世論 What Japan Thinks

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…
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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.
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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.
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