Slashdot Mirror
China Internet Users Hit Half a Billion
angry tapir writes "China's Internet population passed the half billion mark at the end of 2011 after the country added 28 million new users during the second half of the year. At the end of December, the country had 513 million Internet users, according to a report issued Monday by the China Internet Network Information Center. The number of users accessing the Internet from their mobile phones has also grown, reaching 355 million — more than the entire population of the U.S."
So.. What do they look at exactly? Just post pictures of each other and talk about how much they heart china?
I dont care if there are Half a billion of you, I DONT WANT YOUR FUCKING GOLD.
I run www.gotonicaragua.com and about 70% of our spam comes from China; the other 30% comes from Russia. We've had to blacklist both those domains flat out in order to keep the site running. Heavy handed, I know, but screw it ... not many continental Chinese are looking to travel to Nicaragua as far as I know, and the amount of garbage they were posting on the site made it too much to deal with. Always flogging cheap luxury goods, watches, boots, stuff I don't even recognize. Sometimes in the signature line, sometimes via copied forum text with dozens of links pasted in.
Hi China, welcome to the internet. Stay the frik off of my site, thankyaverymuch.
...and a product of capitalism, and freedom and liberation and education...
wanna bitch, go investigate verison or the bell(s) around the world... fuggg... even hear they're looking for people (pay you to do it).
lol
Well, that's the end of China's economy.
I mean, you gotta figure a significant fraction of the 500 million are patrolling for various bits of information. Some of them are actual people and others are just spiders/bots...so what do you put the ratios, bots/person and spies/person, at?
I'm guessing 10% are actively spying for the government.
... And they only have about 330 million IPv4 addresses. I mean, even with the abuse of large scale NAT they must be getting in serious problems.
Half a million internet users browsing the 6 sites they're allowed to visit.
Quote:
>> according to a report issued Monday by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a non-profit group with ties to the government.
As the article itself notes, "Analysts, however, have said the statistics provided by the CNNIC are inflated."
Like all statistical data from China, this info is likely inflated and cannot be trusted. Chinese culture considers cheating to be fine and a smart thing to do. Multiply that by the Chinese government's desire to improve its image at any cost, and you get useless numbers which have been wildly twisted to provide the desired result. It appears that this time they tried to reach that magical psychological barrier of "Half a Billion".
Mm-hmm.
Sure they may have 513 million Internet users, but how many of them are accessing the *full* internet that the rest of us are? With all their filters and the great firewall, it works more like a massive intranet.
Still, the potential for access and communication is there. There are always ways around the filter. More people online is almost always a better thing. Filters or not, the Internet gives people access to more information and the ability to better educate themselves. This is a good thing: not as good as it could be, but still good.
And to make money farming WoW gold, but that is a side "benefit", I guess.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
This is nothing more than 500M people watching cable. The number of people who actually take an IP address and _produce_ anything with it is small. I'm not talking Web 2.0 lusers who use Chinified Facebook - I'm talking independent nodes on the global network.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Now if they would just all ping the Great Firewall of China to death at the same time, they could make history in being the first to stage, and hopefully win, an e-revolution.
If you had eyelids you would be laughing too.
WANG COMPUTERS
is also funny. Back tot he eyelid thing.
Since 75% of the malicious attacks on my networks originate in China, that's half a billion people who will continue to be blocked from my retail networks. Years ago, before I started blocking them, Chinese addresses were involved in a substantial percentage of the chargebacks I received. It will be decades before anyone I know would even consider taking them seriously as a source of legitimate customers.
It would help a lot if they could manage to shut down all the illegal (and unpatched) copies of Microsoft's leaky piece-of-shit operating systems that they're running (as botnet nodes, more often than not) and replace them with Linux (they have their own distro from what I understand). Right now, Chinese visitors are about as welcome to US merchants as 10 Somalis in a speedboat are to a cargo ship off the coast of Africa.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
I think the article must mean Intranet. I'd guess the Chinese Internet population is roughly about 1,000, and are all intelligence agents.
... you've got an audience of 500 exactly like you in China. Guaranteed.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
I'm still waiting for FaceBook users to hit 8 billion. The explanation will be great entertainment. At least the China figure is believable for now.
... we get inundated by all sorts of racist diatribes
And as if this is not enough, those racist diatribes got modded up "Funny" !
Is this Slashdot all about, a site for racists to spew their totally incoherent diatribes ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Never mind the IP addresses, I wondered if they were running out of Chinese names, and found this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1554330/Too-many-Wangs-as-China-runs-out-of-names.html
There are about 50,000 unique Chinese characters, and the Chinese names are made out of the combinations of those 50,000 unique Chinese characters
On the other hand, the "West" as it is, has too many of its own "John Brown" / "Mary Smith"
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
seriously 500mil potential customers? Items drop shipped from Chinese factories at dirt cheap prices?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
you think you are not monitored? how naive!
Sounds like a gold mine for developers.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
like the title.
The USA were the first with TV, and ended up with NTSC. The world learned from our broadcast limitations and developed superior PAL. Now the USA is stuck with IPv4 while the rest of the world has moved forward with IPv6. The story repeats itself again and again with practically every technology. Priceless.
I'm a CS student at a top university in China and regular slashdot reader and would like to share some thoughts of mine:
While we don't know if the actual numbers are true, it's a fact that internet usage is rapidly expanding. I can see it everywhere in Beijing, people in their subways seem to get more and more addicted to their smart phones, iPads, iPhones,.. when eating alone a lot of people also use their mobile devices... heck even the old woman who sells water on our athletic fields recently got herself a Renren (chinese FB) account and writes articles over her mobile.
It's definitely a good thing in my opinion, because scandals are more likely to be discovered and be raged about nationwide nowadays than before the internet age, and hopefully this makes politicians act more carefully. Some examples from around me:
In China there is an extremely selective national college entrance examination where the sole criteria for which university you get in are the points you receive in the exam. Now influential politicians often try to "arrange" for their children to get a few additional points in order to make it in the top universities. Recently a quite comprehensive list was leaked that named these politicians and their children, with actually achieved scores and reported scores. Now privacy concerns aside (It's something that bugs me, but people here don't seem to care about it that much), this is terribly embarrassing for involved politicians and in the future they will definitely think twice before pulling strings with their influence.
Another example were the Internet helped to make a difference for the better: A classmate from a friend of mine is from a very good high school, is a top student and really wants to go to Peking University. He is recommended for admission, meaning he doesn't have to take the exam, because he already worked so hard in high school and attended several national/ international olympiads. Now, however the school wants to force him to go to Tsinghua University, because they don't want to screw up their "guanxi" with Tsinghua. It is that f** up if you've worked your ass off in high school and then they don't even allow you a free decision, because of their own interests. So that said student wrote an article on Renren, and many many students in his high school saw and shared his article, creating a bigger and bigger wave of frustration and anger, until the school finally stopped their interference.
Well altogether, while I admit that there are a lot of screwed up problems with the internet here (privacy concerns, filtering, propaganda, surveillance, and the list goes on...), I can feel that people really appreciate the internet and think that it has made life better, not worse. Furthermore, it's also such a big new market (I mean come on, more mobile users than the US population...lol ), so it'll also open up a lot of economic opportunities.
Holy shit! That's a lot of Chinamen!!!
half thousand million users/half milliard, if you want.
Just so that you know that it is really, really large.
Can't be Wong.
...Internet users are worthless human trash with no morals.
Are you saying that the Internet users from China re "worthless human trash with no morals"?
To the Slashdot editors, how long are you guys going to tolerate this type of racist garbage?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Makes you wonder if China really needs all those American IOUs.
Deleted
We can call it The Chinese Intra-net with unrealistic access to the real Internet.
I run multiple, clean and friendly websites in the Chinese language which are accessible through baidu, the Chinese search engine, and Google. The Numbers of actual visitors who come trough the firewall of censorship is less than in smaller countries with comparable governments.
The Chinese expats are much more on the Internet than the real people in China.
The Chinese Internet market is not accessible from outside, until you are located in China and do everything to please the authorities to let your site through the filters which are obviously set on allow some and deny all the rest.
What does that say about the NY Times? We can get to the NY Times here in the US, but it's all crap propaganda as well.
To be fair the mod system is already doing its thing and the OP was modded down into oblivion. In fact, for example, I wouldn't have even known the comment existed were it not for your post, and my browse threshold is lower than most visitors to the site are at.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
China owns, literally, your "first world".