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China Stats The Internet Technology

China Internet Users Hit Half a Billion 85

Posted by Soulskill from the but-they-can-only-browse-eight-sites dept.
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."
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China Internet Users Hit Half a Billion More

China Internet Users Hit Half a Billion

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  • For the last time (Score:5, Funny)

    by Moheeheeko ( 1682914 ) on Monday January 16, 2012 @06:24PM (#38719356)
    I dont care if there are Half a billion of you, I DONT WANT YOUR FUCKING GOLD.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by migla ( 1099771 )

      >I dont care if there are Half a billion of you, I DONT WANT YOUR FUCKING GOLD.

      I understand your frustration, but really, don't blame the relatively poor chinese people working for some boss/owner exploiting that market opportunity.

      The fault is in the system.

  • Well, that's the end of China's economy.

  • All those people... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by joren02 ( 2131408 ) on Monday January 16, 2012 @06:30PM (#38719406)
    ... 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.

    • 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 [telegraph.co.uk]

      Is mistaken identity a problem on the Internet there . . . ?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Is mistaken identity a problem on the Internet there . . . ?

        Is it a problem here? I'm sure there's quite a few John Smiths out there.

        Assuming you need to use your real name, you'd still have to make your own unique username afterwards for most anything. And if it were something really important, China also has a Resident ID Card [slashdot.org] where everyone has their own unique ID number similar to the US and SSNs.

      • Most people in the USA have duplicate first+last name....if you live in US, put your name here: http://howmanyofme.com/ [howmanyofme.com] Only 3 people have my first + last name

        There are 3,100 surnames in common use in China, the traditional "100 names" do include majority of populace though

        • Most people in the USA have duplicate first+last name....if you live in US, put your name here: http://howmanyofme.com/ [howmanyofme.com] Only 3 people have my first + last name

          Does anyone know of a site like this for other countries? I live in canada and just wanted to check it out. Just for the heck of it I entered my name into the site above and it came back as 1 or fewer with my first and last name.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by zidium ( 2550286 )

            There are 45,240 people with my name. Many have the same middle initial.

            At a hospital in Houston, where I go, there's two of us with the exact same name, born on the same day, at the same hospital, and our social security numbers are offset by 3 numbers (just 1 digit). It's very confusing and I get a ton of bills directed for that guy.

      • 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 [telegraph.co.uk]

        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"

        • The funny thing is even SSNs are only 9 digits, and 1e9 is only 1 billion - not nearly enough for China's 1,338,299,500 inhabitants!

          I sure hope the US never has to add a digit.

        • The generic household Chinese dictionary would not have nearly as much as 50000 characters, and most people do not know more much than 5000. Some characters are also more popular than others. Parents won't usually use "death" and "sickness"; instead they would prefer "affluence" and "happiness". The actual pool of characters for naming is not that large.

      • Well, obviously China has too many Wangs. How do you think they got to more than a billion people in the first place? By having too many storks?

      • You know I'm sure some people think you could never have too many wangs. Know what I'm sayin? YeahhhhhhhhnnnnnnggggggGGGGGGGG

    • Assuming my calculations are correct, they can get over 2bn address just using Class A addresses. So internally they have enough to give every resident up to 2 IP addresses. Now they have a couple ISPs that operate and so they would presumably have their own pool of IPs that they'd be using on their networks so they shouldn't have any trouble doubling or more those addresses.

      When all is said and done, I don't see any particular reason why they would be any more NATed up than the rest of the world.

      What's mor

      • They have been moving to IPv6 for some time -- http://www.ipv6.org.au/09ipv6summit/talks/OrcunTezel.pdf [ipv6.org.au]. Since China uses the same types of routers and DNS servers as the rest of the world (many of them copied), it could not efficiently use the 4,294,967,296 address space as a huge NAT'd network. It would be far easier to use IPv6, which can identify each node by region, city, organization, domain, even by a MAC address. IPv6 is a great way to run a country-wide Internet. Once they are done, China will
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I think the bulk of the growth in China has been in IPv6, and there are a whole bunch of Chinese sites not accessable by IPv4.

  • Density (Score:3, Funny)

    by omganton ( 2554342 ) on Monday January 16, 2012 @06:36PM (#38719454)
    Half a million internet users browsing the 6 sites they're allowed to visit.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Posting anonymously because I already have moderations in here ...

      The Great Firewall of China isn't nearly as severe as people in the US seem to think -- I was surprised how little problem I had accessing places on the "public" Internet in China. Some staples are blocked, like Facebook, but generally I didn't have any serious issues. And most big companies and hotels have VPN access out of the country which bypasses everything. It seems everyone knows someone who has access to them.

      Is it restricted? Yes. Is

    • 6 sites?

      is that due to being restricted to 3 from column A and 3 from column B?

  • Fake statistics (Score:3, Interesting)

    by happyhamster ( 134378 ) on Monday January 16, 2012 @06:46PM (#38719552)

    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".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cobbaut ( 232092 )

      Like all statistical data, this info is likely inflated and cannot be trusted.

      Fixed that for you.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Blocked (Score:4, Interesting)

    by soundguy ( 415780 ) on Monday January 16, 2012 @07:28PM (#38719858) Homepage
    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.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I wonder if they could use their Great Firewall to cripple botnets. I mean, they have no problem finding and blocking thousands of IP addresses from TOR network, right? So they could easily block any number of C&C servers. But of course they wouldn't, because cyber attacks on other countries are controlled by the same government, which tries to mind-control citizens.

  • 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.

  • seriously 500mil potential customers? Items drop shipped from Chinese factories at dirt cheap prices?

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by koan ( 80826 )

    Sounds like a gold mine for developers.

  • half thousand million users/half milliard, if you want.

  • Just so that you know that it is really, really large.

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