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75% of Network Connections Not From Browsers
Trailwalker writes "An article at BigBlueBall.com states that 75% of web connections do not use a browser. IM and P2P applications are used instead." While surprising, this is probably more indicative of how instant messaging has been able to complement and/or replace email in recent times.
The article states that "76 percent of active Web surfers access the Internet using a non-browser based Internet application." I take this to mean not that only 24 percent of traffic is HTTP traffic but that 76 percent of people who use the Web use something else as well.
thinking of a school.... they once did a network traffic tests and it was something like 76% was aim/icq (though i doubt icq) yim or msn. 4% online games (program games not web based). and around 20% web browsing. no were near surprising to me.
Is that unambiguous enough?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Scanning for traffic for worm-infected customers is one of the things I do at the ISP I work at, and I can tell you, it is often NOT as simple as telling them to clean it up. Half the time, the customer doesn't believe us, as if we'd bother to make something like this up, just to annoy them. When they actually do look, much of the time, they claim to find nothing, or to have "fixed it", but we still see the worm traffic. And of course there are those wonderful customers who shut the infected machine down for the day, claim to have "fixed it" and then turn it back on again the next day... And, to top it off, one out of every three of the ones that actually DO resolve it end up getting reinfected days later, because they didn't bother to do all the patches after removing the infection (despite explicit suggestions to do just that on our part). It's a fun job, let me tell ya...
actually most games are UDP
Get DeadAIM. It addresses nearly all of your complaints. :P
Except for the sounds, and you can turn those off by yourself.
0x0D 0x0A
Correction to the article headline and link text - The pr from Nielsen doesn't say what percent of connections are via non-web browser software: "Nielsen//NetRatings, reports that three out of every four home and work Internet users, or 76 percent of active Web surfers, access the Internet using a non-browser based Internet application." That doesn't mean that these same users don't use a web browser for the majority of their http connections, rather it says that 76% of active web surfers *ALSO* use Internet applications other than (as in in addition to) web browsers.
I check the mechanical condition of my car regularly and fix or have fixed anything that's wrong, thanks very much. I suspect that's true of a lot of computer tinkerers, too. People who are knowledgeable and competent in one technical area tend to be so in others. It comes from the fact that we tend to educate ourselves about things. That's how many of us got into IT in the first place.
However, your point that most people are willfully ignorant is spot-on. The information is out there, it's all over the place, and much of it is packaged in a form suitable for absorption by the computer-stupid and the just plain generally stupid, who together make up the majority of computer owners today, I'm convinced.
The car is a very good example of a complex device that is pretty good at taking care of itself, however. While onboard computers and trouble lights are not a substitute for regular scheduled and preventive maintenance, they are pretty good at telling you when something needs immediate attention. If the computer detects a sytsems problem that requires servicing, it will turn on the check engine light, and if you're the most car-stupid person in the world, you know that means you need to take your car to a mechanic and have it checked out.
Unfortunately, doing that on a computer is a lot harder, both because a general purpose computer is in many ways more complex than a car, the user interface to control it is far more complex (a car just has a bunch of switches and knobs, a steering wheel, and a few pedals and levers, and the steering wheel and pedals cover >80% of the function), computers are general purpose (imagine if your car was also a stove, a microwave oven, fishing equipment, a helicopter, and bowling shoes; trouble-shooting by software would be a lot harder), and each computer is different because of different installed apps and configurations.
The unTrustable Computing initiative is one potential solution: selling computers that can't install anything that doesn't bear the vendor's approval. Unfortunately, that really screws the value of a computer for those who have at least two neurons to rub together.
For many people, a network appliance - something that has always been a failure in the marketplace- would honestly be the best solution. It can send email, it can surf the web, can do IRC and other popular IMs. It can save your mails and such to an internal disk or to a compact flash card. It has a basic all-in-one program for word processing, spreadsheet, etc. You can't install software on it, everything loads out of ROM or from a read-only hard drive. However, consumers seem to resist something like this, even though it's the best answer to (relatively) secure computing for them. They want to install a bloated office app suite, a bunch of games, etc, even though they don't really need the office app suite and they'd be better off with a game console for gaming.
Various pundits keep predicting the downfall of the general-purpose, to be supplanted by a number of dedicated purpose computers. That's no closer to happening now than it was when the PC and the Mac were both young computers, because the marketplace - even the marketplace for whom it would be the best answer - continues to reject it.
I don't know what the answer is, I fear there isn't one. We will be stuck with the computer-stupid and the malware they unwittingly propagate for a long time to come. The best answer I've come up with so far is to recommend moving to a Mac for most people, or to Linux or *BSD for the clueful (although they usually never get infected anyway, so it doesn't matter if they move off of Windows or not), but that's only a bandaid on the problem, when the real - and hard to fix - problem is willful ignorance on the part of most computer owners.
I recently reinstalled Win XP about 6 times in one 12 hour period. I got blaster every single time before I could even log in. It happened during the last phase of the installation when XP sets up its networking and checks to see if the computer is connected to a network. It took me under 30 seconds to get infected every single time. Less time than it took to complete the log in process.
The article is confusing because it does not define "active user reach". It's easier to understand in this 3 year old similar Neilsen study [PDF}. The table there makes it clear that "active user reach" refers to what percentage of the total population being studied (the "active users") are using the various applications.
The quote from the Nielsen analyst in the current article makes it clear that "active users" are Web surfers, which by definition are people who use browsers.
So the article says that 76% of the web surfers studied also use some other Internet applications, 34.43% of them use Windows Media Player, 20.27% of them use AIM, etc.
Note that this says nothing about what percent of the traffic any of that represents. It seems obvious to me that they cannot be counting email as an "Internet Application" for their survey.
Being Neilsen, they are only interested in applications that can serve advertising. "Reach" means what percentage of web surfers can be reached via advertising delivered through Windows Media Player, AIM, RealPlayer, etc.
Never. You can't have an IM system that requires a server to be polled (well, there are some Jabberhttp gateways that work this way, but they aren't true IM). An IM client leaves a connection to the server open, and receives messages from the server when they arrive.
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Referenced Nielsen article: 76% of browser users have used a streaming data client or an instant messaging client. (dull)
Hmm.
mt
The referenced article seems to say net, not web; I guess the moral is don't read the article, or you'll get confused :)