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."

Comments

All those people...

[joren02]

... 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.

Fake statistics

[happyhamster]

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".

Blocked

[soundguy]

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.