A sobering Internet metric regarding Haiti | Hacker News Reader

A sobering Internet metric regarding Haiti

blog.mozilla.com

29 pointsDEinspanjer15 comments

What is more sobering is that, even before the quake, it appears that there were fewer than 10K Firefox users in a country of 9M people! It's not a surprise to me at all that the country's communications infrastructure was damaged.

Um... More sobering? I have to disagree.

The country's previous lack of eletronic knowledge sharing is certainly more sobering than the lack of Firefox pings. That a 3rd World country's communications infrastructure could be damaged by an earthquake is hardly surprising. That 2%+ of any country's population could die in a single natural disaster.....nevermind the ping rate.

I wonder how many of those 9M even own a computer. Haiti is the poorest country of America, with a GDP per capita of only $790.

OT: Does anyone know how I can disable firefox's daily ping to mozilla?

Checking about:config, I see browser.send_pings, however, that controls <a ping>.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.send_pings

There are a few automatic connections made to Mozilla servers by products distributed by Mozilla. The are mentioned in the privacy policy: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/privacy/firefox-en.html

And there is a support article with instructions on disabling them: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+makes+unrequeste...

Note that these "pings" aren't implemented as "phone home" type tracking. Rather, they are necessary parts of useful features such as automatic update tracking and extension blocklisting.

So... People do not log on to the internet after an earthquake? Is there something surprising about this?

The Internet could be very useful as a way to connect and find relatives and nearby aid, as well as information in general. If there was a major earthquake where I live and I still could get online, you could bet that I'd use this to find out as much as possible about the situation.

The graph is evidence of the complete breakdown of infrastructure in Haiti.

Their probably was a very basic internet infrastructure to begin with, based on the graph you can pretty much conclude that internet pretty much doesn't exist there right now.

it’s based on a once daily “ping” that we see from active users

Slightly off topic but are they referring to the opt-in "provide anonymous" usability statistics or something else?

See my above comment regarding where the statistic came from.

Apparently, no-one in Haiti stays up past 10pm.

I have no idea if this is the case in Haiti, but in many parts of the world electricity is not on all the time. I wonder if that has something to do with it...

Or the only installations of Firefox are at PC cafes, places likely to be closed at night.

In Haiti electricity is rationed. It turns off at 10.

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