What is the Dark Web all About, The Unseen side of the WEB

 

                 The internet has changed everything, from the way we work to the way we play to the way we live. it seems there is a corner of the internet for everyone. Despite what interest you have, despite your beliefs, there is someone or something out there that thinks the same way that you do. The internet has connected us in ways that you could never imagine. There is so much stuff on the internet much of which you don’t even know exits. If you want something, anything whether be it a service or product, legal or illegal, moral or unethical, the internet has it. You can choose to use it for good or bad. Must like the surface web that we all use every day, the dark web is full of websites, forums and services that we can use. But it is hidden under a layer of production. Under the surface lies the dark and hidden activities that are hidden from the rest of the world. It is the haven for illegal online activity. And it goes deep much deeper than you can imagine. It is a place where criminals, drug traffickers, predators, spies, and even human traffickers lie. And it is all hidden in plain sight. You could access it in minutes if you wanted. But Should You?

You can break down the internet into three separate categories. First we have

THE SURFACE WEB.

                This is everything you use on a daily basis, YouTube, tweeter. Any social media at all. It is all part of what we call the world wide web. It is relatively easy to find anything on the surface web as almost everything is indexed by search engines like google. Every second, about 1000 photos are posted on Instagram, 8000 tweets are posted on tweeter, 70,000 google searches are taking place and nearly 100,000 YouTube videos are watched. From this the surface web seams massive, and in a way it is. In terms of pure traffic, almost everything you do can be found here. You can lookup anyone and find some kind of information about them and their life. But what you can’t find are things like their bank account or medical records. These things are hidden under password protected websites only where they can access them. This is where we venture into the deep web.

THE DEEP WEB

                The deep web refers to the content on the internet that is not indexed by search engines. Basically if you can’t find it on google, it is found on the deep web. Basically if you have ever logged into your Email, you’ve browsed the deep web technically.

And I know it might be a little disappointing that the deep web is not as cool as it is sounds but it is pretty much just as usual as the surface web. Just a little more secrecy. But realize that the deep web is the most massive part on the internet. It contains about 96% of everything there is on the internet. So even if you went online every single day and searched through new websites for  the next 50 years. You wouldn’t even put a dent into the pure amount of information there is on the internet. There is just too much to go through. Much of which you couldn’t even get access to. but if you look further than the deep web and the tinniest sliver of the internet, lies the part of the internet that things don’t leave. Websites that are encrypted to hide their existence. Sites without IP addresses to make them even unrecognizable. Accessed by users who with incipted software to completely mask their identities. Here, anything and everything goes. We have reach.

THE DARK WEB.

                But how does this even work. How can you hide from the rest of the world on something that pretty much everyone has access to. the average person, everything you do online can and in many ways will be tracked. Many websites will track what you are searching and looking at and then turn advertised products or services to you that fit that description. This isn’t anything new. Facebook, amazon, and must social media sites are guilty of this. They sell your data to advertisers around the world. And you agree to it in does terms and conditions that you didn’t read. This isn’t a coincidence and does not happen by accident. The internet was not made to be hidden. Some people see this as an invasion of privacy. Others don’t see a problem with it at all. But how far can we let this go before it turns bad. Funny enough, the United State Government taught this too about 20 years ago. There wanted a system that could protect their communications while online. Since the internet wasn’t designed for everyone and everything should remain anonymous. In a way anyone could intercept government transitions while there were relayed. So in the mid-1990s, researches of the US began working on something called Onion Routing. Onion routing protects any data sent by essentially rapping it in multiple layers of encryption where the innermost layer contains the original message. This allows data to be sent to and from multiple places without it being vulnerable to interception in-between. No one else can see. Only does who are supposed to. Because of onion routing, Dark webs like TOR can exits.

Dark webs operated alongside networks like the internet but require certain software to access. TOR stands for The Onion Router, a software named after the technology that made it possible. It seems like any other normal web browser. But through TOR and any other similar dark nets, you can access web pages that aren’t available to the general public. The tools and requirements needed to access the dark web is enough to access different types of users from all around the world. Links to pages don’t look like youtube.com, there don’t look familiar what so ever. Instead they tend to look like random strings of characters, and not in .com nor .org but .onion . if you try to access these websites through any traditional web browser, it is not going to work. But when using TOR, it will. This is the dark web, your first step into it at least. It is a list of different hundreds of different hidden services, you can fake driver’s licenses and passwords, illegal weapons, drugs. It’s all there and we are barely scratching the surface. Just like on the surface web, market places are extremely popular on the dark web. Here you can buy things that you may struggle to get elsewhere like, rocket launchers. Now I don’t condone you doing any of this, but if you wanted to purchase things on the dark web. Here is how you will do it. Using traditional forms of payment on the dark web doesn’t make much sense. Using things like credit cards can easily be tracked. Taking the anonymity of things away. For this reasons, virtual currency is king. This is where Bitcoin comes in. due to bitcoins almost anonymous nature, it is used alongside other crypto currencies is the heart of running any anonymous market place. In 2011 an online marketing Dark web site was created called silk road. It was letter seized by the FBI in October 2, 2013. And in just 2 years, 20011 – 2013, silk road generated about 9,519,664 BTC in revenue. If you sold this bitcoin at the pic of its price in 2017, silk road’s total revenue would amount to over $187 BILION USD in just two years. Silk road and other dark web markets actually played a pretty big hand in the rise of bitcoin. In 2011 when silk road was created bitcoin was valued to be less than a dollar. But since the dark web requires decentralized crypto currency, it was a perfect choice. To be honest, bitcoin wouldn’t be where it is today without the help of some illegal activities. The creator of silk road Ross Ulbricht was found and arrested in 2013. Which was ultimately why the site was taken down. But where there is Demand, supply will always show up. When one site is taken down, 5 new ones open up to fill the void. After silk road was taken down, silk road 2.0 opened up. It was taken down less than a year later but after that, silk road 3.0 opened up. And this has continued going on for years.

Even if you have never visited the dark web. Even if you didn’t know it existed, it still affects you. It’s not uncommon to see data leeks and bridges often nowadays, if your data was stored in a company’s data base that was compromised, there is a chance it is for sells somewhere on the dark web where it can be purchased by anyone with access to it.  There are websites leaking information of politicians, celebrities and even normal people like you and I and there is not much you can do about this. But even worse than this, there is even some darker things that can be carried out on the dark web. There are multiple hitman services that claim to be able to kill almost anyone in the world you want for as little as $5000

. many of these have been revealed to be scams but not all of them. Even though this may be scams, the fact that there are people out there who trust random people on the internet to carry out real murders is concerning to see. there are also services offering real human organs, how they acquire these? we will never know. But if you need one, there are there. Child pornography is unfortunately a larger part of this than I would like to admit. Sites such as Lolita City have been taken down. But during their picks, sites like this had over 200,000 users. Similar forms exist that discuss ways of up ducting children from different parts of the world. This is only a small look into this dark and deep part of the internet. The lack of rules there allows anything to exits. The deeper you go, the scarier things you will find. But yet, despite all these things that exits on the dark web, roughly half of all TOR's funding contributed still comes from the Unites States Government. Which is surprising when you think about the reputation that the dark web has. A lot of people who have been arrested for illegal activities on the dark web don’t even seem physically threatening what so ever. But if you can run a drug empire online or higher hitmen online, you might not have to be. These are people you can see walking on the street. They seem just like normal people and you wouldn’t know what there are a part of just by looking at them. The dark web is portrayed as the vast criminal underground where billions of the worse people in society lurks. While this is partly true, it is not entirely that. It is claimed that there is only about 2 – 10 thousand of these hidden services on the dark web. With only a little over half of them being elicit content. But again these numbers can’t be taken as fact because well, hidden services are hidden by design and meant to be hidden. Of these few thousand websites, only 6 % of people who use TOR actually use these services, that’s about a hundred thousand people. Out of the billions of people who use the internet, a hundred thousand use the dark web. Out of the billions of websites that exits, a few thousands of them are deemed elicit. This is just a drop of water in the ocean. There is no surprise that not everyone in the world may not be as genuine and they seem.

While those darkest parts of the world exits, other parts exist to help the rest of the world. The dark web provides a heaven where the truth can reign in many situations where anonymity is necessary. It gives people a place to truly speak about and report on things that are important without fear of physical treats. Many of the largest news networks operate dark web services to allow people to come up with information without the fear of being caught or publicly reviled. But to be honest everyone posts their entire lives on the internet. 20 years ago this would have been quit absurd or stupid. In a way we are slowly giving up internet privacy but the dark web kind of protects that. It gives people a way to protect their privacy and anonymity back. Whether they use it positively or negatively, it is up to them. The drugs sold on the dark web whether illegal or not can have some positive use. If you are in a place where they aren’t sold, you could purchase them there. The dark web doesn’t have to be a terrible place.