On 14 Nov 2015, at 23:39, Royce Williams wrote:
Downloading is now much more common 2than during the age of the
browser wars.
Sure, I understand that.
As of October 2014, 64% of American adults owned a smartphone [1].
Phones
don't usually come with Candy Crush, but somehow, 93 *million* people
played it daily at one point. They many not understand that when they
installed the app, they were "downloading" it. But the end result is
the
same.
Yes, because that leads to them doing something they want to be able to
do, that is very tangible. The same motivations spur VPN use (e.g.,
watching Netflix out-of-region, your example of the Olympics, and so
forth).
To put that 93 million in context, the most recent estimates I can find
of Internet users put their number at about 3.2 billion:
<http://time.com/money/3896219/internet-users-worldwide/>
It sounds like we're arguing about the definition of the word "most".
Your
thesis appears to be that most people won't use a VPN -- and you're
probably right.
Yes, we're in agreement.
But what everyone else is saying is that the value of
"most" is likely to shrink rapidly.
I don't know about that. It seems to me that most people who're
inclined to use a VPN are already using one. Unless one believes that a
relatively high percentage of people who don't yet have Internet access
will become VPN users once they gain Internet access.
But now, even if Facebook's estimate [2] of 450 million WhatsApp users
is 90% inflated,
there are 45 million people using encrypted texting, which I would not
have
predicted.
Sure, and Apple iMessage is somewhat similar in that regard, though it's
more susceptible to MITM.
Again, as compared to 3.2 billion.
Most of those users probably don't know what "encryption" is. But
they're
using it.
Sure, via http/s. But VPNs used in the sense of this discussion tend to
imply topological masking, as well.
-----------------------------------
Roland Dobbins <rdobb...@arbor.net>
