Microsoft search engine Bing censors terms deemed sensitive in China from its autosuggestion feature internationally, according to research from Citizen Lab.
The University of Toronto research organization analyzed the search engine's autosuggestion system for censorship of nearly 100,000 names in the United States, Canada and China in both English letters and Chinese characters. Testing was done by modifying region settings, language setting and IP address geolocation.
Microsoft responded to a notification from Citizen Lab, and called [PDF] the lack of autofill terms a "technical error" and said they'd resolved the issue.
The Citizen Lab group claims it found that censored individuals primarily related to Chinese political sensitivity when the word was written in Chinese characters, or names falling under an umbrella that the group termed "eroticism" if searched in English letters.
In English, the names were associated with burlesque dancers, pornographers, glamour models, leaks of stolen nude pics and similar and also the names of drag queens (who are often unfairly linked to sex work). Interestingly, names like Dick Cheney were also censored, based on connotations that could come from the person's first name. Some Chinese political names were also censored when searched in English letters, like "Xi Jinping", "Liu Xiaobo", and "Tank Man."
Chinese character names not showing up in autofill included incumbent leaders like Xi Jinping, retired officials like Wen Jiabao, historical figures like Chinese Communist Party co-founder Li Dazhao as well as politically sensitive search terms such as the names of people involved in scandals or power struggles.
Citizen Lab reasoned that the censorship of Chinese leaders' names in the domestic and international versions of Bing in China may be due to Microsoft's compliance with Chinese laws and regulations.
After all, in September 2021, China demanded companies create governance systems for algorithms.
By late March 2022, presumably after much of Citizen Lab's research, Bing turned off auto-suggestions in China altogether at the request of Beijing. The feature was also shut down for 30 days between December 2021 and January 2022.
But none of this explains why the terms would be removed from autofill in North America.
Citizen Lab said it's very unlikely that the censorship is by random chance, but rather "the result of a process disproportionately targeting names which are politically sensitive in China."
"Search engines play an important role in distributing content and shaping how the public perceives certain issues," explained Citizen Lab. Not only do the autosuggestion systems predict intended queries, they are based on previous queries, so if people stop searching for the terms, they stop being suggested and thereby influence search behaviour.
And its not simply Bing that's affected – Bing feeds autosuggestion and search result data to other engines, such as DuckDuckGo and Yahoo and is the default search engine in Microsoft Edge. Bing is also built into the Windows start menu.
Citizen Lab says it is "happy" that its research led to the discovery and resolution of a misconfiguration but also stated:
In light of our past research, the findings in this report again demonstrate that an internet platform cannot facilitate free speech for one demographic of its users while applying extensive political censorship against another demographic of its users.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is deeply entrenched in China, having entered in 1992, and Beijing has shown no signs of letting up with its policies on censorship.
We have asked Microsoft for comment and will update if they respond. ®
Something for the Weekend Another coffee, please. Yes, I know we're about to start. There is always time for one more coffee. It's good for your brain. Thanks.
Could you hold my cup for a moment? I need to visit the restroom. Yes, I know we're about to start; you told me that already. There is always time for coffee AND a comfort break. Yes, I know the two are related but I don't have time to chat about it. I'm bursting here.
How about I drink the coffee straight away, nip to the WC, and return pronto? Slurp argh that's hot. Thanks, I'll be right back.
On Call This week we bring you a shocking incident for a Register reader who was party to an electrical engineer's earthly delights.
"Andrew" takes us back to the 1980s, the days of DECNet, DEC Rainbow PCs, and the inevitable VAX or two.
Back then, DECnet was a big noise in networking. Originally conceived in the 1970s to connect PDP-11 minis, it had evolved over the years and was having its time in the sun before alternative networking technologies took over.
Analysis Startup QuSecure will this week introduce a service aimed at addressing how to safeguard cybersecurity once quantum computing renders current public key encryption technologies vulnerable.
It's unclear when quantum computers will easily crack classical crypto – estimates range from three to five years to never – but conventional wisdom is that now's the time to start preparing to ensure data remains encrypted.
A growing list of established vendors like IBM and Google and smaller startups – Quantum Xchange and Quantinuum, among others – have worked on this for several years. QuSecure, which is launching this week after three years in stealth mode, will offer a fully managed service approach with QuProtect, which is designed to not only secure data now against conventional threats but also against future attacks from nation-states and bad actors leveraging quantum systems.
China's approved GitHub clone, Gitee, has warned users that it will make all existing repositories private pending a mysterious review of their content.
Gitee offers Git and Apache Subversion as a service. But while GitHub has occasionally been banned in China, Gitee was anointed as China's designated open source development hub in 2020, after the nation's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology conducted a bidding process.
The Reg keeps an eye on Gitee and sees a steady stream of blog posts about product and service updates, plus news of open source software in China. The service is sufficiently committed to the cause of open source to have signed up to mirror Linux Foundation code and is thought to have around eight million users.
Mozilla on Wednesday launched a Developer Preview program to solicit feedback on Firefox extensions that implement Manifest v3, a Google-backed revision of browser extension architecture.
Mozilla last year said it intended to support MV3 in Firefox extensions, though with some differences. Its implementation of the WebExtensions API in Firefox has now incorporated enough of MV3 plumbing that developers can set the appropriate browser flags and experiment with MV3 extensions in Firefox v101, now in beta and due for release at the end of May.
Google Chrome is expected to stop supporting extensions created under the old MV2 specification in about a year, June 2023. And given Chrome's share of the browser market – about 64 per cent currently – extension developers will want to have updated their code by then and to have accounted for how MV3 works – or doesn't – in different browsers.
The Canadian government has joined many of its allies and banned the use of Huawei and ZTE tech in its 5G networks, as part of a new telecommunications security framework.
"The Government is committed to maximizing the social and economic benefits of 5G and access to telecommunications services writ large, but not at the expense of security," stated the Government of Canada.
Companies using equipment or managed services from the two Chinese companies have been until 28 June 2024 to stop operating or remove the equipment.
India has slightly softened its controversial new reporting requirements for information security incidents and made it plain they apply to multinational companies.
The rules were announced with little advance warning in late April and quickly attracted criticism from industry on grounds including the requirement to report 22 different types of incident within six hours, a requirement to register personal details of individual VPN users, and retention of many log files for 180 days.
India's government yesterday responded by publishing an FAQ [PDF] about the new rules.
Lenovo has halved its range of portable workstations.
The Chinese PC giant this week announced the ThinkPad P16. The loved-by-some ThinkPad P15 and P17 are to be retired, The Register has confirmed.
The P16 machine runs Intel 12th Gen HX CPUs, but only up to the i7 models – so maxes out at 14 cores and 4.8GHz clock speed. The laptop is certified to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and can ship with that, Ubuntu, and Windows 11 or 10. The latter is pre-installed as a downgrade right under Windows 11.
The US Justice Department has directed prosecutors not to charge "good-faith security researchers" with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) if their reasons for hacking are ethical — things like bug hunting, responsible vulnerability disclosure, or above-board penetration testing.
Good-faith, according to the policy [PDF], means using a computer "solely for purposes of good-faith testing, investigation, and/or correction of a security flaw or vulnerability."
Additionally, this activity must be "carried out in a manner designed to avoid any harm to individuals or the public, and where the information derived from the activity is used primarily to promote the security or safety of the class of devices, machines, or online services to which the accessed computer belongs, or those who use such devices, machines, or online services."
Intel this week unveiled a $700 million sustainability initiative to try innovative liquid and immersion cooling technologies to the datacenter.
The project will see Intel construct a 200,000-square-foot "mega lab" approximately 20 miles west of Portland at its Hillsboro campus, where the chipmaker will qualify, test, and demo its expansive — and power hungry — datacenter portfolio using a variety of cooling tech.
Alongside the lab, the x86 giant unveiled an open reference design for immersion cooling systems for its chips that is being developed by Intel Taiwan. The chip giant is hoping to bring other Taiwanese manufacturers into the fold and it'll then be rolled out globally.
The US government has recovered over $15 million in proceeds from the 3ve digital advertising fraud operation that cost businesses more than $29 million for ads that were never viewed.
"This forfeiture is the largest international cybercrime recovery in the history of the Eastern District of New York," US Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.
The action, Peace added, "sends a powerful message to those involved in cyber fraud that there are no boundaries to prosecuting these bad actors and locating their ill-gotten assets wherever they are in the world."
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