Halfey Halphstein I have a lot of Chinese in my circles, but that was all during the brief period when G+ wasn't blocked in China. A few of them used VPN, but most were silenced.
Bernd Paysan Many of them are still active in my circles, even more active than I am. I would not ask them how they bypassed the great firewall though because I think they probably want to keep it a secret for as long as possible.
Kathryn Marie Newman? First time I heard someone on the site say that name without a direct prompt from me. I live there, spent half my life there, supposedly born in hedland and spent much of my earlier half in Geraldton.
Ah 😊 I worked in the great sandy for a few years. Newman was our closest supermarket 😋 Then years later I ended back there on another role. Mostly that was Port Hedland based though.
Kathryn Marie it is quite the place, desolate place but a place nevertheless. We have two supermarkets now which is nice, a wollies and an IGA, though I don't use the IGA...
Kathryn Marie I know right? For a while we had no fast food though, but now we got a chicken treat. We also got a Dome Cafe and I work at Muzz Buzz, so we still managed to snag the two WA coffee franchises.
CircleCount Do you have any basis for useful estimates of or lists of the following? They'd be useful in some planning / assessment of our reach here (2700+ members of this Community, for example):
1. Estimating actual "engaged" personal direct Google+ activity on a monthly or similar basis? Posts, comments, etc.? I and Stone Temple came up with 4-6 million (STC's "50 or more posts ever" == 6.7 million, 3.5 in past 30 days, March 2015)
The non-posting-but-active list is another tricky one to count. Stone Temple and I both took a stab at it, but it's squishy.
2. Lists of active or engaged (or barring that, large) G+ Communities.
3. Lists of active/engaged top G+ profiles?
I suspect any data would be stale -- 2016 is when a lot of interest started slacking. But something would be more useful than nothing.
(Feelers out to Stone Temple as well.)
David Thiery more grist for you and Di to look at. I'd pioneered the methodology Stone Temple used, and got very similar numbers (on a smaller sample and with cruder methods).
Bernd Paysan I’m surprise that a VPN works in China, I would think they would have found out a way to defeat it. Since you usually have to pay for VPN service I would think a government could easily determine who is using it?
Mike Kennedy Yes, it's all tricky, but it still does kind-a work.
First thing: You pay through a foreign company that merely offers payment service. The fee is still small enough that it could be anything, and the payment company will be one that can be used for anything. I.e. has enough cover traffic.
Second: It's an arms race to technically defeat a VPN. First of all, they can't just block every encrypted connection, and they don't. They usually just slow them down beyond usability. E.g. a WhatsApp chat message takes between one to two hours to be delivered through excessive, but random, packet drops.
WhatsApp is easy, because the IP range is well-known.
What about VPN endpoints that regularly change their IPs? I tend to use an SSH tunnel to my network at home when I'm in China — it gets a new IP every day, and I don't care if the previous IP is burned. That works quite well; the SSH tunnel is somewhat slowed down, but not beyond usability, and the IP changes every day, so the effort to learn a new VPN endpoint for the machine learning in the great firewall restarts every day.
I've also my own protocol design (net2o), that does not suffer from random packet drops, and that still works better to my home network as compared to a server with a public hoster's IP range. So ideally, you would have a lot of small endpoints with net2o or something similar at people's homes to get out of China.
And that's about the best way to do it. I think it would be feasible if those Chinese that do their send-home tiny business would also offer their relatives and friends such a VPN endpoint; the costs for that would just vanish in the payments for the send-home stuff like milk powder and cosmetics, and there would be so damn'd many of those endpoints that the machine learning simply can't catch up.
Edward Morbius as we closed our service/website, we have also removed all collected data. One of the reasons for closing the services (besides the high costs we had) was the GDPR. And only closing the website wouldn't make sense regarding the GDPR if we still would keep/collect the data ;)
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A fellow Brit here too.
ReplyDeleteFrance
ReplyDeleteMore than half of the people I follow (or more than half of my followers) are from China and Japan.
ReplyDeleteMost are from the US obviously, though I am a Western Australian
ReplyDeleteMost are American. During the years I've been with Google (from day one), I've lived in Texas, California, Scotland, Spain, and South Africa.
ReplyDeleteHalfey Halphstein I have a lot of Chinese in my circles, but that was all during the brief period when G+ wasn't blocked in China. A few of them used VPN, but most were silenced.
ReplyDeleteHuh, loomhigh I'm Western Australian too.
ReplyDeleteBernd Paysan Many of them are still active in my circles, even more active than I am. I would not ask them how they bypassed the great firewall though because I think they probably want to keep it a secret for as long as possible.
ReplyDeleteAlicia Smith oh yeah whereabouts?
ReplyDeleteWestern suburbs, Perth.
ReplyDeleteAlicia Smith Newman up North in the Pilbara region, prolly more people in that suburb than all of the East Pilbara lol
ReplyDeleteVery likely!
ReplyDeleteNorthern Ireland
ReplyDeleteSelf-selected polling is a poor research methodology.
ReplyDelete2016 stats, most recent I can find, and near-peak AFAIAA:
USA, India, Brazil, UK, Canada.
https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/google-users-statistics/
Altair IV representin'.
globalmediainsight.com - Google Plus Users Statistics 2016 Infographics | GMI
I am from West Coast USA and have friends from every continent and almost every country in Europe, plus South East Asia.
ReplyDeleteGermany
ReplyDeleteI currently live in Tokyo.
ReplyDeleteDiana Ewing bless you for not just saying your state
ReplyDeleteThe scientific consensus is that humans evolved in Africa. That would make G+ users from Africa.
ReplyDeleteShawn H Corey That doesn’t answer the question in any meaningful way.
ReplyDeleteCircleCount You guys have these kinds of number, right?
ReplyDeleteI'm from Australia. Depends on the day what state though 😋
ReplyDeleteKathryn Marie a traveller eh?
ReplyDeleteloomhigh consultant 😊
ReplyDeleteKathryn Marie where ya prefer to call home?
ReplyDeleteI have my home base in Victoria, but I spend a lot of time in Sydney where all the big companies are installing SAP.
ReplyDeleteKathryn Marie basically east, I am on the other side, though not Perth you might be surprised to know.
ReplyDeleteI've spent a fair bit of time in WA. Perth, Port Hedland, Newman...
ReplyDeleteKathryn Marie Newman? First time I heard someone on the site say that name without a direct prompt from me. I live there, spent half my life there, supposedly born in hedland and spent much of my earlier half in Geraldton.
ReplyDeleteAh 😊 I worked in the great sandy for a few years. Newman was our closest supermarket 😋 Then years later I ended back there on another role. Mostly that was Port Hedland based though.
ReplyDeleteKathryn Marie it is quite the place, desolate place but a place nevertheless. We have two supermarkets now which is nice, a wollies and an IGA, though I don't use the IGA...
ReplyDeleteloomhigh TWO supermarkets now?!? Totally spoilt 😋
ReplyDeleteKathryn Marie I know right? For a while we had no fast food though, but now we got a chicken treat. We also got a Dome Cafe and I work at Muzz Buzz, so we still managed to snag the two WA coffee franchises.
ReplyDeleteJohn Lewis we had this numbers in the past, where the location was shown on the public profiles.
ReplyDeleteYour question reminded me on this post: plus.google.com - Google+ Profiles - Visualized on a Map now correctly aligned on the map We h... (pretty old, but a different kind of visualization of the location ;) )
CircleCount Do you have any basis for useful estimates of or lists of the following? They'd be useful in some planning / assessment of our reach here (2700+ members of this Community, for example):
ReplyDelete1. Estimating actual "engaged" personal direct Google+ activity on a monthly or similar basis? Posts, comments, etc.? I and Stone Temple came up with 4-6 million (STC's "50 or more posts ever" == 6.7 million, 3.5 in past 30 days, March 2015)
The non-posting-but-active list is another tricky one to count. Stone Temple and I both took a stab at it, but it's squishy.
STC's 30-day activity is also interesting:
100+ posts: 53,267 (extrapolated)
50+ posts: 106,022
10+ posts: 1.968,976
5+ posts: 4,386,812
1+ posts: 16,000,562
2. Lists of active or engaged (or barring that, large) G+ Communities.
3. Lists of active/engaged top G+ profiles?
I suspect any data would be stale -- 2016 is when a lot of interest started slacking. But something would be more useful than nothing.
(Feelers out to Stone Temple as well.)
David Thiery more grist for you and Di to look at. I'd pioneered the methodology Stone Temple used, and got very similar numbers (on a smaller sample and with cruder methods).
stonetemple.com - Hard Numbers for Public Posting Activity on Google Plus
plus.google.com - Google+ World illuminated Check out the brand new wallpaper Google+ World il...
ReplyDeleteMost of my followers are in the US and in India. I ran a non scientific poll last year, and it matches pretty well with the demographics on the traffic a get from Google+ on my YouTube videos.
ReplyDeletehttps://plus.google.com/+PeggyKTC/posts/6PodxYXH2HX
plus.google.com - Google+ers come from all around the world! To get to know my followers bette...
Bernd Paysan I’m surprise that a VPN works in China, I would think they would have found out a way to defeat it. Since you usually have to pay for VPN service I would think a government could easily determine who is using it?
ReplyDeleteMike Kennedy Yes, it's all tricky, but it still does kind-a work.
ReplyDeleteFirst thing: You pay through a foreign company that merely offers payment service. The fee is still small enough that it could be anything, and the payment company will be one that can be used for anything. I.e. has enough cover traffic.
Second: It's an arms race to technically defeat a VPN. First of all, they can't just block every encrypted connection, and they don't. They usually just slow them down beyond usability. E.g. a WhatsApp chat message takes between one to two hours to be delivered through excessive, but random, packet drops.
WhatsApp is easy, because the IP range is well-known.
What about VPN endpoints that regularly change their IPs? I tend to use an SSH tunnel to my network at home when I'm in China — it gets a new IP every day, and I don't care if the previous IP is burned. That works quite well; the SSH tunnel is somewhat slowed down, but not beyond usability, and the IP changes every day, so the effort to learn a new VPN endpoint for the machine learning in the great firewall restarts every day.
I've also my own protocol design (net2o), that does not suffer from random packet drops, and that still works better to my home network as compared to a server with a public hoster's IP range. So ideally, you would have a lot of small endpoints with net2o or something similar at people's homes to get out of China.
And that's about the best way to do it. I think it would be feasible if those Chinese that do their send-home tiny business would also offer their relatives and friends such a VPN endpoint; the costs for that would just vanish in the payments for the send-home stuff like milk powder and cosmetics, and there would be so damn'd many of those endpoints that the machine learning simply can't catch up.
I'm in the central US.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius as we closed our service/website, we have also removed all collected data. One of the reasons for closing the services (besides the high costs we had) was the GDPR. And only closing the website wouldn't make sense regarding the GDPR if we still would keep/collect the data ;)
ReplyDeleteCircleCount Ah. Pity, given my present needs, but I totally understand.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing that.
"Data are liability", eh?
Bernd Paysan 👍🏻
ReplyDeleteI’m from England myself.
ReplyDelete