Dark Web: With History

Everyone might has heard of the dark web. It is commonly known as the epicenter of illegal online activity. A vast secret cyber underworld. It is called the dark web. In addition, people are not using it to buy shoes, they are buying drugs weapons anything you can imagine. The subterranean realm is sinister and untraceable with consequences that can be deadly. People may also be familiar with the Silk Road or at least its history. The online marketplace where you could buy narcotics with absolute anonymity but the dark web is part of something much bigger the. Deep Web, which makes up percentage of the entire web. Through our internet searches in our daily lives, we only see a tip of the iceberg. How did this all start? We will look at both the Deep Web and the dark web.

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                    Parts

or starters, let us look at some basics. The web can be defined into three categories.

 First, there is the surface web, that is everything that is open, and available everything that can be found is through a Google search. Following this is the Deep Web; this is the portion of the Internet that is hidden from conventional search engines and it contains unindexed websites. Here you can find personal information like your payroll and medical records or a corporation's private data and finally there is the dark web. Here sites are intentionally hidden from search engines sites. In addition, the dark web can only be accessed through special browsers which you use masked IP addresses to hide the identity of the visitors.

History

 So where did this dark web come from? In 1969, a couple of university students sent the world's first computers to compete a message it was sent on ARPANET an early ancestor to the Internet. The concept of connecting computers together was a radical idea at the time and at certain motions the progression to the modern Internet. However, ever since there has been the internet or any form of internet, people have used it for illegal online activity in fact one of the. First ever ecommerce transactions was a drug deal in it was done between two students at 1970 it was done between MIT and Stanford student. In the 1980, people also attempted to create data havens in small countries with relaxed laws. These early examples were nowhere near as sophisticated as the modern dark web. However, they illustrate the point that they have always been people who wanted to use the web to escape the eyes of the authorities or everyone's eyes for that matter.  In the midst, 1990 things started to get interesting. A technology called tor was created. Tor stands for The Onion Router and is a browser, which allows users to exchange information anonymously online. Peer-to-peer networks like tor are the backbone of the dark web. For the dark web to exist it needs anonymity. Tor manages this by hiding the identity of the user by bouncing the connection through three different servers around the world adding a layer of encryption each time hence the name onion. It would be logical to assume a group of antiestablishment coders and criminals trying to evade government control invented that tall. Looking at the illegal activity of the dark web this makes sense. However, quiet paradoxically tor was invented by the US Naval Research Laboratory to allow intelligence personnel to transfer information. Department of Defense called DARPA further developed all and in 2002, they made it available to the public. To this very day, tour is still funded in part by the US government. However, why would the US government fund and allow the public to access tor. Well, the idea was to make it difficult for anyone to decipher which information on the dark web intelligence officers created. It is easier to remain anonymous in a sea   of anonymous users. Simply, the more users there are the better it is important to note that without tor the dark net would still exist.  Tor is simply one dark web browser to which there are many. It is kind of; as if Google Chrome were shut down tomorrow, the internet would still exist. In 2014 dr., Gareth Owen provided a breakdown of the sites on the dark web by classification. His research found that drug marketplaces were by far the most common type of site. This was followed by other marketplaces including fraud sites and Bitcoin sites, which are mainly used for money laundering. Ok so let us take a deeper dive and take an interesting look at the deep and dark web. Firstly, it is huge and its size is growing rapidly. A study done by the University of California discovered that the dark web had 7.5 petabytes or 7500 gigabytes of information. In just two years, this number increased to over 91000 petabytes.

 Today combined the deep and dark web is over 96% of the entire web. To give you more of an idea of the scale 60 of the largest deep web sites collectively exceeds the size of the entire surface Internet by 40 times. When you do an internet search, you are only searching 0.03 percent of the entire web. The dark web is such a nefarious place that you can get frauds based around murder.in one case, people kept falling for an elaborate fraud to hire hitmen. A website called Busser mafia claim to offer the toughest Albanian hitman services but in reality, it was two Eastern European men tricking people into handing over their money to pay for hit jobs that actually did not happen. After getting their initial payment, the fraudsters often strung customers along lying to them and making up stories about why the killing had not happened yet. They even started a fake moral panic around the issue. They started up false campaign groups and petitions calling for the beset Mafia website to be shut down this are a convoluted effort to make it look legitimate. It said that you could find anything from an AK to rocket launcher on the dark web if you look hard enough. Criminals have also been discovered selling fake degrees certifications and passports. People have also hired hackers to break into university systems just to change their grades. Stolen identities up for grabs from the dark web. Passwords for individual bank accounts cost around 160 dollars and your full identity about 1200$ on the dark web there is also a hidden Wikipedia. This contains Wikipedia articles that are immune from censorship. One of the most infamous sites on the dark web is the marketplace Silk Road. The name comes from an ancient network of trade routes, which connected Europe parts of Africa Asia and the Middle East. Ross Albrecht borrowed the name in 2011 when he said of the first Silk Road marketplace under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts. Here many things can be purchased with Bitcoin but mostly illicit drugs and fraudulent documentation such as passport. Being mostly anonymous Bitcoin among other crypto currencies was instrumental in allowing Silk Road and any anonymous marketplace to run. Ross Ulbricht was arrested in 2013 and charged in a high-profile case with money laundering computer hacking conspiracy to traffic narcotics and arranging hit men to murder six people. However, he was not prosecuted for the attempted murder charges. In October last year the FBI swooped Ross Ulbricht was sitting at his laptop in the science fiction section of a San Francisco library but to ensure they got the evidence they wanted the federal agents had to grab Albrecht before he had time to shut down his computer. He was sentenced to double life in prison and the US government from Silk Road and old bridges personal account seized 40 years without parole in total approximately a hundred and seventy thousand bitcoins. At the time, this was roughly a hundred million US dollars. You have sold at the peak of bitcoins price in it would be worth approximately 2.8 billion US dollars. Russ Oh Bridge had a staunch libertarian philosophy believing that he was doing an ultimate good for the world. His rules for Silk Road outlined that only products that do not cause harm to innocent people may be listed. He fundamentally believed that he was giving power to the people against the government. It could be argued that the site reduced violence in society as Silk Road provided a means to purchase narcotics without the violent nature of cartels gangs or local drug dealers. Ross Ulbricht is heavy prosecution has caused a stir in the online community. There have been arguments about how much of Silk Road was built by an Ulbricht, as he had a limited programming knowledge. Some claim that, this was the work of a group. New versions of Silk Road and other drug marketplaces keep reappearing perhaps as long as there is demand. There will always be another form of Silk Road to land. The dark web has also been crucial to whistleblowers. The New York Times and other news outlets have opened onion sites to allow people to anonymously submit information. Therefore, the dark web is not really a place to surf. It is a place that allows you to do specific things and people should really know what they are getting into before accessing it. Many sites need invites and many people provide very specific services. Stumbling upon a site by accident may even be a criminal offense. To make things clear it is definitely recommended that you do not mess with the dark web. They have been reports of people getting strange phone calls after browsing through forums. People’s webcams being hacked and then being put on livestream for all to see. People being followed around in public and being horrified to see photos while doing their daily activities appear in their computer later that day. Many people regard the dark web as an underworld. An illegal and dark place where criminals meet. Its true there is a lot of this type of activity but the other argument is that it gives people freedom. It can stop governments from overreaching their boundaries. It can keep people and their ideas safe. The question is how we stop the parts of the dark web that should not exist. Right now, it seems like an unanswerable question but people such as tor staff are working on. It in a time where all of our information is online and our identity follows us on every post and search perhaps who needs something like a dark web in order to keep our freedom. So I will pass the question off to you.Do you think we need something like a dark web for privacy reasons? On the other hand it just might be the case in the future that intelligence agencies compromised the system without even telling us it is an interesting debate.