There are lots of ways to obfuscate traffic using VPN. With obfs4 proxies and tor, you can appear to access a website from shadow IP addresses that cannot be resolved definitively to a country.
This. You can change where the traffic is from, but you can't make 40% of it disappear. Either that traffic never existed and that 60% accounts for the 100%, or they purposely left out 40% of the traffic because it is in fact from somewhere they're trying to hide from the public. No doubt Alexa is in on it too, money goes a long way when it comes to changing numbers around.
You're both overlooking a crucial factor: Alexa doesn't have precise measurements. It uses statistical averages based on a smaller sample size gleaned from some people's browsers and uses its algorithm to correct/estimate actual traffic.
The data is collected from a subset of internet users using one of 25,000 browser extensions for either Google Chrome, Firefox and/or Internet Explorer. An algorithm then ‘corrects’ for various potential biases and attempts to compensate for visitors who may not be in Alexa’s measurement panel (a factor it hasn’t always tried to accommodate for) and normalizes the data based on the geographical location of visitors.
I have no idea what you mean by "shadow" IP addresses.
Maybe he means a spoofed IP. I haven't played around with TCP/IP in 20 years but back in the day, you could spoof IPs if you have root access on a name server.
If you own the website and the network the user is connecting through, it is relatively easy to use heuristics of the traffic to correlate users on a site to the person connecting to the VPN. This is already available in firewalls which can detect applications/viruses using encrypted traffic.
A less covert, but far more effective way is to just start sending packets of specific sizes/timing in bursts and see where they show up in traffic from the VPN provider to suspect users in China.
Without access to both the site and the user's network, you can eventually locate people by monitoring latency and loss on the links you suspect the user is connecting through. I do this to identify people in video games to root out spies in my group and all I need is root access to our group's and user-level access to the enemy group's voice servers.
I really think the "missing traffic" just comes from a wide dispersal of low percentage countries. Say if you start at traffic from nation #4 is 4% and each subsequent nation is 93% of the traffic of the previous, you get the missing traffic you get to 100% by nation #27.
thedonald.win currently #1,162 in US sites
I think the "missing traffic" issue is easily explainable with just "the other countries just aren't shown in the unpaid-for presentation" but I could easily believe that tDw dropping out of the top 1,000 to 1,162 (99x to 1,162 is a pretty significant drop) is due to a concerted effort by a few Trump Derangement Syndrome zealots writing botnet scripts to generate traffic for whatever 100 sites are just ahead of and 100 sites just behind us. I don't think it is any stretch of the imagination that there are a dozen leftists just that rabid and petty that they would devote time and resources to "owning" tDw out of the top 1,000 thinking it would affect our collective morale.
Yes, but it is precisely the geographic mapping - and lack of geographically Chinese IPs - that the OP is citing. VPNs could explain some of it... but, frankly, that's a lot
I go look at subreddits I used to go to last year from time to time. Unless some post hits r.all. Most of them are pretty dead. Yeah, the big ones will always get the bot upvotes.
Just my opinion and from what Ive seen from the subreddits I used to go to.
Im sure the chinese on reddit are smart enough to not be so obvious and use a VPN. That probably explains the unaccounted traffic.
Reddit is one large CCP honeypot now. Its just sad seeing dumb woke kids fall into CCP trap so easily
There are lots of ways to obfuscate traffic using VPN. With obfs4 proxies and tor, you can appear to access a website from shadow IP addresses that cannot be resolved definitively to a country.
When bill gates and steve jobs argue
This. You can change where the traffic is from, but you can't make 40% of it disappear. Either that traffic never existed and that 60% accounts for the 100%, or they purposely left out 40% of the traffic because it is in fact from somewhere they're trying to hide from the public. No doubt Alexa is in on it too, money goes a long way when it comes to changing numbers around.
You're both overlooking a crucial factor: Alexa doesn't have precise measurements. It uses statistical averages based on a smaller sample size gleaned from some people's browsers and uses its algorithm to correct/estimate actual traffic.
https://winningwp.com/alexa-traffic-rank/
Maybe he means a spoofed IP. I haven't played around with TCP/IP in 20 years but back in the day, you could spoof IPs if you have root access on a name server.
Most people have never heard of Reddit, either. ¯\(ツ)/¯
are you suggesting the Alexa rankings of some sites might be... padded? :D
If you own the website and the network the user is connecting through, it is relatively easy to use heuristics of the traffic to correlate users on a site to the person connecting to the VPN. This is already available in firewalls which can detect applications/viruses using encrypted traffic.
A less covert, but far more effective way is to just start sending packets of specific sizes/timing in bursts and see where they show up in traffic from the VPN provider to suspect users in China.
Without access to both the site and the user's network, you can eventually locate people by monitoring latency and loss on the links you suspect the user is connecting through. I do this to identify people in video games to root out spies in my group and all I need is root access to our group's and user-level access to the enemy group's voice servers.
EVE player?
I really think the "missing traffic" just comes from a wide dispersal of low percentage countries. Say if you start at traffic from nation #4 is 4% and each subsequent nation is 93% of the traffic of the previous, you get the missing traffic you get to 100% by nation #27.
I think the "missing traffic" issue is easily explainable with just "the other countries just aren't shown in the unpaid-for presentation" but I could easily believe that tDw dropping out of the top 1,000 to 1,162 (99x to 1,162 is a pretty significant drop) is due to a concerted effort by a few Trump Derangement Syndrome zealots writing botnet scripts to generate traffic for whatever 100 sites are just ahead of and 100 sites just behind us. I don't think it is any stretch of the imagination that there are a dozen leftists just that rabid and petty that they would devote time and resources to "owning" tDw out of the top 1,000 thinking it would affect our collective morale.
Yes, but it is precisely the geographic mapping - and lack of geographically Chinese IPs - that the OP is citing. VPNs could explain some of it... but, frankly, that's a lot
...until they use a VPN. Thats kinda the point
I dont think they're masking it, more like deliberately scrubbing/ massaging that information.
Whether or not its reddit or Alexa itself doing this remains to be seen but Alexa has no reason to lie afaik
Alexa is Amazon. Amazon is China.
I go look at subreddits I used to go to last year from time to time. Unless some post hits r.all. Most of them are pretty dead. Yeah, the big ones will always get the bot upvotes.
Just my opinion and from what Ive seen from the subreddits I used to go to.
I'm sure they aren't using a VPN, but rather the official VCCPN