable.
Google does the same thing with censoring its products in China as does Apple. In fact Apple even makes its users' data available to the PRC in China.
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Re:How? (Score:4, Insightful)
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A Microsoft spokesperson said it was "due to an accidental human error."
As opposed to their usual intentional human error.
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Simple: Putting a manager blind to political implications in a position to make such a decision. Of course, the actual human error was both not an error and made much higher in the hierarchy, but when has anybody honorable ever worked for Microsoft?
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Microsoft maintains lists of banned words, things like the names of notorious paedophile sites, which are in effect globally. In fact there are layers to it, e.g. you can search for porn but porn related words don't get suggested and unless your search is very clearly porn related then porn sites are filtered by default.
Some parts of the world have different lists. Someone probably just added "tank man" to the wrong one.
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How is "human error" possible in this situation? Under what circumstances would anyone need to fiddle with a specific search result on a specific day, when that same search on any other day brings back what is expected? What possible reason could Microsoft give for "human error" to happen in this situation?
I take it you've never used a computer? I mean if there's one thing you learn early on when you sit in front of one is that never before in history have we had the power to fuck up so grandly, for so many, so easily.
Everything we have ever created is in some way susceptible to human error. The goal is only to minimise said error.
The only thing I miss from Win (Score:2)
I use BBEdit, but I don't like it. For one thing it sometimes opens the files I was last working on, and other times it doesn't. The inconsistency drives me nuts.
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If you are using it at work, see if you can get your company to pay for a Sublime Text license.
Every year the sane BS (Score:5, Informative)
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China: It was a protest, not worthy of news.
Rest of world: The site was a massacre, with over 10,000 killed, but couldn't count because of the curfew and the bodies being removed [bbc.com].
China: Okay, fine, you have pictures proving some people died, and families are commenting on it. We'll give an official total of 184 unnamed people. [nytimes.com] They're unnamed to protect their privacy, not because it keeps people from checking to verify their loved ones were on the list.
Rest of world: We have photos showing thousands were
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What are the exact numbers? I don't think anyone knows. We certainly don't know today, all I remember was hearing about nightly news broadcasts and discussing it in current events. From photos and early reports the official numbers of around 200-300 are obviously far too low. Reports of perhaps 10000 are probably too high. That's an enormous amount of humanity and carnage in between.
You're right that photos are rare. Every year there are discussions of the massacre, for good reason. Photos are rare because
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Oh, good spot. You got him.
China didn't actually say it was just a flesh wound. We know that would require a level of humour and self-awareness that the CCP lacks.
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Imagine if someone said "Hitler's crackdown on Judaism".
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Mass riots! (Score:2)
All 7 Bing users are going to be really pissed.
Good old days (Score:2)
In good old days, Western Europe along with North America had economic/military monopoly around the world. Now China is showing dominance and the rate at which this is happening and China government using its dominance with central authority is indeed alarming. Europe/NA will need new coalition partners if it wants to stop this juggarnaut. Once there is enough big economic market, they can tell China to get lost but not now. Companies like MS have the same interest in China as you and me have in buying Chin
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Exactly. That China is the latest whipping horse isn't bad because China doesn't deserve to be the next whipping horse, but because it's so damned hypocritical. The people pounding their fists on the table about China buy Chinese-made goods. Their constituents shop at Walmart, which might as well be considered the Beijing General Store. Everybody talks about repatriating manufacturing, without anyone really putting the trillions of dollars on the table it's going to take to build that manufacturing capacity
Good points, but not WalMart (Score:2)
You make some good points.
Just as a point of fact, at 26% Chinese-sourced products, WalMart carries less products from China than most retailers.
https://www.10news.com/news/na... [10news.com]
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Why does a notepad need internet search? (Score:2)
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feature parity with emacs, well, they have ddg support at least.
https://www.emacswiki.org/emac... [emacswiki.org]
Installing notepad++ today (Score:2)
Social responsibility! (Score:2)
Human Error? (Score:2)
Yesterday's News. (Score:2)
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Bing only put it back because they got caught and were blindsided by the outcry. Don't think for a second that the faulty executive decision-making that led to this happening in the first place has been corrected.
I am sick and tired of everyone boycotting everyon (Score:2)
US and USSR cooperated on space exploration despite being bitter enemies. Imaging having something - like passion for great computer code - that is completely orthogonal to your politics and tribal identity. Even if people search Baidu from Notepad++ they are likely to look for something technical and uncontroversial. Is it too much to ask that normal people recognize several different areas in their lives rather than having politics subsume everything they do?
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Overthinking (Score:2)
And here's me, using NP++ to look at text files.
removing google et al too? (Score:2)
Oh ... (Score:2)
... so it's okay to care about this censorship. Just not the kinds against our domestic political opponents.
Man, the regulations for keeping our geek cards just get more and more complicated every year.
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The reverse happened to me. No matter what, you get F'd
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Are you sure you didn't type 'pawn'? We're all just pawns to the IRS.
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Yeah, I think he previously put in a message of support to the Hong Kong protestors in the build notes, or something like that. That was enough to warrant a ban,, apparently.
I sent him $10 just for screwing with the thin-skinned commies, and because I've used Notepad++ for many years. That being said, I had no idea it had built-in internet searching. I could see some settings related to that, but never manage to find the actual "Search on Internet" command among the menus.
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Make a sign and go stand on a corner like everyone else.
You don't get to define the terms of someone else's protest, but this is pretty much exactly what he has done. It's just because this particular sign is attached to a particularly useful program that you're bothered. It's not like he's blocking streets or setting cars on fire here -- this level of protest is well within bounds, and should be used more rather than less.
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You don't get to define the terms of someone else's protest
No but you can point out its hypocrisy.
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I see not even a whiff of hypocrisy. If I make a thing, I can choose what features to include in it by default or not. That includes the right to remove stuff that was already there. (Sometimes things turn out not to be as useful as anticipated.) NPP is very easy to extend, either in configuration or with plugins, so unless it starts ignoring your customizations every update the way Windows likes to, just override whatever default behavior you don't like and move on. You just don't like to be inconvenienced