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Two billion Android devices and 3.5 billion searches a day. You're right - no one uses Google services. No one. Sad.

The so called "study" is a study only in piggybacking on sensationalism and stirring up division.
Author, one "Morten Bay, Ph.D., Research Fellow, Center for the Digital Future USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism" is himself, functionally, a troII.
Whether he is also intentionally peddling and hyping fraudulent studies to increase his media exposure or is just a victim of his own incompetence... that's up to debate.
But let's just say that he didn't pick a less popular franchise for his "study".

Anyway...
The Fraudulent Study found following...

Examining 967 tweets (that's TWEETS - not accounts), made "between December 13, 2017 and July 20, 2018." on a platform where around 6000 tweets are made each second, "206 expressed a negative sentiment towards the film and its director, which is 21.9% or a little more than one in five fans."
Out of those 206... "Using the Botometer mentioned in the Method section, 11 out of the of 206 accounts expressing negative sentiments were identified as bots."
But that's not all!
Our boy Morten also claims that through his spider senses he "identified 33 of the 206 negative accounts as troIIs and/or sock puppets."
Out of those 33 trolls and socks...

16 of these 33 troII/sock puppet accounts appear to be Russian trolls, or at least possess several of the Russian troII characteristics presented above.

Anyway... author claims he looked through some 967 tweets aimed at Rian Johnson, over a period of 6 months, finding 11 tweets made by probable bots, and 16 he thinks may be Russian.
Cause their language skills were poor, their names were generic and they had no profile photos.

7 of the 16 had auto-generated handles consisting of a very common, English name followed by a series of seemingly random digits, and five of those seven had not uploaded a profile image, a combination which according to the studies mentioned above, is a typical characteristic of Russian troII accounts.

Out of those 16, 4(?) were actually identified as Russian troIIs.
@1popculturefan, @MarcoSo94862885, @VPalmera and @ThatNikkaGeeked.
Also, there is another account retweeting @1popculturefan which is, maybe, also a Russian troll/sock.

It doesn't help that the author keeps interchangeably referring to tweets as accounts.
Or that there is no summary of tweets or accounts.
Thus one can't tell if he's referring to some of the same accounts (or tweets) when he says that "6 of the 16 accounts have an extremely high retweet rate" and "9 accounts have been through the "resets"" while "4 accounts present themselves as a type of news source".
Are those 6 among the 9? 4 among 6? Who knows!

On a side note, TIL that using the word "troII" more than a certain number of times in the text activates Slashdot lameness filter.
Luckily, bitches don't know about my upper case i.

Oh, and the movie did suck.

That is old world media bullshit from the last millennium, the previous centuries media state. I give you http://www.internetlivestats.c... the internet. I billion web sites, thanks to weird ideas by backwards Americans, 1 billion in this case not being a million million but only a thousand million. Looking at one per second it would take, well, a billion seconds just to click on them, let alone read every page.

Reality is people only go where they want to go. No surprise taking over of people's minds and turning them into terrorists, they go to the worst sites because they already have an interest or they are just bored, either way, no new terrorist created, the terrorist is already there just seeking confirmation of their own crazy assed bullshit.

There is a whole lot of whining going on about it in main stream media because, instead of being in control and being able to extort billions for access to the public mind space, they are just another web site, just another bunch of bloggers and when subject to more competition, well, actually, much, much, much (boy, I could type that a whole bunch of times and still not cover it) competition and they are starting to look like real corrupt bogus shite selling corporate propaganda lies as the truth, full of wank psuedo celebrities, utter narcissists, full of delusional fucking stars and bullshit musical geniuses, oh my.

The big complaint in reality, old main stream media channels are no longer able to dominate and extort billions for access to the public mind space, neither are governments. Suck it up fellas, pandoras box is open and the general public is accessible to the general public and they are finding out, they do not like what the fuck is going on with the insanely rich and and greedy, as well as their corrupt political buddies.

Reality is the more the internet exposes the better off we are and not the other way around.

For comparison purposes, Google hasn't said exactly how many searches it handles recently, but in 2012 it said it handled 1.2 trillion searches (or averaging 3.3B/day, 137M/hour, 2.2M/minute, 38k/second). It's estimated they handle over 2T per year now (5.5B/day, 228M/day, 3.8M/hour, 63K/second). So Google likely handles in 2 days what DDG has done in 8 years.

As a western liberal I of course object censorship in all of its forms, but at the same time I understand the mindset that the Chinese establishment has: they cannot prevent the inevitable spread of communication technology, so more and more Chinese people are becoming networked. This means that the potential for massive protests of millions of people over any number of subjects ranging from food prices to air quality to an outrage over public transit prices can occur more and more easily as these ideas are free to spread.

Take something like the 2013 Turkey protests as an example. The estimates of how many people were on streets ranger from 3,5 to 7,5 million people. As I was in a relationship with a Turkish woman at the time, I know the effect social media had. People were sharing the locations data with each other; locations of other protesters, riot cops, locations of where to get gas masks/first aid, and in general coordinating the movement of the masses to try and evade the rather over the top fascist measures that the government pretty much immediately chose to resort to. Now 3,5 million people is a lot, but percentage-wise it's less than 5 % of the total population. China has approximately 721 million online users and growing. Even if only 0,5 % of that population gets together and starts organizing protests movements, we're talking about over 3 and a half million people, around the same scale as the protests in Turkey.

From the perspective of the Chinese government the situation is tricky: lowering censorship would be a good PR move and make people happier, but it has the potential to trigger situations in which Tianmen square will look like a peaceful and orderly event. The path of least resistance is thus to allow people to yell about their dissatisfaction online, but just make sure the information never reaches a critical mass of people to trigger major social instability and havoc. Put another way: giving total freedom of communication to the Chinese people has the possibility of sending the country into major internal turmoil, possibly even civil war, because the internet can be used - both by ethical and unethical instances - to leverage the power of the mobs at much faster speeds than any other communication technology up until this point.

From this perspective I understand why they're doing it, even though I do not condone it.
 

Fake news websites a problem, will main stream media the champions of fake news just fuck off, here is the reality http://www.internetlivestats.c... number of websites one billion, one hundred and twelve million, seventy seven thousand, nine hundred an six (excuse any error the number changes all of the time). So fake news, it would be a miracle to find (excluding of course the shit heads in main stream media) it, unless of course you are looking it (unless of course you are from main stream media looking for it but hey, they should just turn on the idiot box and look at the shite they broadcast).

So if I looked at one site every second it would take me, 12,871 days odd without break and of course not reading them to see them and find the fake news. Hey want fake news, fuck you google and youtube, look at this shite, https://www.youtube.com/result... by far the majority fake and Google not only wont block the asshats but in a display of sheer unadulterated greed wont let you block them either, because first you see the fucking commercial and then you see the bullshit content, well the start of the bullshit content, then go to the next video and oh yeah, the next fucking commercial, fuck you Google.

Now will those corporate fucker's wet dream be the ability to censor the internet of all competing non corporate propaganda content, of course. Wont to cut back on fake news, then bust up the fucking mega corps producing and that will get rid of by far the majority of actually accessible fake news corporate propaganda. As for the rest of the internet, seriously, think I can find those fake news sites out of the billion on offer unless I was specifically looking for them, no, but hey, fuck you main stream media and your endless bullshit.

There is simply no reasonable polite way to put this, well, I suppose there is but global corporate censorship, let the fuckers burn in hell (I don't even believe in hell but maybe, just maybe, if enough of us believe in that fantasy, a whole bunch of snakes in suits will spontaneously combust, we can only dream).

Probably half of those people would never be ALLOWED to connect to the internet, even if it were possible to provide access. Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, many of the impoverished African kleptocracies... which of those governments would ever allow their subjects any information about a better way of life?

You're pretty ignorant.
Iran: 39 million (49%)
Saudi-Arabia: 21 million (65%)
China: 721 million (52%)

Of course it might not be entirely free Internet, but no modern nation can really afford to go without it these days. It's mostly North Korea and a bunch of countries in Africa that compete to be the world's poorest countries that lack it. Authoritarian regimes manage to control it just fine, if you are the law and don't have to worry about constitutions or civil rights or whatever you just put up the Great Firewall and block everything you don't like or that doesn't play ball with the government.

Probably half of those people would never be ALLOWED to connect to the internet, even if it were possible to provide access. Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, many of the impoverished African kleptocracies... which of those governments would ever allow their subjects any information about a better way of life?

You're pretty ignorant.
Iran: 39 million (49%)
Saudi-Arabia: 21 million (65%)
China: 721 million (52%)

Of course it might not be entirely free Internet, but no modern nation can really afford to go without it these days. It's mostly North Korea and a bunch of countries in Africa that compete to be the world's poorest countries that lack it. Authoritarian regimes manage to control it just fine, if you are the law and don't have to worry about constitutions or civil rights or whatever you just put up the Great Firewall and block everything you don't like or that doesn't play ball with the government.

Probably half of those people would never be ALLOWED to connect to the internet, even if it were possible to provide access. Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, many of the impoverished African kleptocracies... which of those governments would ever allow their subjects any information about a better way of life?

You're pretty ignorant.
Iran: 39 million (49%)
Saudi-Arabia: 21 million (65%)
China: 721 million (52%)

Of course it might not be entirely free Internet, but no modern nation can really afford to go without it these days. It's mostly North Korea and a bunch of countries in Africa that compete to be the world's poorest countries that lack it. Authoritarian regimes manage to control it just fine, if you are the law and don't have to worry about constitutions or civil rights or whatever you just put up the Great Firewall and block everything you don't like or that doesn't play ball with the government.

That's revenue. You have to subtract operating expenses. Google's profit per quarter is about $4 billion.

France has a population of 66 million people. Assume 2/3 of those use Google (the rest being too young or luddites) and you get 44 million users. Figure Google has a billion users, so France accounts for 4.4% of that.

If you look at Google's growth profile, it more or less forms a triangle going back to about 2005. So assuming constant profit margin, total Google profit has been about $4 billion * 4 quarters * 11 years / 2 = $88 billion.

4.4% of $88 billion is $3.87 billion. So France wants to tax Google at a $1.76 / $3.87 = 45.5% tax rate.

I have always thought as a home user that one of the greatest pleasures of owning a Windows PC is that it is a purely commercial product with no pretensions of ideological purity or political correctness.

Computers are being locked down because Internet access has grown exponentially. In no vision of the future will the geek find 3 to 6 billion technically sophisticated users.

"The chain is only as strong as its weakest link."

Neither should the geek be surprised that in a population this size more users are taking shelter in walled gardens of more manageable size.

Around 40% of the world population has an internet connection today.
In 1995, it was less than 1%.
The number of internet users has increased tenfold from 1999 to 2013.
The first billion was reached in 2005.
The second billion in 2010. The third billion in 2014.

Internet users in the world

WOW all the way down at 31... so far down there! First I agree that they often come accross as "entitled self-absorbed people"; that said. Hmmm so it's at 31 of ~967,247,000 currently tracked sites by http://www.internetlivestats.c... Lets see... 31/967247000 ... wow that comes back as 3.20497246308337e-8 . So yeah I'm pretty sure they are in the 1% of the 0.00003204 percent. Seems like front page to me. BTW I only care that you are using smoke and mirrors with number to make your point valid. I could care less where reddit ranks or what dumb thing they say about themselves.

I agree, however, I got bored and wanted to find out how much potential storage twitter posts use on a daily basis.
500Million Tweets a day : http://www.internetlivestats.c...
* 140 bytes = 70Billion Bytes, or, 70Gigabytes roughly a day

If you double the char array to 280, thats only 140Gigabytes a day for just tweets.

Twitter have the money and network infrastructure to do this without question. I think its more a case that Twitter believes the 140 character limit is part of their "ethos", changing it would piss off all those users who wasted their life mastering the "shorthand of Twitter messages".

The Internet works fine for 99% of the users and stakeholders. Good enough is better than perfect[1] and the Internet is good enough. What we need is legal protection, because the current problems of the Internet are not technological, but political. Privacy is a political goal, for example. Do-Not-Track Header[2], I was laughing when I first heard of that and of course it's a failed concept.

The new Internet must be 200% better then the current Internet. You can see how slow and reluctant new (and even necessary) technologies are adopted (IPv6) because the current tech (IPv4) is "Good Enough". If you want that 1 billion websites[3] to switch to Internet2 your new Internet must have a lot of incentives.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
[3] http://www.internetlivestats.c...