Statcounter - Update your browsers

One of the things I have discovered since I started blogging is StatCounter.

It is pretty amazing the amount of detail it can provide. I suppose I'm not surprised, after all I do information security for a living but there is still something stark about how much useful and useless information can be gathered.

Google Analytics is pretty useful as well but doesn't provide some of the detail you can get with Statcounter.

For example even though this is an Information Security Blog I can tell you that more than half of you are using MSIE 6.0 or earlier and are not even close to having it currently patched. For that matter less than a third of the FireFox (the next highest usage browser that hits me) are on the current version. There is at least one Opera user that is always up to date on his (or her) updates. It is pretty clear to me that the Netscape updates are automated because when a new update goes out I instantly see it.

Although I can't tie any of the information to an individual I can get a decent idea of what they are like.

I have two regular visitors from Israel. One hits me at almost exactly the same time every day. It looks like it is breakfast or just after he gets to work.

I have a couple of regular visitors from India. It might be the same person on multiple different systems because they are from different providers but the same city.

One or more of my frequent visitors travels a whole lot. They must have a lot of travel points at Hilton and Wyatt because I have seen them coming from all over Europe, the US and Asia from pops from those chains or ones affiliated with them.

I have had visitors from over a hundred countries and returns from over forty.

Most of my visits come from the UK, Canada, Australia and the US but together they make up only about half of my return visitors.

About 2/3rds of my visitors spend between 5 min and 30 min a visit at my site.

Sorry if that was a bit off topic but I thought that some of you might be interested in what bloggers can see of you when you visit their sites. I hope this doesn't cause anyone to block me because I love reading the stats. It might be good to update your browsers though.

Welcome to the blog and remember Big Brother is watching (and keeping logs) :)