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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."
I dont care if there are Half a billion of you, I DONT WANT YOUR FUCKING GOLD.
... 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".
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
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.
Parent, meet Captcha.
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
... 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 !