Anyone use "Deep Web"

So I'm watching a television episode of Law & Order: SVU and they are talking about the "dark net" or "deep web" or stuff like that.

Does anyone ever use it? Does it have any use for the normal person? Or is it just a means for people to share their porno videos and pirate software?

People try to justify Tor, but unless you're a journalist or someone that is in danger because of the information you got (the only cases where Tor is a good thing), Tor is just a way to get access to illegal, and disgusting, porn, and other illegal activities websites.

PS: I've never "used" (as in actively using) Tor, just tested it one or two times to understand what it was and how to use it in case some day I need to.

Edited by nathanpc 2014-04-20 2:12 PM

90% of all of the material on the internet is on the dark net. Most systems, services and data is invisible i.e. un indexed by search engines.

I've undertaken CS research on the development of darknet protocols, so am not going the pretend I haven't contributed to the discourse on the problem. While Nathan is correct, he's also viewing it from the point of someone in a liberal democracy where freedom of the press is taken for granted. If you're in China, North Korea or part of the middle east and want to get to the outside without winding up in a Gulag, it's your only avenue.

In the West, darknet systems aren't without their potential merits. We live in a society where rightly or wrongly ISP's and the state have legislated to ensure that companies and groups are compelled to keep logs of all of your Internet access, searches, phone calls. You don't have to be doing anything illegal for that to be a problem. Something that's legal now isn't necessarily always going to be. I'm sure that the increasing religious governments in parts of the world would love to know what their citizens had been up to in days before their glorious spiritual enlightenment took place. Well, now we can! You think the Tea Party mob wouldn't be interested on access to that type of data on political opponents in both the GOP and Democratic parties? Tosh if you think there aren't people who would use it if they could get it. I see that in 2007 you searched for information on abortion, very interesting. 2009 you were searching for mental health issues - you're not fit for leadership.

As far as I'm concerned the US government which so pretends that it doesn't spy on its own citizens (ha) has no qualms about the fact it actively records as much as it wants about anyone else. The Snowden leaks have proven that much. I'll be damned if I'm going to be accountable for my own academic research to the UK government, I'm certainly not to the US; neither should anyone else in the world. Yet with the US increasingly seeming to believe that it is indeed the antagonist from 1984 I think we all have a duty to send a message that this isn't OK.

If the US allows itself to lose its political morality on this issue, it's a flagrant undermining of your own constitutional rights (certainly the pretence that anyone else in the world should be entitled to the same rights) and makes you no better than any of the worlds despotic regimes who are undermining the freedom of the press, individual and are interested in nothing other than maintaining the faux credibility of their Soviet era propaganda. The UK government is just as guilty. I'm not in any way singling out the US here.

Of course it is abused, but so is the light net. It's no different in that regard. Let's also not pretend that all of our various security services aren't using the darknet for their own purposes 100% of the time.

I've argued that we've been violating the Fourth Amendment since we began warrantless spying and since Congress passed (with bipartisan support) the ironically-named USA PATRIOT Act (it's an acronym though). Logging info from public networks is one thing, but your private network? Those who pushed these through claimed that they are necessary measures to "protect our freedom," but one has to ask exactly what freedom we're protecting.

Nice to see I'm not the only fan here of "SVU," though - and it's not just cuz of Mariska Hargitay.

Okay...I have a better idea about it all now. So here is a challenge for you...give me a single website address that I can visit and see something that doesn't show up when I search it on a normal search engine...say Google since it seems to be the most popular.

Tell me a website that I can address directly by typing in a http://www.etc.com that if I did a Google search, nothing would be returned.

Do those type of sites exist?

Dunno, but etc.com definitely exists.

I have a private server with some not-very-important files (all password protected anyway) in it which I access with a kinda obscure domain name (since it's supposed to be private) and you definitely won't find it with a Google search. Most of those 90% are just private servers and things like that.

There in is the problem. The web itself is a light net service. The www works off of the light net addressing system, DNS. DNS is a centralised system that works based upon an address hierarchy that roots with public servers. In order to get anywhere in DNS you have to go via the root system, via someone else's server. Therefore you will never get a darknet website that resolves against public DNS.

So quite literally I cannot give you a web address. Best case it would be an IP address. Most >established< darknet services rely on a totally different addressing access system known as DHT. DHT in a nutshell is a Distributed Hash Table. The premise is that everyone currently running on the service receives 1nth of the telephone directory of all available servers, encrypted and randomly distributed. The nth value is relative to the number of users on the service. As users add and remove, the amount of the telephone directory you store fluctuates. If you go offline without signing out, the system can self repair the missing data.

In order to get onto the darknet service you have to get onto the DHT. In order to get onto the DHT, you HAVE to know the IP address of only one node that is a member of the DHT swarm. You then sign onto the DHT via that node, get assigned an nth of the address space and off you go, you have full resolution access to the service.

The limitation is obvious however, unlike public DNS, with DHT, unless you can discover any single node in the DHT, you cannot get onto it. It becomes a chicken and an egg problem. For legitimate servers, there are published lightnet entry node directories. Usually, special, publicly visible servers offering access to the DHT - DHT linked Torrent Aggregators are an example available through existing torrent tracker services. Want to get onto a Torrent DHT, go to a Torrent tracker site on the www lightnet and load up against its entry node. If the authorities close down the entry node, that's all that is lost. Entry nodes are low security and you run the risk of your connection to the node being logged. But what you did once in the server has nothing to do with the server.

NB: Most BitTorrenting is NOT darknet/DHT, so please don't confuse lightnet BitTorrent with my analogy here. BitTorrent is a service which happens to have a version of itself that is based upon DHT. Most BitTorrent is a lightnet service that uses torrent trackers. DHT BitTorrent has no trackers as every single node in the DHT is a tiny % of the tracker itself.

There are DHT versions of DNS and the www, but in order to access anything on it, you have to get onto a DHT or know it's IP address - even then knowing its address isn't necessarily going to get you onto the service as it may only allow connections from legitimate DHT referrals. Most darknet services are service orientated, not browser orientated i.e. they do one thing via special software written for the DHT swarm itself. Though as I said, there are darknet www equivalents.

I should clarify at this point that technically the terms "darknet" refers to pseudo-lightnet file sharing, "Dark Internet" is more appropriate to what I am describing above. Even then, technically under the definition of the dark internet, a DHT with public entry points isn't a Dark Internet service either.

If you want to play with a dark www overlay then freenet is pretty safe (assuming that you're in a country where it's legal to play with encrypted systems) https://freenetproject.org/. Under freenet both the addressing and the data itself lives in the DHT swarm, so if you access (the non existent) equivalent of HPC:Factor on it, a larger % of the page load request will come from one or a small number of different peoples running computer in order to load the page - rather than lots of small %'s from many users. Despite this, there are no central servers, no central addressing, no single point of failure and in order to change the content you have to hold the authoring keys for the material.

If it's on a registered domain, it's not a dark service. I can pull your server and prove it exists from it's glue's and/or its A/AAAA records.

Here is another good example of the problem at hand

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/16/lavabit-court-rul...

Darknet /= deep web.... Deep web is known to few. Google isn't good at deep web sadly...

North Korea? Hah, not really. There is not even a way to access interwebs without satellite hardware or trans-borders radio IIRC.

Edited by Alt Bass 2014-04-22 4:19 PM

satellite hardware or trans-borders radio

Both of which are broadcast mediums and therefor would DEFINATELY require encryption to ensure confidentiality and anonymity.

To ensure confidentiality to the last moment before you get pelenged and wasted.


I have nothing against your points though.

Edited by Alt Bass 2014-04-23 7:22 PM

North Korea is connected by China's telecom lines.