世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted on the 5th of July by JR Tokai Express Research into viruses and spam. They interviewed 330 members of their monitor panel who used a PC or Mac at home. 70.0% were male, 0.9% were in their teens, 11.2% in their twenties, 34.5% in their thirties, 33.3% in their forties, 16.1% in their fifties, and 3.9% in their sixties.

This looked at people with PCs or Macs, where I presume that PCs implies a Windows OS. One might think that Linux users would distort the virus figures, but as a previous survey on home operating systems showed, just one person in 300 was running Linux as a primary home operating system. In Q1, I presume virus covers trojans and rootkits and prehaps even spyware, and in Q1SQ, catching one from a LAN includes the internet.

In Q2, if you add up the number of people reporting using spam filtering, you have at maximum just a small majority using anti-spam methods. However, this figure may be affected by first, people being unaware of their ISP’s spam filtering, and second, if you’re relatively careful, you can get almost no spam. My wife, for instance, just gets one a day even though she has given her email address out to quite a few mail magazines and other web sites.

Q1: In the last three months, have you caught a virus on your home PC or Mac? (Sample size=330)

Yes (to SQ)	3.0%
No	92.4%
Don’t know	4.5%

Q1SQ: How did you catch the virus (or viruses)? (Sample size=10, multiple answer)

From email	5
From a web page or web mail	5
From a LAN	1
Other	0

Q2: Please tell me what measures you take against spam mail. (Sample size=330, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Use ISP’s spam filtering service	94	28.5%
Use local spam filtering application	56	17.0%
Don’t open HTML mail	52	15.8%
Use mail program’s built-in spam filter	34	10.3%
Other	7	2.1%