The Dark Web

When you are watching a video on Youtube or looking to buy a gift for your friend on Amazon, this internet browsing is taking place on a level called the Surface Web. But beneath there are many layers of the internet and what’s known as the Deep Web. On the Surface web, you’ll find those websites which can be easily found by doing a quick search on Google/Bing. After this layer comes the layer of websites which cannot be easily accessible as banks or various companies store their encrypted data here. Further down at the bottom of all these layers, there lies the Dark Web.

The Dark internetcould be a part of the net that may not indexed by search engines. The Dark internet is solely a networ kof internet sites which needs basic secret writing technologies to access.Most of us use these technologies every day to check our bank accounts and email. Many people think that it is only the haunt of drug dealers and those who trade stolen information. Apart from that, many professionals use the Dark Web and the list includes law enforcement, journalists and cryptologists. It is also used in countries where free speech is suppressed, allowing freethinkers to express themselves. The Dark Web world is accessible with the help of anonymity tools. Some popular tools are Tor and I2P.

Nowadays hackers, leaked information and general carelessness with data security abound, and on the Dark Web is where it will end up. This has become inevitable due to the user and server anonymity which it provides. Admittedly there is a lot of bad stuff out there on offer, the most infamous of which having been Silk Road. But the Dark Web is popular for both black market and user protection, so it has both positive and negative aspects. The existence of the Dark Web allows investigative news organizations such as ProPublica to communicate securely with sources. Everything you find on the Dark Web is not illegal. There are links to full-text editions of hard-to-find books, collections of political news from mainstream websites. You can conduct discussions concerning current events anonymously on Intel Exchange. There are a huge number of whistleblower sites, including a dark web version of Wikileaks. Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent site that law enforcement officials have repeatedly shut down is still active there. Even Facebook has a dark web presence.

Theremay besome confusion existing between what constitutes thedistinctionbetween the Darkinternetand also theDeepinternet. The latter simply are pages which are not accessible to the public such as a corporate intranet, secure bank pages and private social media accounts. These pages are non-searchable. The actual Dark Web accounts for less than .01% of the web.

While it hits the headlines quite often for the wrong reasons, many law abiding citizens are supportive of the Dark Web as it promotes anonymity and, most importantly, privacy. Rather than a haven for criminals, it can be seen as a force for good.