Notepad++ Drops Bing After 'Tank Man' Censorship Fiasco

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.'

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