Singapore?

The Singapore Skyline

     I recently looked at the analytics on this board which give me a lot of information about visitors to this board, such as their operating system and which search engine they used if they used a search engine. Don't worry. Even if I were interested, I couldn't identify individual visitors. It's far from that detailed. 

    The analytics included a list of the hits on this blog from various countries. Here's what it shows as the top countries for a one week time period:

• United States 11.2K
• Singapore 6.56K
• Hong Kong 103
• Germany 56
• Australia 28
• Canada 19
• United Kingdom 19
• Russia 15
• Spain 7

    Apart from the U.S., you'd expect random hits from most of these countries. Hong Kong seems a bit high but who knows? However, Singapore really stands out. It only has a population of about six million. How many of the residents of that small, but wealthy, city state at the tip of the Malay Peninsula could possibly be interested in U.S. Social Security matters?

    My guess is that traffic from other countries -- probably the U.S. -- is being routed through Singapore for some arcane reason, perhaps through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) located in Singapore. I didn't know there were that many VPN users inside the U.S. There are other uses but VPNs are what you use when you're in China or Russia and you're trying to avoid government censorship. 

    Who knows? Maybe Google Analytics is hallucinating and those aren't real hits. Anybody have a guess?