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China - 7.3%

India - 3.6%

America - 67.8%

Statistics are your friend.

"half of those households must be in India, China and Africa."

China is one of the leaders (as mentioned in the headline). They have what 1.3 billion people, and 94M Internet users (not sure of the broadband -vs- dialup ratio). I don't think they are quite in the same league as India and Africa. I would guess the density is much higher than 2.5:1 per household as well like you say, but I could be wrong.

Sorry to nitpick. ;)

It's a perfectly valid comparison. According to this site, the US has over 200 million internet users, while if you add up all the european countries in that list, you get less than that figure.

There's no point in making a zombie comparison based on population - you need to look at the number of internet users. If there's zombie out there who doesn't have internet access, we have bigger problems on our hands.

[rant]If you "generally consider the internet as USA only", that probably says a whole lot more about you than it does about the internet. Are you aware you wouldn't even be reading /. if it weren't for the Swiss CERN, creating the WWW? Do you know that broadband penetration is as high (if not higher) in many EU countries as it is in the US? Don't you think it's about time for many Americans to drop the conceited attitude, and to look around and notice they're not alone on the planet?[/rant]

That being said, according to TFA, The origin of the zombie machines may change on a daily basis as machines can be infected anywhere in the world. CipherTrust has found that during April and May, the largest percent of zombie originations have alternated between China and the United States. In addition, during the first three weeks of May, approximately 26% of daily new zombies originated in the European Union, so let's not jump to any conclusions about Europe's supposed backwardness here. The figures may very likely show an entirely different picture again tomorrow, as they apparentely did just a few weeks ago.

On an Internet with 888 million users, half a million hits is not exactly "spreading like wildfire". Half of them are probably Slashdotters.

a link here

I'll remind the next Dane who complains to me about how bad Americans treat native Americans that they've yet to "unoppress" (or is that "UN oppress"?) their own aboriginal inhabitants.

In fact one of the worst atrocities against the native population in Greenland was done after pressure from the US: In 1953 the native population was forced to relocate from Thule so that the US could build their radar station there. Despite an artic climate and the promise that new houses would be ready for them at their new location, they had to live in thin tents for almost half a year before they were given cheap wooden houses.

I'll tell you how we "oppress" the native population in Greenland:

• They are all full danish citicens with voting rights to our national parliament.
• They have an extensive home rule, and can decide almost all their local policy for themselves. Foreign policy is one of the few exceptions.
• To ensure that they have a say in the few limits to their hole rule they are ensured 2 out of 179 seats in the danish parliament. This despite the fact that they only amount to 0.9 percent of the danish population.
• When they decided not to be members of the EU in 1985, we respected that. Today Greenland is not a part of the EU although the rest of Denmark is.
• To help them develop their infrastructure (expensive on the world's largest island with a sparse population) we each year give them what amounts to about US$10,000 per person in Greenland. For example this gives them affordable internet access, and today about 35 percent have internet access.

Don't underestimate the people in Greenland, they are good and capable people who know what they want and how to achieve it. Think twice before saying they are oppressed.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
NORTH AMERICA, which includes our friendly canucks, have 26.7% of the worlds internet users

this is the best stat I could find on the topic,
but do you really think that 73.3 % (+ canada) of the world uses less than half of the equipment online?

Physical media will never die off. Not ever. For those of us who spend a lot of time on the internet, it's easy to imagine that almost everyone has already made the switch to non-physical media. The reality's a lot different. According to this website, only 66.8% of Americans even have an internet connection at all. Aside from a handful of other first world countries, that number is even lower in other places. Since there will never be a time when everyone can afford a computer, there will always be a market for physical media.

there is far more internet penetration and PC's among the populace here than in SK.

Could you please give me some of what you and your mods are smoking because it must be some mighty fine shit.

According to figures gathered by Internet World Stats, in December of 2004 South Korea had Internet penetration of 63.3% while in November of 2004 the United States had Internet pentration of 66.8%.* 3.5% difference in penetration hardly qualifies as "far more" despite the month's differrence in time.

* These numbers were gathered by different organizations. Nielsen in the case of the US and KNIRC in the case of South Korea

there is far more internet penetration and PC's among the populace here than in SK.

Could you please give me some of what you and your mods are smoking because it must be some mighty fine shit.

According to figures gathered by Internet World Stats, in December of 2004 South Korea had Internet penetration of 63.3% while in November of 2004 the United States had Internet pentration of 66.8%.* 3.5% difference in penetration hardly qualifies as "far more" despite the month's differrence in time.

* These numbers were gathered by different organizations. Nielsen in the case of the US and KNIRC in the case of South Korea

there is far more internet penetration and PC's among the populace here than in SK.

Could you please give me some of what you and your mods are smoking because it must be some mighty fine shit.

According to figures gathered by Internet World Stats, in December of 2004 South Korea had Internet penetration of 63.3% while in November of 2004 the United States had Internet pentration of 66.8%.* 3.5% difference in penetration hardly qualifies as "far more" despite the month's differrence in time.

* These numbers were gathered by different organizations. Nielsen in the case of the US and KNIRC in the case of South Korea

What a crock of propaganda.

The United States is 3rd in total internet penetration rate (68.8%), only behind Sweden(74.6%) and Hong Kong(72.5%).France, Portugal, and Estonia, aren't even in the top 25.

Pathetic, and by your logic much less informed than USAians. Europeans should be ashamed.

Oh sure. Maybe broadband is cheaper some places. Or more people have it in other places. Big deal. Many Americans seem happy with modems.

1 Sweden 74.6 %
6,722,576
9,010,700
Nielsen//NR Aug./04

2 Hong Kong 72.5 %
4,878,713
6,727,900
Nielsen//NR Aug./04

3 United States 68.8 %
201,661,159
293,271,500
Nielsen//NR Aug./04

4 Iceland 66.6 %
195,000
292,800
ITU - Dec./03

5 Netherlands 66.5 %
10,806,328
16,254,900
Nielsen//NR Aug./04

6 Australia 65.9 %
13,359,821
20,275,700
Nielsen//NR Aug./04

7 Canada 64.2 %
20,450,000
31,846,900
C.I.Almanac - Dec/03

8 Switzerland 63.5 %
4,432,190
7,433,000
Nielsen//NR Aug./04

9 Denmark 62.5 %
3,375,850
5,397,600
Nielsen//NR June/02

10 Korea, (South) 62.4 %
30,670,000
49,131,700
KRNIC - July/04

The US has the third highest internet penetration rate in the world, beat by such "countries" as Sweden and Hong Kong. That's higher than Canada or South Korea.

According to these sites:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm
http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/eu.htm

The population of Europe + FSU (or Europe, for short)
is ~730 million.

The population of EU + FSU is ~600 million.

Neener neener neener, but if you really want to know, those figures came from a Google for "broadband penetration mainland China" and "broadband penetration USA"

Here's let's try it again.

Here we go, similar numbers from several different sources: start with China

"The number of broadband users grew to 31 million by the end of June, a 79 percent increase in subscribers from the start of this year." XDSL.com

Okay, now let's try it with USA®

The first link I get is just percentages.
Second link says:

The data shows that 24.6 million U.S. households now subscribe to high-speed Internet. Among the 20 top high-speed Internet providers in the United States, which represent 98 percent of the market, 7.4 million high-speed subscribers were added in 2003.

TRIPInfo.com

Wow, that's much lower than what I posted. It can't be that bad, can it? Let's keep digging.

Hmm, about five links down I get a nice highball figure almost twice that at 48 million. Gee, that was about the figure I posted, wasn't it?

But whatever you do, don't look at this one, these guys say that a third world country is at eighty percent of US penetration. What a shameful figure.

I don't see how all this adds up to the US providing some obscene proportion of the world's spam.

Second, US broadband penetration, as a fraction of Internet users, passed 50% some time this month. It was at 49.48% last month. That number is climbing steadily at 10-15% per year. Within two years it will pass cable TV penetration, stuck at 66% for years. This number is projected to pass 80% in 2006. We don't need to do anything to encourage broadband; it's already happened.

The US still has a huge population of dialup users. Remember, the US has flat-rate wireline local phone calls; most of the world charges per minute. So dialup is very cost-effective in the US. And 56Kb/s isn't bad for web surfing. 10% of users are still using modems slower than 56Kb/s. Around 4% are still at 14.4Kb/s, a number that's held steady for five years. So there's a small customer base that doesn't feel the need for speed at all. And a big customer base that doesn't want to pay $50 per month for broadband. Dial-up access starts, after all, under $5 per month.

So there is no "broadband penetration problem". It's over.

Where the US is behind is in bandwidth for "broadband" users. A sizable fraction of US broadband users have sub-megabit speeds, and very few have enough bandwidth for HDTV.

For those that are writing this off, let's remember that 1.0% translates into about 7.9 million users (with 785.7 million total users.) And this probably doesn't include all those users that are faking their useragent string.

Of course, other places have differing numbers. Google Zeitgeist in May 2004 has total IE usage at about 89% and Mozilla usage at about 5% (if you zoom in on the graph and count up some pixels.)

I call bullshit: one, two, three, four, many more. Perhaps your statistic about Denmark is true (I don't know) but you must have pulled the first figure out of your ass, and your wild speculations have no other ties to reality. Sorry.

I call bullshit: one, two, three, four, many more. Perhaps your statistic about Denmark is true (I don't know) but you must have pulled the first figure out of your ass, and your wild speculations have no other ties to reality. Sorry.

• (as far as open relays go, I'm sure that spammers have an equal-opportunity policy regarding countries of origin.
• Statistics show that about 33% of the world's users are in the US, so that might be more likely)

There are two factors that I don't believe you are keeping in mind.

The first is total population size. The bubonic plague killed approximately 25 million people of the 75 million people living in Europe at the time.

The population of Europe right now, according to these people is nearly 10 times that. Its true that the more recent consensus may count some countries not counted in the 75 million count, but still it will suffice for our purposes.

Another factor is population density, which is much greater in this day and age. Its true that we now have sanitation, but keep in mind that we have more people living in cities as well.

So you need to keep a few things in mind.