The Dark Web

[dave50]

I keep hearing about this in the media and on crime dramas. Has anyone here ever accessed it and how would you if you wanted to? I hasten to add i am not looking to do anything illegal or anything like that, I just want to know what it's all about.

[Togo]

You will need to download a browser something like Tor. Not a place to go unless you are pretty teched up.....loads of criminals you see. Some years ago my son, then aged 14, downloaded and was operating Tor on my desktop. He even had it set up as a proxy server and was generating bitcoin. At the time he was very big into gaming, World of Warcraft etc. and a lot of the people on there ran Tor.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-deep-dark-web-and-how-do-you-access-it

[Guilbert53]

I must admit that while I worked in computers all my life I never had any interest in hacking or things like the Dark Web.

However it may help to understand how the web "works" to get a better idea of what the Dark Web is.

I guess a lot of people think the internet is one huge computer somewhere holding all the web information.

In fact it is MILLIONS of computers all connected together in a sort of huge spiders web.

When you go to a web site you have no idea WHERE the computer is that is holding that web site. It may be in the UK, it may be in the USA, South America, Japan, Korea, Russia or wherever.

In fact in that sense it is a bit like the phone system. When you "dial" a number it rings a phone in another town or another country.

So when you sit at your computer and connect to a web site it could "dial" a computer anywhere in the world.

Because the internet is made up of millions of computers connected together then it is possible to set up ANY computer to connect to the internet and then store web pages or other (dodgy?) information.

So for example anyone could set up a computer in their bedroom to connect to the internet and store all sorts of information on it (be it criminal or whatever) and then tell selected "friends" how to connect to this computer.

The computer would not appear if you did a general web search, so it would not be easy to find. You would need to be "in the know" to find this computer and access the things on it.

Basically it is individuals (or small groups) who connect their own computers to the internet and install special software on them and then let their "Dark Web" friends know how to access it.

Once their friends access it then they can store all sorts of dodgy stuff on it.

So this is sort of how the Dark Web works (that is the general idea anyway I don't know all the technical details).

[HansUrbancka]

It is my opinion that the Dark Web is an area on the Internet to be avoided and any advice on accessing it should be removed by Moderators and Editorial staff.

Hans.

[Kidas]

I've never accessed the dark web, not do I have any desire to do so.

As Hans notes, seeking that kind of advice is a bit like seeking advice on how to deal drugs, or write computer viruses.

Not the kind of information that you want to give out on a family website.

The dark web is just that. Dark. Hidden. By design.

People who want to do things without risk of being identified use it. That very often means criminals, but also those who are concerned about the proliferation of private data and want to keep their identity and activities secret.

Standard internet technology links many computers together.
When accessing a regular website such as TheAnswerBank.co.uk, your computer looks up the address in a public look-up table (called DNS), and discovers that the 'address' of TheAnswerBank is something like 64.237.61.68

When you type the address into your browser, all kinds of information leaks out to various people and organisations.

Take a look at this link, for example
http://mybrowserinfo.com/

If people want to put a lot of that data together, they can find out huge amounts of information about the user and his or her activities, where the user has been; what sites they looked at and so on.

Those who use the Dark Web use specific browser software that hides this kind of information, and furthermore uses specific software to hide the addresses of the source and the destination of each web request by jumping through a series of hops, each one of which should be untraceable. Make five or six, or 1000 (or 1000,000) such hops and the request cannot be traced. Hence the Onion analogy

Add to that end-to-end encryption and other security systems, and the dark web becomes a place where residents can do anything they want, with no come-back and no fear of identification. I leave to to your imagination.

The OP said they keep hearing about the dark Web in the context of crime dramas or crime reports on the news.

That might give a clue as to the kinds of activities you might find there.

[Vintager]

The Onion Router or "TOR" is not much use in hiding your identity if your router is the last hop in the chain as that is the one is public.
Hope Ive got the right link for this but its a bit late at night;
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/krgx2/how_safe_is_tor/
There are other ways of accessing the dark / deep web and other browsers to do it by the way.
Very little of interest there though.
It is just web addresses that are not indexed on browsers and search engines as they were before they became available.
Regards, Bob in Telford.