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Number of people on government websites now

analytics.usa.gov

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Re: Number of people on government websites now

#51

Post by keewee7 »

NV2k9JtLJpba5BN wrote: post #46
caaqil wrote: post #5

From the data at https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live/browsers.json , Microsoft Edge has more than 2x the users of Firefox (322,890,632 vs 143,040,483).

`totals.browser` contains user agents (or something similar). Why are there (personal?) email addresses in there as well? Who sets that as their user agent?

>Why are there (personal?) email addresses in there as well? Who sets that as their user agent?

Might be some programming exercise. It's a common network programming exercise to build a HTTP client using bare sockets. But they don't look like student email addresses.

Re: Number of people on government websites now

#52

Post by black3r »

amitport wrote: post #19
Victerius wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US gov sites may not represent the entire web, but the platforms that the entire population uses to access government websites, does. People don't use a different browser for the State Department and for Facebook. The data presented here is actually reflective. If anything, it's conservative. Not many teens are looking up tax forms or passport renewal forms (their parents do it for them). And these young users are le…

US is not the world. Just felt like it had to be stated.

currently it states that 56.3% visitors there are from outside the US.

Re: Number of people on government websites now

#53

Post by rypskar »

echelon wrote: post #3

Firefox's usage percentage is upsetting. I hope they don't die, but this looks really bad for them.

It seems like this data is from Google analytics, which is not only blocked but also is being shimmed by Firefox, at least when strict privacy is enabled. So this do not show the correct number of Firefox user, only the users without privacy protection enabled and without any tracking blocker

Re: Number of people on government websites now

#54

Post by NavinF »

NV2k9JtLJpba5BN wrote: post #46
caaqil wrote: post #5

From the data at https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live/browsers.json , Microsoft Edge has more than 2x the users of Firefox (322,890,632 vs 143,040,483).

`totals.browser` contains user agents (or something similar). Why are there (personal?) email addresses in there as well? Who sets that as their user agent?

Some APIs require contact info in the user agent header. For example, all calls to the reddit API are supposed to contain the dev’s reddit /u/username in the user agent.

Re: Number of people on government websites now

#55

Post by NavinF »

substructure wrote: post #8

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this shows that in the last 90 days 5.06 billion visits came from 31.3% Windows while 1.1% were from GNU/Linux. If we assume that both groups visit government websites equally often, then for every GNU/Linux user there exist (31.3/1.1) = 28.5 Windows users. Scary stuff.

1.1% is way too high. I bet they didn't filter out all the scrapers that poll gov't websites.

Hmm I wonder if just parsing the HTML still works like it did 8 years ago when I had to scrape the USPS: https://github.com/NavinF/USPS-scraper/blob/master/USPS_scra... As long as the USPS only allows API requests from browsers (as opposed to the much more common situation where you need to update the status of every tracking number in a database), people still have to scrape their website pretending to be a browser.

Re: Number of people on government websites now

#57

Post by TonyTrapp »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #29

Under "Visitor locations right now," 1% are coming from Graceville. As far as I can tell, that's either a town of 4k in Australia, 2k in Florida, or there are two Gracevilles in Minnesota with a few hundred people. Any idea what's up?

It might be a default set of coordinates used for geolocation of some IPs used in a larger region (or even state). This sort of thing has in fact caused trouble in the past at least once: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/maxmind-m...

> IP mapping isn’t an exact science and so MaxMind assigns a default address when it can’t identify its true location. That address just happened to be the Arnolds’ property, a remote farm that is located slap-bang in the middle of America.

> More than 600 million IP addresses are associated with their farm and more than 5,000 companies are drawing information from MaxMind’s database.

Re: Number of people on government websites now

#59

Post by jjeaff »

NavinF wrote: post #55
substructure wrote: post #8

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this shows that in the last 90 days 5.06 billion visits came from 31.3% Windows while 1.1% were from GNU/Linux. If we assume that both groups visit government websites equally often, then for every GNU/Linux user there exist (31.3/1.1) = 28.5 Windows users. Scary stuff.

1.1% is way too high. I bet they didn't filter out all the scrapers that poll gov't websites. Hmm I wonder if just parsing the HTML still works like it did 8 years ago when I had to scrape the USPS: https://github.com/NavinF/USPS-scraper/blob/master/USPS_scra... As long as the USPS only allows API requests from browsers (as opposed to the much more common situation where you need to update the status of every trackin…

The USPS has long had an API. I don't remember it being fun to work with, but it has a lot of functionality.
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