The dark canvas looks disturbing. Why should police forces in Brazil, Germany and the United States attack websites like the "Wall Street Market" (WSM), accusing the operators of a long list of crimes ranging from stolen data, drugs and malware? These events occur on the dark canvas, but they are only part of the story. The internet is a huge and sometimes disorganized place, almost like a huge flea market or bazaar. With billions of sites and addresses, it's amazing that we can search for, and find, almost anything. There are three basic levels to this complex we call the World Wide Web: open, deep, and dark. They all have their place and their drawbacks.
Let's be open about it
The open or surface web is what is accessed daily through Bing or Google. Before the device was turned on, search engines ran the Web, looking for information, evaluating sources, and listing options. Think of this like the general reading room at your local library. The books are there, they are precisely organized by subject and title, and you are free to search anywhere. By accessing the Internet, your device accesses the central servers that will then display the website. If you have questions, you can refer to the file on the form or speak to a librarian. Browsers like Google, Bing, GoDuckGo act as librarians, classifying and cataloging documents to make them easier to find and also to track your own movements with their traces. Most corporate and public sites are working hard to be easily found by web crawlers. Knowing where the documents are, and who is looking for them, allows Google to sell ads, which accounts for more than 80% of the company's revenue. However, it is estimated that this open and cataloged content still represents only about 5% of total Internet connections.
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Go further on the web.
The term "Deep Web" doesn't mean anything bad, it simply refers to unindexed web databases and other content that search engines can't crawl or catalog, like web forums or even your Gmail account. . It includes information about you that data brokers such as LocalBlox may store on a public Amazon server, but not on the list. Imagine the deep web as an archive containing a pile of unclassified websites and virtually inaccessible resources. Deep sites include corporate intranets and government websites (ie the European Union website) where you can search for specific topics or forms. On these pages, you can use your own internal search function and not a search engine such as Bing or Yahoo or any other external search engine. The Deep Web also includes most academic content managed directly by universities. Imagine, for example, searching for a book in the library using the installation's own index files; you may have to be in the library to search. It is estimated that this deep web represents approximately 95% of the entire web.Come down in the dark
The Dark Web, despite the media attention, is a small part of the Deep Web that can only be accessed through a special digital network. Tor stands for: The Onion Router" (a reference to how it works); sending encrypted traffic through relay layers all over the world, thus hiding the content, the sender, and its location. Not only is it more secure, but it's also more private to the extent that it effectively excludes online tracking While protecting users' privacy isn't flawless, it works well enough to give users much more privacy about where they go, what content they access and how they hide their own identity. Multiple relays allow a certain distance and anonymity to be maintained between the person visiting the website, the website itself, and any entity trying to eavesdrop on the communication between the two. Tor is both a connection type (with extended relays) as a browser There are other variants, including I2P, GNU.net and Freenet When your device uses a TOR browser, you can access specific TOR sites (with an .onion suffix) or visit the sites common on the web. Yes, there are a number of sites exclusively for illicit drugs or collateral material. It allows users to remain anonymous and go to "members only" forums where they can use unlisted crypto-currencies for their purchases. But that is not all. There are also popular services offering their services at facebookcorewwwi.onion and the German email provider Mailbox.org also offers their services.
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Privacy in a nutshell
"With the open, deep, and dark web, there is a difference between who can follow you," said Alexander Vukcevic, head of Avira Protective Laboratories. "With a typical open web search, the search engine knows where you are, your device number, your IP address, and the search topic. "In the deep web, you can assume that activities are being monitored at the gateway. , the main difference with the open web is that the system administrator, not the search engine, can track your activities. . "For the Deep Web, although some activities can be monitored, you can hide your personal data before entering, although you may want to perform an anonymous search, some sites, NYTimes and even those illegal markets may require you to register in order to register. Some open websites will prevent you from entering with the TOR browser."It's small, dark, and messy in there.
Research on the dark canvas can be irritating, visually and operationally. Before you find a treasure trove of foreign substances or private information, you may be at an impasse. According to Internet Live Stats, approximately 75% of these sites are down. Once you've found them, these sites are a bit gritty, 1990s chic. Unlike the open or surface Web, these sites aren't afraid of being found by a web crawler. Although Google tries to categorize the Black Web, its results are mixed. Part of this is the incentive. Tor users are not worried about cleaning up their website with the latest SEO tips to improve their relative ranking in Google and Bing listings. Regardless of the media attention, the dark web is small compared to the open web and the deep web, estimated at about 50,000 sites.
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Should I visit the Dark Web?
For most of us, the short answer is that there's no reason to: unless you're really paranoid about your privacy, or doing something that really requires anonymity, like reporting on repressive regimes or criminal syndicates, or trying to circumvent the state censorship. there's no reason to venture onto the Dark Web, especially since it slows down your browsing. There's a fascinating thread on Reddit (not safe for remote work), where Dark Web users share their stories, and some of it is enough to make you check your webcam and disable your router just in case. Think of it as the shady part of town where reasonable people don't go at night. If that makes you more interested, the key to the Dark Web is Tor. You can download it from Torproject.org.What is tor
Tor represents Thin Onion Routing and, in 2013, UK MP Julian Smith described it as "the black internet where child pornography, drug trafficking and the arms trade occur." You are not mistaken: Tor is where the now defunct Silk Road drug market is located. This is where the Reloaded Black Market has traded drugs and guns, and this is where the US National Security Agency says "very bad people." This isn't the only web-based darknet, for example, you may have heard of Freenet's anti-censorship network, but it is by far the most popular.
According to a survey by Deep Web Watchers Vocativ, European terrorists seeking firearms had "turned to a 20-year-old market that was entrenched and thrived at the end of the Balkan wars. Now, with the rise of dark web, the market has been scanned and illegal arms deals are only minutes away." A large number of these deals were concluded in the United States: Vocativ listed 281 lists of weapons and ammunition on the Dark Web, the most of which came from the United States. It's not that Tor is evil; it's just that the same tools that protect political dissidents are also very effective in protecting criminals. This was not intentional. Tor was originally developed by the United States Navy and was intended to protect Internet users from espionage. It does this by bouncing user and site traffic across multiple relays to hide your location. In addition to "very bad people", it is used by political activists and dissidents, journalists, people who do not trust websites that use their personal data, and the few members of the tin hat brigade.
If the Dark Web is so secret, how do you find something?
This is a very good question, and for many people, the answer is Reddit. Subheadings like DarkNetMarketsNoobs exist to guide newcomers through the dark web, while on the open web, some wikis are a kind of Yahoo! for destinations on the Tor network, although it is a Yahoo! many links can land you in jail, so we do not name or link them. You will see that the sites have the extension .onion: it means that you need a Tor browser to open them. You will also see that most of the sites you can find are marketplaces because they want to attract as many customers as possible. This means that they are the visible part of the Dark Web iceberg, as many sites are secret and only accessible to people with appropriate identification and/or contact information.Can I protect my privacy without accessing the Dark Web?
Yes. Although Tor is a powerful tool to protect your privacy, it is not the only one. Encrypting files and everything that is important with an open source encryption method (to make sure there is no back door) is one of the best privacy protectors, while browsers Focused on privacy, as the common features of Epic and Ice Dragon that are used to track users, such as IP address tracking.
If you just want to prevent ad networks from following you, plugins like Ghostery can block trackers and other potential privacy invaders, while secure VPNs can anonymize your browsing. But don't forget the essentials: if you use documents that are likely to make you the next Edward Snowden, use an "air gap", that is, a device Who is not connected to anything else. Your data cannot be intercepted if you are not on the network.