I followed a silly reddit/no sleep link to a story regarding the presence of the Dark Web, which apparently is gazillions of gigabytes larger than the searchable internet. From the looks of it, it appears to be quite illegal and pretty scary; think hit men, drugs, porn, really bad pen and snuff films. Seems you can’t even fit into the sites unless you download a specialized Tor browser. Anyone have first hand experience of it?
I was speaking to a coworrker about the Silk Road (drugs) guy who got busted. Although his site was thought to be unbustable, he made some silly e-mail mistakes, and got quite busted. My coworker mentioned that he sometimes uses Tor, and tried to sell me on it’s privacy. I didn’t download it. No way I even want to know about it!
i wouldn’t download it either…pretty spooky!
You are talking about the deep web With the drug sales and such. The dark web is something else and not particularly sinister.
US intelligence could use tor to monitor online jihadi stuff without giving themselves away.
There’s nothing illegal (in the US) about accessing these services or using Tor. But there are laws against buying drugs, accessing/possessing child porn, etc.
Nobody cares if you just use Tor or Freenet, etc. just to look around. Sure, you’ll end up on a list somewhere, but if you’re American any online privacy you have is illusory to begin with, and all your communications are always being monitored and recorded anyway. Just accept it and move on and play with these services if you want to, or don’t if you don’t want to… they are just not a big deal either way.
I’ve played with Freenet and Tor and I2P for a decade or so and nobody’s ever come after me. You’re just noise in the traffic until you start doing the actually illegal activities, and even then, you have to be a big player for them to specifically target you.
I use the Tor Browser (basically a repackaged Firefox that routes through Tor) every week at work to test our website as an anonymous visitor.
Originally developed for the US DOD by DARPA as a secure method of communication over a TCP/IP network.
Make what you what want of it, but scare-mongering shouldn’t be part of it.
https://www.torproject.org/index.html.en
I’ve used it, but it really slows down your typical. normal internet experience.
Deep Web sounds like something named by a small-town columnist who just discovered that the internet has porn. The type of person who pronounces google.com as “aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash google dot com.” In other words, it’s a stupid name.
Ever read the Man Who Was Thursday? Spoilers for a 107 year old book. In it it turns out that all of the leaders of the anarchist conspiracy are feds. I am pretty sure that 99.9% of people who advertise their hitman services are cops. And the rest are idiots who are being watched by feds.
nm
The problem for Silk Road was that its prime selling point (complete anonymity) was its great weakness (no-one could tell if you were a cop or not). It only takes a few cops and some publicised pinches to completely destroy the trust necessary for an anonymous community like that to operate.
And the anonymity thing wasn’t so great, either. At some point if you are buying, you have to drop cover and let the seller know where to send your purchase. Posted items and couriered items can be back-tracked to source. It passed the Uber/Airbnb test of being really cool right now, but failed at being actually operational.
It’s “actually operational” alright, it just isn’t 100% safe.
Neither is the alternative: Face-to-face interactions with your local crowd of drug dealers.
ETA: I’m talking about the darknet here, not Silk Road specifically.
Tor and the like are are simply tools. Some people find them useful. Some people do bad things with them. Being afraid to learn about them or use them is like refusing to have an axe in your tool shed because of Lizzie Borden.
If you are curious, just download the Tor browser and search for The Hidden Wiki for a sample of what’s available. Be prepared for a very slow internet experience and a lot of dead links. Don’t do anything stupid.
I downloaded Tor and looked around a bit back when the Arab Spring groups were using it to get around government censors. One of the big problems is that there’s no easy way to find things. Even the Wiki’s and search engines are like the earliest days of Yahoo when people just put together manual lists of things. There’s really nothing all that exciting there unless you already know where you want to go.
Of course, porn and drugs is a great way for reporters to make the subject sound more interesting than it really is, especially when they are often confused on what exactly they mean by deep or dark web.
I think dark web is reserved for services like Tor, but the bigger deep web distinction is just that some Internet resources are available for searches by services like Google and others aren’t. They might be password-protected or maybe they’re just database-driven in a way that doesn’t cooperate with search engines. Wikipediahas a more comprehensive list of things that might be part of the deep Web.
So when you log into your bank account online, you’re using part of the deep web because Google can’t show search results from your checking account activity. Your Hotmail/Gmail account is part of the deep web. My QuickBooks online account, payroll service, tax research portal, CPE website… all of these things are deep web because they are not indexed by Google.
Sites “in” the deep web can just be as simple as a company’s internal web server for employees that isn’t accessible to the world at large. Or some random guy creating a web page that he hasn’t told anyone about yet. Etc.
I have purchased from The Silk Road, and no, I’m not going to tell you what. Three times, actually.
Each time, I got exactly what I ordered, in a timely fashion. My merchandise was delivered to a USPS mail box. I put my key in the lock, turned the key, grabbed the package, and walked out with it. The guy behind the counter never looked up from his book.
I left the sellers good feedback each time.
One of the successors to the Silk Road, Evolution, just went bust a few days ago when the people running it stole everyone’s Bitcoins and legged it. Silk Road 2.0 has already been busted by the feds. Probably 90% of the people you contact on the Darkside are either scam artists or feds and the rest are stoners and Bitcoin enthusiasts. Verdict: Not actually all that scary.
Usually a lurker, but I wanted to add two points here:
- I usually hear the “gazillions of gigabytes larger than the searchable internet” claim linked to the Deep Web, not the Dark Web. The difference being that the Dark Web is just one small portion of the Deep Web.
The reason the Deep Web is so huge compared to the typical ‘google-able’ range of sites is that it includes huge databases behind paywalls (such as academic research journals) or other such protections from web crawlers (bots/programs search engines use to index public sites). So as you can imagine, the “gazillions of gigabytes” is mostly relatively useless to the average google user, not something inherently sinister.
- Even the Dark Web (Tor and other anonymising networks) is not simply “Evil” or “Illegal”, it is just one more form of tech that is amoral by nature. It can be abused just like anything else. Were pagers “scary” because they made drug dealer’s lives easier? What about the lives they saved because doctors could be much more easily contacted at any time? Same with the anonymity tools online.
[ul]
[li]Think of a journalist reporting in an unfriendly country that would have otherwise been caught, jailed, and even executed as a ‘spy’ for just doing their job. [/li][li]… some curious soul behind the Great Firewall of China using proxies to educate themselves on the outside world without the filter the govt propaganda. … just some average joe doesn’t want google to know about his search on herpes and filling his AdSense bars with prescription spam.[/li][/ul]
Apologies if this comes off as rant-y but it just irks me when I see moral panics like this. (Not accusing the OP, but the news as of lately has latched on to these Silkroad->Tor->Bane of Civilized Society storylines. :()
There is absolutely drugs and illegal porn on the darkweb, there has not been a single confirmed hitman or hit connected with it though and also no snuff films unless you’re talking about stuff like ISIS beheading videos.
Relevant StraightDope column here.
I’ve got Tor Browser on my laptop right now. I’ve also used a Firefox plugin before to access via Tor. It’s handy to get around false positives on screening firewalls of public wifi. It’s uncommon but they are out there. Some of the language in the Pit could have triggered porn blocks at one place I regularly access the net from. They eventually fixed the settings but for a while they were screening the internet seemingly at random. Tor browser was my friend.