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 <rdobbins@arbor.net>