Friday, June 04, 2021

Fwd: Microsoft caught censoring the internet.

This time it is sufficiently unsubtle to be worth talking about.

One of the pics of Tank Man from that day.


That's Tank Man from Tiananmen Square. Very famous. You can't miss it. I searched and downloaded this one from Google today.

Search "Tank Man" on Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo.



Nothing.

Okay? Microsoft, red handed, carrying water for the ChiComs.

Time to switch to Linux? I'll be looking into it.

4 comments:

Stephen Taylor said...

Your problem seems to be with the various search engines, not with the browser. I don't see what moving to Linux will do to help with the censorship problem. I'm willing to learn, however. Maybe I'm missing something. I'd like to find a search engine that isn't dependent on Microsoft, which is the biggest problem with DuckDuckGo. Any ideas?

The Phantom said...

I'm thinking that if Microsoft did something this ham-fisted and tone-deaf with Bing (which DDG and Yahoo both run on) I can only imagine what fuckery they are up to in the bowels of their operating system. Not to mention their office suite.

Plus Windows is rubbish for networking and always has been. I've been doing networks since Novell Netware, and Windows has sucked -forever-. Lately they've been finding new and ever more creative ways to suck. Their forced updates are a huge source of problems for me even on my little home network. They break something pretty much every time.

I've been looking for an excuse to ditch them, and this may well be it. Censoring MY internet at the behest of Communists in China? Nuh uh, comrade.

Reziac said...

Dunno what went wrong for you but when I do (via their Images link)

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=h_&iax=images&ia=images

in various random browsers, I get page after page of images.

However, there seems to be a bug in DDG's latest interface -- sometimes it acts like there were no results until I click the S (search) button. I think it is no longer reliably passing on the SUBMIT part of the user action, so it just stops with no data. This started about a month ago, when something changed in their javascript. (This was about when I had to dick with the JS toggle on another browser to make suggestions work right again.)

Then again, I still use WinXP for everyday, or XP64 on the New! Improved!! frankenputer. Win7 annoyed me and Win10 made my eyes bleed and my teeth itch, and that's why the streaming system now runs PCLinuxOS. Which has been very good.

But I've had the opposite experience with networking. My various WinBoxen (XP through 10) all speak to one another without any special difficulty, other than the annoyance of having to make a special admin account for 7 onward if I want to share the drive root (which I do, because it's just me here and I want to see ALL my files, dammit!) 7 sometimes forgets the other systems' names, but can still be pointed at them and reminded.

But networking linux has been nothing but trouble. So far I've only managed to get it to regularly see and (usually) remember ONE of the multiple shared drives (and I swear that was by chance). If I want to see any other box, I have to input its IP address. And I can't save from Chrome-on-linux to another system at all, it just doesn't see them. Have tried SAMBA (worse than before) and several HowTos (all spotty except for one a friend wrote up) and no joy.

[I wouldn't use Chrome, but SeaMonkey on linux has too many problems.]

My Windows boxen all see each other immediately, with no intervention on my part. My linux boxen (usually two of 'em up) won't even see each other. (Tried other linuxes. They were even less cooperative. And rather more annoying in other ways.)

Eventually I got tired of the frustration, installed XP in a VM, and now use that when I need to schlep files to or from a linux box -- absolutely no problem, sees everything!

As to search engines whose back end is not-Microsoft and not-Google, AFAIK your choices are Russian and Chinese. Which are not really progress.

The Phantom said...

Hi Reziac, yeah they "fixed" it after Tank Man was off the images all day. The update is that yes it happened, but it was "human error".

Meaning that yes, they did censor Tank Man and yes, it was done deliberately but no, they're not going to admit it.