IT鈥橲 official: there is no such thing as normal behaviour on the internet.
Mark Meiss and colleagues at Indiana University in Bloomington collected statistical data on hundreds of millions of online connections involving people exchanging emails, sharing files or just browsing the web. They found extreme variations in user behaviour 鈥� for example, in the number of people a user tended to interact with. The spread of results was utterly unlike the normal bell curve of statistics, produced when most data points are clustered around a central value, with few points at the 鈥渢ails鈥� of the curve.
The team hope their findings will inspire better models of online behaviour, which could help improve network security (Journal of Physics A, ).
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