This is a blog post I found while exploring the dark Web a long time ago, and it caught my eye after reading a few paragraphs. The author, whose name is Alice, has taken a rigorous attitude, devoting 7,000 words to the ins and outs of the dark web, and the examples cited in the article are all footnotes (up to 44), which shows that the author has spent a lot of energy, and has a very professional level, and is completely writing a serious paper. In order to read the convenience, I deleted the footnotes, readers if there is a deep interest, you can see my personal website blog, I am afraid to add a link to the article will be blocked… (website to see the signature should be written, the site for two years, the number of page views but I ~~ hahahaha).

First of all, write some of their own reading, the article is very long, readers need to calm down to straighten out their ideas, the article likes to drop the Internet book bag, involving rich knowledge points, many knowledge points are not available to the average person, but also gave the footnotes, if seriously reading, it is estimated that there is no certain level to spend some time to see the footnotes. Such an article is much smarter than a cool article with a few gory and scary photos to create a scary atmosphere of the dark web. What I admire more is the author’s ability and attitude, as well as the feelings full of idealists.

The article made me lament that there was already a blueprint for anonymous electronic money transactions in 1981, and until now Bitcoin has only been a tool for human evil (money laundering/black market/manipulation). In fact, even the original idealist free/equal Internet is very different from today’s centralized/monopolistic Internet. It’s ironic that what started out as a well-intentioned tool to defend everyone’s privacy has instead been used by the evil of humanity to become a monster that everyone is Shouting at.

It is even more ironic that on the open platform of the Internet, the material about the dark web is so incendiary and arouses emotions that most people have little understanding of it. (Most people’s understanding of the virus is also the same) and on the so-called “dark web” this private platform, it is rigorous and objective to describe its past life.

The same is true of human history, where the few deceive and control the many; There is also an idealistic minority who want the majority not to be deceived and controlled. So far history has repeated itself, but I believe it will have a different future.

With the full text –

Debunking the myth of the dark Web

Author: Alice

Published: November 17, 2017

Technology pioneers’ quest for Internet freedom began shortly after the Internet was born. In 1981, cryptographer David Chaum designed an anonymous E-mail system, and a few years later outlined a blueprint for an anonymous electronic money exchange system in a paper declaring that it “would render Big Brother obsolete.” Three years later, TimothyC. May argued that just as printing weakened and changed the medieval guilds and social power structures, cryptography would do the same. A small wire fence made it possible to build vast farms and ranches in the Western United States, and the small branch of mathematics known as cryptography became a sharp pair of scissors to strip away the wire fence surrounding “intellectual property.” In 1993, Berkeley scholar Eric Hughes further supplemented the basic idea: We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other faceless giant institutions to benevolently grant us privacy, and if we expect privacy at all, we must stand up and defend it.

The anonymous web technology we see today is the result of the efforts of these hackers. Unfortunately, their years of hard work have been seriously distorted in the past few years, and they have become what the media calls the “dark web.” While the Silk Road is partly to blame for this, it is largely to blame for the wild urban legends that, because of their dramatic and mysterious nature, are widely disseminated on social networks and half-understood subject media. They will tell you that the entire Internet as we know it is only 5% of it, and that more than 95% of the content is on the “deep web” and the “dark web.” So who’s involved? There are alleged secret societies, mafias, human experimentation, illegal drugs, human trafficking, and hidden conspiracies. Today darknet, tomorrow darkweb, then deepweb, in short, all kinds of buzzword, and “Internet security” is not a word.

These myths have serious implications not only for anonymous technologies and their communities, but also for Internet privacy and security itself. In order to dispel such myths, it is necessary to conduct a simple research on the sources of these claims, so that history can be used as a mirror to recognize the facts, and over-exaggerated conspiracy theories can be destroyed. Finally, we need to recognize the misleading and harmful nature of the term “dark web” and recommend that we stop using the term “dark web” and use other terms, such as “anonymous web.”

Due to the short writing time, the article is not only very long and lax sorting, I hope readers can understand.

Deepweb

Before dealing with the confusing definition of the “dark web,” let’s first talk about the uncontroversial “deep web.”

“Deep Web” is a term used in web search to refer to content that exists on the Internet but is not indexed by search engines. The simplest examples are websites that require a login to view, public databases that require a form to query, and so on. Many studies believe that the scale of the data that has not been included is much larger than the scale of the network data that can be searched, and the public data is clearly on the network, but can not be found by search engines, so it is a major problem that search engines need to solve. Especially in the early days of Internet development, when search engines were not perfect, relevant reports appeared almost every few years. There are also academic teams that have built tools to help users query deep Web data, which is where the claim that only 5% of the Internet we see comes from. For example, this report by ABC Australia in March 2010 even used “iceberg” as an example, which foreshadowed the legend in the future.

Early meaning of Darknet

The term “darknet” had several early meanings, none of which have anything to do with today’s urban legend usage. The first meaning, which is closer to its literal meaning, refers to an address space on the Internet that has assigned IP segments and routes, but does not actively run any network services or servers. Therefore, any packet entering this IP address space seems to be entering a black hole, hence the name “dark web”. Such networks can act as a kind of honeypot, deploying logging and intrusion detection systems to track malicious traffic on the Internet, such as network viruses, DDoS attacks, etc., because any data attempted to send to the “dark web” is inherently problematic. The term appears in several papers on network architecture and security research, such as this MIT paper, and the team can be reached at darknet@mit.edu…

The second, more interesting implication, comes from a paper published in 2002, which suggests that the “dark web” is not a separate physical network, but rather a layer of applications and protocols on top of the network, such as “P2P file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and keys and passwords shared in email and newsgroups.” The reason for this alarmist description is that the paper, written by Microsoft developer PeterBiddle for digital rights management technology, argues that such private web sharing poses a serious challenge to DRM, which they do not want to see. Around the same time, groups led by the RIAA and the MPAA began a harsh crackdown on piracy in the name of protecting artists, and many American Internet users had a lot to say about it. In 2005, journalist J. D. Lasica published a book titled Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation, a book that describes Hollywood’s copyright wars, the open Culture movement, etc., is also the meaning of the “dark web”. At the same time, the Freenet project, which has been active since the beginning of this century, also released a new version of v0.7 in 2007, adding a “dark web” mode, meaning that Freenet will only be connected to the trusted friend node for data exchange, so as to improve the privacy of user communication and avoid interference from outsiders. Here, the “dark web” is the same definition.

The third meaning refers to the network used for organized crime. This usage was first seen in the special research on online extremism and terrorism of Arizona State University, which used web crawler, statistics, natural language processing and artificial intelligence technologies to conduct a large amount of data analysis on the network promoting terrorism, and studied the operation mode and communication characteristics of such communities. In a 2003 slide study, the “dark web” was defined as the other side of the Internet, used by terrorist and extremist groups for propaganda. In 2006, a feature report on the study was picked up by NPR, Fox News and others, probably the first time a news outlet used the dark Web. But it’s worth noting that the “dark web” here doesn’t have any meaning of “anonymous,” “encrypted,” or “secret,” and that the terrorist websites in question are all accessible directly from a browser (the slideshow begins with sites that promote extreme racism, such as Stormfront, as an example), and that Tor wasn’t mentioned until recently. As a result, the term “dark web,” which is the most widely abused term in today’s sense and pervades media reports and urban legends, still does not exist.

It was not until November 2009 that The Guardian reported on The dark side of the internet, which briefly covered the Pirate Bay, the development of Freenet, and the existence of illegal content on the web. The Reddit forum’s /r/darknet/ section was created around the same time, apparently in response to the news. However, there is only a brief mention of Tor and links it to the “dark web”, saying that it is a Freenet-like system, but there is no mention of Tor’s Hidden Service features, and the time is set for all of 2010. Typing Darknet or Darkweb still yields no results, except for a puzzle game of the same name and something like a “Dark Web Color Scheme Guide.” A search of Tor Hidden Service, however, turns up some technical data. It can be seen that until 2011, the anonymous website technology itself, such as Tor, and the various shady websites hosted by it were still not associated with the term “dark web”, and its modern usage was still not formed.

Silk Road

The turning point came in February 2011, when Silk Road launched after six months of development. Just four months later, tech media outlets like Gawker and Motherboard were the first to report on the black market for drugs operating on Tor. However, the words “deep” and “dark” did not appear in the news at all, only the role played by Tor was mentioned, and then more mainstream media followed up, and Congressman Charleschumer’s attention called on law enforcement agencies to act. But in these early articles, there was no mention of the “dark web” or “deep web,” instead focusing on Bitcoin.

Meanwhile, in April, Anonymous members launched the #OpDarknet initiative, claiming that one of their IRC servers had begun blocking proxy servers, Tor, and VPNS, and called on Anonymous members to use i2p. This is probably the earliest modern use of Darknet. In October of the same year, Anonymous launched an attack on the child pornography site Lolita City on Tor and the Freedom Hosting service, exposing a large amount of user data, and again using the #OpDarknet banner, claiming to seek justice. Then, in reports in the Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal, there was a natural interpretation of one of the terms “Darknet,” which said it “protects dissidents from government crackdowns but also serves as a venue for everything from drugs to child pornography.” According to the former, “The sites on Darknet are part of the Invisible Web, sometimes called the Deep Web, which includes content other than the Surface Web that is indexed by search engines.”

Over the course of the year, some individual blogs began to refer to the Tor HiddenService as “deep web” and “dark Web”, such as using Anonymous’s Operation Darknet captions. At this point, the term “dark web” was first associated with these anonymous sites on Tor and confused with “deep web,” a usage that would continue to spread. Soon after, the famous image of the iceberg appeared, and the earliest documented appearance of the image was this version uploaded to Imgur on May 31, 2011, which has been viewed more than 150,000 times. It compares the Internet to an “iceberg” and places easily accessible sites above the water, while lesser-known sites that require technical tools are placed below, and asks if any of its readers have reached the deepest level of the water. The image is poorly reworked and in poor quality, and it also suggests that niche forums such as 4chan, 808chan, 7chan and 420chan are the dividing lines above and below the water. It stands to reason that the image first appeared on a discussion post on 4chan before it was uploaded to Imgur. Full of 4chan’s usual color of abuse and parody, it soon aroused the attention of unknown outsiders, leaked out of 4chan, and was posted elsewhere.

In one Reddit post, for example, the user asked /r/askreddit what the image meant and got 161 votes. It was around this time that the standard “deep web” and “dark web” myth that “the entire Internet is only 5% known of it, and that more than 95% of the content is located on the deep web and dark web, and that there are” government secrets, secret societies, mafias, human experimentation, illegal drugs, human trafficking “claims began to emerge. The most prominent example is the “Mariana Net,” which was posted around the web in June 2011. It takes its name from the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, which refers to the deepest and most secret corner of the so-called “dark Web,” and is the subject of many urban legends. This statement is likely to have been directly influenced by the “iceberg” image.

By the end of 2011, such claims were widespread. We don’t find the original urban legend text, probably because it originated on 4chan and other imageboards and is no longer recorded, but references to it can be found everywhere, such as in the K-3 BBS of Taiwan villagers, where the discussion is very conspiracy-tinged; In this Channel 4 news report on September 1, the word “Darkweb” also appeared; Reddit’s /r/deepweb/ section was created in June 2011; By 2012, “Darkweb” had been frequently seen in mainstream media, such as this BBC report about illegal drugs on the “dark web”; A book called Deep Dark Web was published the same year; After the FBI shut down Silk Road and arrested those involved in the case in 2013, public opinion reached its climax, eventually forming the current Tor = “dark web” situation.

In short, we can see that the “dark web” had almost no use before 2010. After that, Anonymous’ #OpDarknet was the first to bring the term to public use. With the launch of the Silk Road that same year, the media quickly confused the meaning of “deep web” and “dark web.” At the same time, 4chan users also naturally noticed these phenomena, and produced “iceberg” pictures to discuss and joke. As a result, all the media were misled by 4chan’s “masterpieces”, so that the “deep web iceberg” theory entered the official news report. During this time, various rather dramatic urban legends began to spread, such as the “Mariana Net,” which eventually became the nonsense we read today, such as this one.

Anyone browsing foreign urban legends on Reddit is no doubt familiar with the term “deep web.” It’s a domain that lurks beneath the web as we know it, that you can’t find through a search engine or a web site, that’s full of all kinds of unimaginable illegal activities, like drug smuggling, arms dealing, hacking, money laundering, human trafficking, you can even buy murder through the dark Web, join a cult, buy and sell organs, Or livestreaming perverted killings or watching child pornography. Even more striking is that the content of the dark web accounts for 94% of the entire web, in other words, the pages that we can normally access, only account for 6% of the entire web. The hacker successfully hacked into the “dark web” full of evil activities, and witnessed the extreme torture images that left him with a lifetime of shadow.

If the general domain is an iceberg, then the dark web is the bottomless ice beneath it. To access The dark web, you have to go through a system called Tor, a technology originally developed by American military scientists that allows all users to remain anonymous on the Internet, also known as The Onion Router because the passwords that protect data are layered on top of each other like an onion. Since such technology has fallen into the hands of people with a heart, it has become a dark world, if you want to also through the Internet to provide teaching into the dark web, but those who enter the dark Web hackers definitely have a way to find your server in the first time, even your IP address, causing a threat to life.

Stop using the term “dark web.

Thus, the “dark web” is an ambiguous and heavily mixed term that has not only lost any definite meaning in itself, but has also become associated with various urban legends. First, the term “dark web” is riddled with factual errors, such as “astonisingly, the dark Web accounts for 94% of the web’s content”, in order to attract readers’ attention, without mentioning the true size of Tor Hidden Service. The OnionScan project scanned the entire Tor network in 2016 and found a total of about 30,000 sites, and with Freedom Host II going offline, the number of Onion sites has reached an all-time low of about 4,000 (if I were a media outlet, I’d write this: Shock! The Dark Web has become 80% darker! ). In addition, according to the statistics of Tor Metrics, the current Tor network can exceed 100 Gbps of traffic, but Hidden Service traffic only accounts for 1.5 Gbps, about 1% of the entire network traffic, most of the traffic is almost through the exit node browsing the World Wide Web. Instead of being “94% of the web,” building websites and services is one of the community’s top priorities. For lurid dramatic effect, these urban legends also exaggerate the violent elements of the Internet, and while it is true that some vicious outlaws use Tor to cover themselves, the extent of it is exaggerated, and much of it is completely false, like the “invisible dark world”. If you want to, you can also access the dark Web through the education provided on the Internet, but those who enter the dark Web definitely have a way to find your server in the first time, even your IP address, causing a threat to life “, as if I open two pages with Tor Browser, I will be killed? Are you sure you haven’t been watching too much Hell Girl? Even the characters didn’t die that fast… Moreover, there is a huge amount of malfeasant activity happening every day on the open Internet, at least at the same level, if not as serious, as on the so-called dark Web; At the same time, these urban legends resort to mystery and conspiracy, and not only do not play an applied role in popularizing cybersecurity knowledge, but also mystify security technology.

This leads directly to serious consequences. For example, the British police recently said that visiting the so-called “dark web” indicates that you may be a terrorist, and encourages citizens to actively report to the police, in case someone sees Tor Browser in the future, someone will call the police. Second, it seriously misleads newcomers to treat anonymous web technologies with a distorted mindset, and especially to use them in a curious manner, rather than as a practical security tool, always trying to dig something out of the ground. Tor developers in a speech last year, for example, one after the researchers see https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/ was amazed at the meeting asked him: “what’s the matter? Why did I find a dark Facebook on the dark Web?” Ironically, this version of Facebook allows activists in authoritarian countries to speak out without revealing their geographic location. Readers who read the comments on Alice’s blog, saying that they were “shocked to see the ‘dark web’ with Chinese characters for the first time,” may have been misled. Finally, this has a negative impact on the developers of anonymous web technologies and the community as a whole, meaning that exaggerating urban legends will encourage more and more people to set up websites dedicated to publishing content related to urban legends, rather than providing innovative, practical and safe web services. This image will become self-reinforcing and will only lead to the deterioration of the entire online community environment. Internet privacy cannot be promoted.

Commenting on a browser plugin called Darkweb Everywhere, Tor core developer Roger Dingledine blasted it:… I can’t accept the name: I don’t want to promote such dark images of icebergs at all.” The term “dark web” only exaggerates and reinforces the FUD that HiddenService is facing. We’ve been debating these terms lately, and I now tend to favor The term “The PrivateWeb.” While it conflates the security features that users get from Tor with the security features that websites get, both are really necessary, so I have no problem with the name; The Tor team’s speech at the 2015 CCC conference also mentioned that people need to realize that Tor is just another network protocol. If we need to transfer plaintext web pages, we use HTTP; If we need secure delivery of web pages, we use HTTPS, if we need self-authenticated, end-to-end encrypted anonymous delivery, we use Onion, and that’s it. Here we urge readers to use the term “privacy network” or “anonymous network” (Alice prefers the latter), and stop using the term “dark web” to call these web technologies! The entire anonymous web technology community would appreciate it if you could practice this for yourself.

Finally, having spent a lot of time talking about urban legends and horror stories that the news media talk about, let me also briefly tell you the stories that they don’t tell you: In 2006, a whistleblower published the improper actions of a pharmaceutical company. As a result, under the pressure of lawyers in the name of “copyright”, the domain name of the published document was stopped for many times, and finally it was successfully published on Tor HiddenService. This was one of the first examples of Tor Hidden Service providing citizens with freedom of speech protection, and later wikileaks did the same; Today, thanks to the efforts of the Tor community, platforms like GlobaLeaks and SecureDrop have been joined by more than 30 news outlets, making it easy for any citizen to submit raw material, such as political corruption, to multiple news outlets. According to these outlets, they have received some key clues from here (what exactly? Media: Don’t answer, don’t answer, don’t answer); In addition, Hidden Service has a strong technical advantage. Imagine that Tor HiddenService’s own traffic is not only fully end-to-end encrypted, but also the host name is the public key, as long as the link is correct, there is no need to worry about man-in-the-middle attacks, and because all traffic passes through the Tor network, you can run any TCP server without a public IP address. At the same time, the attack surface is much less than the WWW service, many users let their home servers refuse all inbound connections, and Tor is a very useful application scenario for remote access and management. In addition, the future development of next generation network tools based on the anonymous network technology foundation represented by Tor is very promising. Ricochet is an absolutely decentralized chat Service based on Tor Hidden Service. Each person’s account is the host name of Onion server on their own machine. All communication is conducted point-to-point directly through Hidden Service. Not only can mass monitors not intercept the content of chats, but they can’t analyze your network of relationships through metadata (experimental project, not recommended for ordinary users). Now public sites such as DuckDuckGo, Blockchain, GnuPG, and even Debian software sources have opened their own Hidden Service, and have been better protected.

Due to space, Alice will not say much here, and will continue to introduce it to you in the future. Thank you for your support. In addition, the developers urge everyone to deploy the Onion protocol as often as possible to promote the technology, and if you’re a website owner, it’s great to have your website support TorHidden Service access.

At the end of the article, Eric Hughes’ 1993 Cypherpunk manifesto is excerpted to commemorate their groundbreaking contributions.

Privacy is a necessity for an open society in the electronic age. “Privacy” is different from “confidentiality” in that “private matters” refer to things that a person does not want the world to know, while “confidential” refers to things that a person does not want anyone to know. Privacy, therefore, refers to the right to selectively disclose information to the public. If the two parties had exchanges, then both have memories, and either can talk about their meetings at will, what’s to stop them? Of course, a law can be enacted to prohibit it, but freedom of speech is also a fundamental condition of an open society, and trumps the right to privacy, so we should not restrict speech. As we ask for privacy, therefore… Both sides just need to know that… Directly relevant information When I buy a magazine with cash at the counter, the cashier doesn’t need to know who I am. When I ask my email provider to send and receive messages, my provider also doesn’t need to know who I am, who I’m talking to, and who’s talking to me; They just need to know how to deliver the information and what fees I should pay. When my identity is revealed by the trading mechanism, I have no privacy. … Open societies also need privacy, and when I speak, I only want my audience to hear those words, and I have no privacy when what I say is available all over the world. … We cannot expect the mercy of governments, corporations, or other faceless giant institutions to grant us privacy. … We must protect our privacy - if we expect to have it at all.