That level of information would be located in the deep web. Regular browsers search the so-called “surface web,” but that’s where the search stops.įor instance, if you wanted to search a public library catalog to find a book, you couldn’t type the title into your browser’s search bar and expect Google to return a meaningful result for your library. They use links to rank search results according to things like relevancy, inbound links, and keywords. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are able to search and index websites because of links. Indeed, in an otherwise ordinary turn of events, during the writing of this article, my laptop suddenly began to restart immediately my mind turned to thoughts of a governmental source sabotaging my coverage of such a controversial subject.The deep web is just like it sounds - below the surface and not completely dark. Undoubtedly, the fact that we are under endless surveillance from governments breeds a pervasive and unhealthy paranoia, which might justify browsing on the dark web where anonymity prevails. These include government surveillance of online activity and hence the destruction of online freedom rampant commercialisation and personalised advertising and criminality, notably spam, trolls and stalkers, with freely available software conducive to pursuing a victim’s GPS signal, tapping into webcams and microphones as well as surveying the movements of any active social media user. In a TED talk, aptly named ‘The Dark Web’, Alan Pearce cites the three main threats to the Internet. The standard Internet is not without its own faults, however. Without sensationalising the dark web, I can’t help but feel that it represents something endlessly terrifying and morbidly thrilling in equal measure - a veiled and debaucherous entity amid the mundane every day, an embodiment of the saying ‘not everything is as it seems’. This is just a snippet of the dark web, and however implausible it seems, it’s happening right under our noses. Despite having been shut down by the FBI in 2013, the dark web also hosted the infamous ‘Silk Road’, the dark web’s twisted e-bay equivalent, where instead of garden furniture and second-hand clothes, you could fill your shopping basket with illegal drugs, fake passports, and pirated content and pay using an elusive crypto currency, known as Bitcoin. The sex trafficking gang, the ‘Black Death Group’, led the model to Milan under the misconception that she would attend a photo shoot.Īside from auctioning women abducted across Europe within the Tor network, other possibilities include the hiring of hitmen and rental of hackers to frame targeted victims by downloading images of child sexual abuse onto their computers as well as the perusal of forums coordinating child abuse and how-to guides for cannibals. A lot of what goes on is innocent enough, however, due to its anonymous nature, it also serves as a hub of crime, from child porn to black markets.Ī recent development on the dark web involved the drugging, kidnapping and consequent auctioning of 20 year old British model, Chloe Ayling. The dark web is a mirror image of the regular surface web, albeit 400 to 550 times larger, with clones of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The deep web, not to be confused with the dark web, can be equated with the middle section of the iceberg just beneath the ocean surface and comprises password-protected pages, not accessed directly through search engines. The top layer is the surface web, those websites visible to us all, including this article that you’re reading right now. The Internet itself, like an iceberg, is composed of three distinct layers, with the dark web constituting the very underside of the iceberg. It exploits a particular technology known as ‘Tor’ (The Onion Router, the name derived from an encryption technique which makes websites untraceable) to form a network of undetectable online material, accessed solely by using particular software or with sanction. 2 years later, and it’s still as intriguing to me as ever.Īs if taken straight out of a dystopian novel, the dark web, initially created by the US government to permit anonymous communication between spies, is essentially a kind of parallel universe, concealed within the masked depths of the Internet. Now, before you brand me as an audacious delinquent, you might be interested to discover that it was instead our teacher who was the culprit responsible for enlightening our 18 year-old stress-ridden minds with this phenomenon. My fascination with the dark web all started in an A-Level English lesson where literary discussion (quite clearly) went ever so slightly off topic.
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