The Seedy Underbelly of the Internet

When you think of the internet, usually what first comes to mind is social networking, online marketplaces, and other places that don’t sound that bad. Look deeper and you’ll find that the internet isn’t as nice as you thought it was. This “dark side” of the net is comprised of everything looked down upon in the real world – drugs, weapons, false identities, and even hit men for hire exist in this rough-and-tumble darknet. Not just physical products, but virtual products float around as well; from term papers to file sharing and even e-currency populate this dark area.

One shining example of the dark side of the net is known as the “deep web.” Charlie Fripp of IT News Africa writes that the deep web is “a collection of webpages that are not indexed by search engines, or content that is not part of the Surface Web.” The deep web is said to be many hundreds of times bigger than the surface web, or the web that we can normally access at any given time. To access the deep web, you need client side programs, like Freenet or the Tor Browser. Currently, the program with the most exposure would have to be the Tor browser – but not for any good reasons at all.

Once you have a program like Tor installed, you first have to locate a site, or “hidden service directories” (Fripp), that serves the need of what you are looking for. An example site looks something like this: http://kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion. These links are inaccessible by regular browsers, like Firefox or Chrome because they cannot parse these links – mainly to the fact that .onion is not a top-level domain that is not recognized by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). The site posted links to a directory of sites called “The Hidden Wiki.” It contains a menagerie of deep ...

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Fripp, C. (2014, January 27). Deep web: what search engines do not see | IT News Africa- Africa's Technology News Leader. Retrieved from http://www.itnewsafrica.com/2014/01/deep-web-what-search-engines-do-not-see/

Gallagher, S. (2011, October 23). Anonymous takes down darknet child porn site on Tor network | Ars Technica. Retrieved from http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/10/anonymous-takes-down-darknet-child-porn-site-on-tor-network/

Isaacson, B. (2014, January 30). The Deep Web Is Filled With Drugs, Porn And ... Book Lovers(!). Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/30/illegal-libraries_n_4682897.html

Neal, M. (2013, September 30th). To Bust a Giant Porn Ring, Did the FBI Crack the Dark Web? | Motherboard. Retrieved from http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-fbi-says-it-busted-the-biggest-child-porn-ring-on-the-deep-web-1