What happens in an internet minute?
Most answers to that question are annual estimates divided down to a per-minute figure and republished as an infographic. Since When answers it differently: it opens live connections to public data streams and counts what actually arrives while you watch. Leave it open for sixty seconds and the numbers on screen are events that genuinely occurred in that minute, not a model of an average one.
Is this data real or estimated?
OBSERVED means the event arrived over a live connection while the page was open. CALCULATED means a physical constant applied to elapsed time, such as how far Earth travelled along its orbit. APPROXIMATE means a published average rate multiplied by elapsed time, and those readings carry a tilde. Every card says which it is. The label is the promise.
Where does the data come from?
Public feeds only: Wikimedia recent changes, the Bluesky Jetstream firehose, RIPE RIS Live BGP updates, Coinbase public market trades, USGS earthquakes, NOAA space weather, NASA EONET, Hacker News, GitHub public events, mempool.space, Frankfurter reference rates and the ISS position API. Every source is named, scoped and individually switchable in Settings.
Does Since When track me?
No. Everything runs in your browser. Session counts, visit history and settings live in this browser’s local storage and are never uploaded. The browser activity strip counts events only, never content — what you typed, what you clicked and where your pointer moved are not recorded or retained.
Why do some readings show zero or disappear?
A reading starts at zero because it counts only what has arrived since your chosen starting point. Some events, like a new Bitcoin block, average ten minutes apart, so zero is the honest answer for a short visit. Cards disappear when their source is unreachable or has hit its daily public limit, because a frozen number would be worse than no number.
What does “since you last left” mean?
After your first visit, the CHANGE control near the clock unlocks two longer windows: since your previous visit ended, and since this browser first opened the page. Calculated and approximate totals cover the whole window. Live event counts still only cover time the page was genuinely open, and the difference is shown rather than filled in with guesses.
Is Since When free?
Yes. No account, no signup, no ads, no trial. It is one HTML file from Chris Pirillo’s Arcade, which has hundreds of other free browser tools built the same way.