Type the following sequence into your computer:
4-8-15-16-23-42
Do so every 108 minutes.
You will be contacted at the appropriate time. Ask “what did one snowman say to the other snowman” when you are contacted.
Okay, serious question. Back when I was working we had a departmental computer network. It’s connected to every facility in the NYS Dept of Corrections. We can send emails back and forth across the state to each other and access each others files. But it’s a closed system. You can’t access it from outside the system and you can’t access anything outside from inside of it.
So is this system an example of the “deep web”? Or is it something else?
That’s more like an intranet, a private network based on internet technologies.
The “deep web”, on the other hand, consists of publicly-accessible pages that are simply not listed on search engines.If you know the exact URL you can get to it, but you won’t be able to find it on Google.
When somebody makes a new webpage and puts it on a web server, search engines don’t automatically know about the new page. It either has to be submitted to a search engine or the search engine has to find it through a link on another page – that process is called “crawling” the internet. If neither of those two things happen, search engines generally won’t know about it and it remains a part of the “deep web” (there are exceptions but it’s not worth getting into).
Webmasters can also manually hide a page (or entire site) from crawlers by using a special file (robots.txt) that tell search engines “Hey! I want privacy! Pretend I don’t exist.” and most will obey.
Once while bouncing around link after link I landed on a website that was promoting underground type music concerts, as well as I could make out anyway. It gave band and time info but there was something about it that seemed a bit off. So I deleted all of the URL except the base .com addy and it took me to a corporate website. I poked around a bit but found no mention of or link to anything like the first place I found.
Since then I’ve alway had the idea there are hackers out there who are piggybacking onto big corporate sites to promote their agendas.
It’s mostly spammers and scammers, but yes, this is quite common and has been for some time. It’s called parasite hosting.
I’m guessing he’s talking about the “Darknet”.
Part of the deepweb the OP is talking about are pages that are publically accessable even though there are no links to it on the website. All you need to know is the exact pagename and location.
Isn’t that what I said?
Okay, I always thought an intranet was a completely isolated system. Something a person or business was running on their own hardware that had no outside connection. I figured the system we used at my job didn’t qualify because while access in and out of it was restricted, it still transferred information over the same communications network that the rest of the internet was using.
Is there a term for the completely isolated system I described above?
If the whole things exists within the same general building/campus, most people would just call it a LAN (local area network).
If it spans significant geographic distance (i.e., if they run their own lengths of cable through multiple cities or states)… hmm, I’m not sure what the official term is. Maybe “isolated intranet” or “air-gapped network”?
ETA: It may also be called, with less precision, a WAN (wide area network) – but that doesn’t necessarily imply complete isolation from the internet.
And in case it wasn’t clear, it’s very costly to implement your own private, isolated network separate from the world’s normal telecommunications infrastructure over any significant distance. I don’t think many organizations can afford to do that.
Most settle for encrypted links over the public internet, or at most leased lines through regular telecom companies (these lines may be disconnected from the internet proper, but are still handled by a outside telecom company and vulnerable to government snooping, etc.).
OK, to answer the actual question, the OP is referring to using TOR to access .onion sites such as The Hidden Wiki. TOR is cryptographically secure which means that, assuming you follow the correct procedures, it’s generally thought of as impossible for anyone to determine the origin or request of any particular piece of content.
It’s being used by dissidents to overthrow regimes, child pornographers to distribute pornography, “hitmen” to advertise for contract hits (although there’s never been a confirmed transaction through the service AFAIK) and a safe place to buy drugs.
The other recent innovation in this space is Bitcoin which, again if the correct procedures are followed, allows completely anonymous purchasing with a cryptographically secure paper trail.
The encryption technologies underlying these products are the same ones the NSA uses to encrypt their secret files so, as long as you believe the NSA believes the Russians can’t crack their encryption, you must also believe no federal law enforcement agency is able to penetrate these services (again, assuming correct procedures).
Cite please?
AES is approved by the NSA for protecting information classified as top secret, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t use something else.
No, that gets you the Australian internet.
I mean, 
The NSA publicly claims to use AES and the NSA is full of good cryptographers which means that the NSA privately uses AES as well. In cryptography, you want to use what everyone else is using. That’s because the more eyeballs that have audited a piece of code, the more secure it’s likely to be. That’s because most security isn’t broken by breaking the fundamental algorithm, but by exploiting tiny implementation details that make the algorithm drastically less secure. The NSA is not immune to this problem.
The opposite is called “security through obscurity” which is rightly derided but everyone competent in the security arena.
Just a point about nomenclature.
The word “internet” is a contraction of interconnected-network. It means the connecting together of smaller (typically local area) networks into a broader whole. The technology needed to do this involved the development of things like distributed routing and name resolution services. These technologies became known as “internet protocols”. The ones we are used to using are but one of many developed. In the early days there were a number of proprietary protocols (such as DECNet) in use.
If you have such an inter-connected network, you have created an internet. As the use of such technology spread most institutions connected together into one big internet, which became known as the Internet. Note the capitalisation. There are many many internets, but only one Internet.
The web is not the Internet. Sorry, really it isn’t. The web runs but one of a legion of protocols that can be carried over the basic internet protocols. The web is called that because it is composed of inter-site references (links). These links depend upon the internet name resolution protocols to find their way to the referenced site, and the routing protocols to make the traffic find its way around. The web depends upon the Internet for its existence, but the Internet existed long before the first web, indeed at least twice as long.
It isn’t hard to build and run your own internet. The simplest is as described above, to tunnel your traffic over links in the Internet, as provided by your ISPs. If you want a private internet, not subject to snooping, you can encrypt it. But tunnelling does not require encryption. If you want more than this, most ISPs can provide more, at a price. You may want this for a number of reasons. You can lease naked bandwidth, and run whatever you want over it. This can get you guaranteed quality of service - you never compete with anyone else for bandwidth. You can lease links that are guaranteed to run over different physical media - so providing redundancy in the face of damage to the network infrastructure (things like backhoe fade). And of course somewhat better security. Large multinational companies do this sort of thing regularly. Many have private networks running around the planet connecting offices. Similarly security agencies and most countries military have private internets. Nowadays, most of these do run the usual internet protocols, but they didn’t always, and probably some still don’t.
If you don’t provide some form of bridge from the Internet to your own internet, that internet will be not just invisible, but inaccessible from the Internet.
The internet protocols themselves often don’t run native on the physical media either. This is changing, but until recently most backbone links used ATM protocols, which were designed for carrier level systems, and more directed at voice communications than data. ATM has its own routing and switching protocols and works quite independently of the internet protocol traffic it may be carrying. (Your ADSL router typically talks ATM, and the internet is carried over the top, although again this is changing.)
https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en
“Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others.”
There are a couple of posters in this thread who know what they are talking about but are being a bit coy about saying it. Shalmanese is just coming out and telling you to download Tor and look for the Hidden Wiki and .onion websites if you want to begin exploring the hidden internet.
Most of you will not bother. Those of you who do will be a bit less ignorant.
You could say the same thing about learning to speak Portuguese and exploring the Brazilian internet. I’d have access to places I don’t now.
The question is whether access to those places is worth the effort of getting there. Is there anything on the Hidden Internet that makes it worth going there? I don’t want to buy drugs or look at child porn or hire a hit man or topple a government or look at business records. Any reason I should want to go underground?
Only you can decide that.
I just wanted people to understand that talk of the hidden internet / darkweb is not delusion; there is a whole other web available with a slightly modified version of Firefox. It cannot be censored and provides a means of secure communication that some people might find interesting or useful.