世論 What Japan Thinks

There’s nothing really startlingly new from this recent survey into security software from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com, but I’ll translate it anyway.

Demographics

Between the 11th and 15th of June 2009 1,083 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.0% of the sample were male, 16.3% in their tweens, 18.4% in their twenties, 20.9% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, 15.8% in their fifties, and 12.3% aged sixty or older.

In Q2, it would have been useful to know if any of the people with viruses got them despite having virus software installed.

In Q2SQ, it’s interesting that so many used free software to remove the infection - I wonder how many only discovered they were infected when the bot scanner from Windows Update ran? You may wish to cross-reference this with another survey earlier this year that discovered a large number of people pay for security software.
Read the rest of this entry »

Although there are just 371 or so confirmed cases of the “new-type” flu, as it’s officially-labelled in Japan, a look by iBridge Research Plus at swine flu and other spam email and reported on by japan.internet.com found that within their sample swine flu-related electronic viruses were also infectious.

Demographics

On the 25th of May 2009 300 members of the iBridge monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.3% of the sample were male, 19.7% in their twenties, 36.7% in their thirties, 28.7% in their forties, 14.3% in their fifties, and 0.7% in their sixties.

I’m not sure why this survey used “swine flu” in all their questions whereas, as mentioned above, “new-type flu” is the almost universal name.

I’d love to know how 2% of the population managed to avoid hearing any news about swine flu!

I’ve not seen any swine flu virus spam, but in a couple of weeks I’ll be heading off to right by the Mexican border, so I might be able to experience it first-hand!

Read the rest of this entry »

With stories almost every week about a new bot network or browser exploit threatening Western civilisation, the need for not just straightforward virus-checking, but regular spyware and malware scanning, is as great as ever. This recent survey from MyVoice was their second look (I missed the first!) at computer security.

Demographics

Over the first five days of April 2009 15,682 members of the MyVoice internet community successfully completed a private online questionnaire. 54% of the sample were female, 2% in their teens, 15% in their twenties, 36% in their thirties, 29% in their forties, and 18% aged fifty or older.

In the English-speaking world I could see a product named “Internet Security Zero” selling absolutely zero copies, but it’s not the first and won’t be the last product to misappropriate some English, with beer manufacturers being the worst with “Off”, “Style Free”, and “Lets Beer Nothing”, although I may have invented that last brand.

As I mention every survey, a combination of Avast anti-virus and Spybot Search and Destroy will keep your PC clean for free, and are a lot less obtrusive and memory-hogging than the commercial offerings. MalwareBytes is another program I’ve heard good things about for detecting nasties, but I’ve used it just once or twice.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m back from holidays, so normal service will be resumed from today. To kick things off, here’s one from JR Tokai Express Research Inc and published by japan.internet.com looking into P2P (peer to peer) file-sharing software.

Demographics

On the 29th of July 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel employed in public or private industry completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 73.6% of the sample were male, 8.8% in their twenties, 36.4% in their thirties, 41.2% in their forties, and 13.6% in their fifties. The Japanese text said in one place it was only those in private industry interviewed, but in another that it was both public and private; and in one place people from their twenties to sixties, but the percentage breakdown did not mention anything about people in their sixties…

In Q2, one category that is omitted is legitimate software, either shareware or Linux and other GPLed contents.

My fingers are still jet-lagged, so I cannot type too much extra comment tonight…
Read the rest of this entry »

I run anti-virus software at home, and at work of course, but there always is the worry that it’s chewing up system resources - at work a full disk scan starts at noon on Wednesdays and takes around two hours to process my desktop, rendering most other tasks pretty much unusable - but better safe than sorry, which is, I suppose, how TrendMicro and the rest make their money. To find out what the average Japanese person uses at home, japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into anti-virus software.

Demographics

On the 19th of March 2008 331 members of the JR Tokai Express Research online monitor group employed in either the private or public sector completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 83.7% of the sample was male, 10.6% in their twenties, 38.4% in their thirties, 35.3% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties, and 3.0% in their sixties.

For free software, the best virus protection is probably AVG Anti-Virus, which I recommend should be used in conjunction with a spyware detector, with SpyBot Search and Destroy being the one I employ on a regular basis.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »