The internet has changed everything from the way we work to the way we play to the way we live, it seems that there is a corner of the Internet for everyone despite what interested you have, despite what your beliefs are there’s someone or something out there that thinks the same way that you do. The internet has given a broad platform where everyone feel connected and distance doesn’t matter. Internet is for everyone and at a time a large number of people use, a lot of knowledge exists here, and there are many things many people don’t know about it ,it’s obvious because as a human being it impossible to know everything. If you want something, anything whether it be a service or product, legal or illegal, immoral or unethical, the internet has it.
Every technology can be used for both good and bad purpose similarly its all up-to us to use it in a good or bad manner. Much like the surface web that we all use every single day, the dark web is also full of websites and forums and services that we can use, but dark web is hidden from rest of the world under a layer of protection. The dark web is the haven for illegal online activity and it goes deep, much deeper than you might imagine, it’s a place for criminals, predators, spies and even human traffickers to lie and it’s all hidden in plain sight. You could access it in minutes if you wanted.
We can breakdown the internet in three separate categories…
Surface Web
Surface web is everything that we use on daily basis, YouTube, Twitter, any social media we use, it’s all a part of what we call the world wide web. It’s relatively easy to find anything on the surface as almost everything is indexed by search engines like Google. Every second over 1000 photos posted on Instagram, 8000 tweets are posted on twitter, 7000 google searches take place and nearly 100000 YouTube videos are watched from. It is really massive and everything you do is found here in terms of pure traffic . You could look up anyone and find some kind of information about them and their life but you can’t find things like their bank account or medical records, these things are hidden under password-protected websites where only they can access them, this is where we venture into the Deep Web.
Deep Web
The deep web is the content is not found in search engines , so if you can’t find it on google it is Deep web. If you have ever logged into your email you have browsed the Deep Web technically and I know it might be a little disappointing that the Deep is not as cool as it sounds, it’s pretty much just as mundane as the surface web but with just a bit more secrecy but realise that the Deep Web is the most massive part of the Internet. The Deep Web contains 96% of everything there is on the internet. So even if you got 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 a lot to go through. Most of which you couldn’t even get access to but even further deeper than the Deep Web in the tiniest silver of the Internet lies the part of the web where things don’t leave websites that are encrypted the Heidler existence sliced without IP addresses to make them nearly unrecognizable accessed by users with encrypted software to completely mask their identities. Here anything and everything goes. We have reached the Dark Web but how does this work. How can you hide from the rest of the world on something that pretty much everyone has access to.
Dark Web: detailed
If you browse the Surface Web chances are the FBI man watching you. For a normal person, anything we do online is tracked in many ways and we have literally no idea about it. Many commercial shopping websites track our search engines that we are looking for and within few seconds we see it as ads. This is not anything new, Facebook, Amazon and most social sites are guilty of this. They sell your data to advertisers around the world and you agreed to those terms and conditions that you didn’t read. This is not a coincidence and this doesn’t happen by accident. The internet was not made to be anonymous. Some people ignore this or don’t notice while some people have problem regarding their privacy concern.
The United States government thought this too over 20 years ago, they wanted a system that could protect their communications while online since internet was not designed for everyone and everything to remain anonymous in a way anyone could intercept government transmissions while they were being relayed and this was unacceptable so in the mid 1990s researches at the US Naval Research Laboratory started working on something called Onion Routing. Onion Routing protects any knowledge sent by primarily wrapping it with multiple layers of coding wherever the innermost layer contains the initial message.
The Soviet encryption allows our data to be sent to and from multiple places without it being vulnerable to interception in between no one can see, only those who are supposed to. Because of Onion Routing darkness like tor can exist. Dark nets operated alongside network like the internet or requires certain software to access tor stands through the Onion Router. It’s a software named after the technology . It seems just like any other normal browser, but through tor and other similar darkness 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 attract different types of users from all around the world. Links to pages don’t look like youtube.com, they don’t look familiar whatsoever, instead they tend to look like random strings of characters like Nick nack.com, non.org. If you attempt to access these websites through any traditional web browser it’s not going to work, but when you are using tor it will. This is the Dark Web. This is the hidden wiki, it contains a lists of hundreds of different hidden services you can find on the Dark Web. You can find fake US driver’s licence and passports, you can find illegal weapon, you can find drugs, it’s all here and we are barely scratching the surface. Just like on the surface web, web marketplaces are extremely popular on the Dark Web, here you can buy those things that you may struggle to get elsewhere like rocket launchers, now i don’t condemn you doing any of this but if you wanted to purchase things from the sites on the Dark Web the traditional mode of payment doesn’t make sense here.
Using things like credit cards can easily be tracked, taking the anonymity of things away and you will be in jail. For these things virtual currency is king and this is where bitcoin comes in and due to bitcoins anonymous nature it’s useful on site. Many other crypto currencies is central in running any marketplace, creating Bitcoin and can exchange some cash. For Bitcoin you know how your anonymous currency does almost whatever you want with it. On of the first thing comes to people’s from the dark web mentions are the fast amount of sites selling illegal drugs and similar items and yes those are real. In 2011, dark net market known as Silk Road opened for business. Here you could buy any illegal drug you have ever dreamed of. Sellers from all over the sold things from weed to cocaine, from DMT to LSD, if drugs aren’t your thing then they also sold things like guns, counterfeit cash and some books and clothes, but only after only two years in operation FBI seized the site in October 2013, and taken down in October 2013. Over the course of only two years 2011 to 2013, the Silk Road generated over 9.5 Billion bitcoin in revenue. Now stretching this a bit, if you sold Bitcoin at the peak of its price in 2017 which is roughly Twenty thousand dollars, Silk Roads total revenue would amount to over 187 Billion dollars in just two years. Silk Road, another dark internet, Margaret’s truly contend a reasonably hand within the rise of Bitcoin. In 2011 with the Silk Road, Bitcoin was valued at less than a dollar but because the dark web pretty much requires decentralized cryptocurrency. It was a perfect choice, to be honest, Bitcoin wouldn’t be where it is without a bit of illegal activity.
data leaks and crimes: DARK WEB
Nowadays it’s very common to see data leaks and breaches. If your data was stored in a company’s database that was compromised, then there are chances for sales somewhere on the dark web where it could be purchased by anyone with access to it. There are websites leaking important information of common public as well as politicians , celebrities and even normal people like you and I. There is not much you can really do about it but even worse than this there are some even darker things that can be carried out on the dark web. There are many hitmen who says they can kill anyone in the world for a very few amount of $5000, many are fake but some comes out real murder too. There are also services selling real human organs and how they acquire this we will never know but if you need one then these services are present. Child pornography is unfortunately a larger part of this. Sites such as Lolita city and playpen have been taken down but during their peaks sites like these had over 200,000 users. Similar forms exist that discuss ways of abducting children from the different types of world where people would have discussions about how to hide them, what kinds of kids they owned and even darker things that they would do to them when no one else was around.
This is very small look in this deep and dark web of the Internet. The lack of rules here allows anything to exist, the deeper you go the scarier things you will find but despite all of the things that exist on the dark web roughly half of the funding for tours still comes from the United States government which is actually astounding when you consider the reputation that the dark web has. A lot of people that have been arrested and thrown in prison for illegal activities on the dark web don’t even seem physically threatening whatsoever but if you can run a drug business online or hire hitmen for a some few Bitcoin without having to put yourself in danger, you might not have to be. These are people you could see walking down the street, these are the people that are in line behind you at the grocery store, they seem just like normal people and you wouldn’t even know what they are a part of just by looking at them.
The dark web is portrayed as the vast criminal underground millions of the worst people in society lurk and while this is partly true it’s not entirely that, it’s been claimed that there is only around 2000 – 10000 of these hidden services in the dark web with a few of them being deemed illicit content but then again these numbers cannot be taken as fact because we’ll hidden services are by design meant to be hidden. Out of these few thousand websites only less than 6% of people who use tor actually use these hidden services, that’s less than 120,000 people. Out of Billions of people who use the internet a hundred thousand use the dark web, out of billions of websites that exist a few thousand of them are deemed illicit. This is just a drop of water on the ocean. There is no surprise that not everyone in the world is as genuine as they may see but that’s the gamble you take, that’s the price you pay for this. While the darkest part of the web exist and some other parts exist to help the rest of the world.
Plenty of countries around the world censor Internet content that has been deemed to be obscene by a higher power, typically the government. The dark web provides a heaven where none of the censorship exists providing the truth in many situations that people otherwise would have never seen. It gives us a platform to speak about and report too that are important without any fear or threat. Many of the biggest news networks operate dark internet services to permit individuals to return forward with info while not the concern of being caught or publically ridiculed however to be honest everybody puts their entire lives on the net at this time. ten or fifteen years ago this could are absurd and quite honestly stupid however currently it appears pretty traditional. In a way we are slowly giving up Internet privacy but the dark web kind of protects that, it gives people the way to take their privacy and anonymity back whether they use it in a positive or negative way it is all up to them.
The drugs that are sold on the dark web while mostly illegal can have some positive uses if you are in a place where they are not sold, you could purchase them there while the FBI, governments and much of the public believes Silk Road have vastly negative effects on the world. Ross Ulbricht thought otherwise, he believed he was doing the world a service rather than the violence that can result from the trading and dealing of illegal drugs. Silk Road provided a safer more genuine experience which brought opportunity to the masses and protected people. And opposed to putting them at risk but despite this despite his apparent peaceful and non harming nature, he was one who actually used these hitmen services on the dark web. The dark web doesn’t have to be a Terrie place, it’s only scary if you go looking for things that you don’t want to see. You can’t necessarily get rid of them but you can avoid them. There are some things that the average person just should not see, if you don’t want to fall victim to this then stay away from dark web whether or not you believe it’s as bad as it’s made out to be. If this is the first time you are hearing about it, you probably don’t know what you are getting into and once you are in you are not leaving.
