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Foreword
Most of my readers know my blog for the "Slackware, Simplified" series, where I offer beginner-friendly tutorials on Slackware Linux. However, there's only so much I can think to cover. In the meantime, I've created a new series, "Tron's Takes" where I offer my opinions on various topics that interest me, and potentially others that you, the reader, can suggest I look into in the comments.
Now for the actual blog
A lot of people outside the tech space have heard the term "dark web" before, and many of them have a mental image of it, but may not know entirely what it is. Essentially, the public perception of the "dark web" is that of a spooky underground version of the World Wide Web, where only hackers, pedophiles, and other assorted nuts and wackjobs hang out to be evil. Anyone with a more in-depth understanding knows that this is only a half-truth. Yes, you can find some pretty heinous shit on the "dark web" but that only makes up a small but vocal minority of its usage.
But first, let's address the elephant in the room for anyone who doesn't have that in-depth understanding and just knows the term "dark web" and thinks "bad."
Essentially, the "dark web" is just an umbrella term for various network protocols that expand the functionality of the World Wide Web, or even are separate from it almost entirely. These include, but are not limited to:
- Tor, short for "The Onion Router." This is a network protocol that essentially routes your online traffic through 3 different computers chosen at random and placed in various locations around the world; the guard node, which takes your traffic initially, and sends it to the middle node over an encrypted network, which then sends it to the exit node, again over an encrypted network. That exit node then sends your traffic to the outside internet. Then the process is reversed whenever the site you're on sends data to your device. This has the benefit of making your traffic very hard to decrypt by any outside attackers, but also comes at the cost of being very slow. The average Tor user is very patient.
- I2P, short for the "Invisible Internet Protocol." This is a network protocol that is arguably even more secure than Tor, but less popular due to being harder to set up. I2P operates on a peer-to-peer basis, which means that things on the network are only around as long as at least one machine on the network has that thing cached. This means that if an I2P site, called an eepsite, is not getting any traction, and the person running it decides to shut down the server hosting the eepsite, then that eepsite is effectively dead. In order to make sure you're contributing to the network's longevity, and to keep any eepsites you wish to host alive, you'll have to keep a machine running the I2P network constantly. This has the added benefit that you can browse more eepsites the longer you're connected, but can be a bit of a hassle for some.
- Hyphanet, formerly, yet still colloquially called Freenet, is a network protocol that similarly operates on a peer-to-peer basis. The network by default is not super secure, but it can become extremely secure through the "trust" system implemented in the network. Essentially, you make your traffic more secure by limiting the number of peers that you connect to, with the goal being to limit it to only people you trust, and ideally that you know in real life. This massively slows down your speeds, but in turn makes it more secure than Tor and potentially even I2P. However, the process of finding people to trust on Hyphanet/Freenet is more than most people are willing to put in the effort for, and so most will only use the network in its less secure state, which is admittedly still more secure than the "non-dark web" or "clearweb."
These are just a few examples with excrutiating detail as to how they operate. Now let's get into the meat and potatoes of this blog entry - dissecting the public perception and providing "facts and logic (God I hate saying that)" that might help convince people that it's not so bad as long as they're careful and smart.
What most people think of as the "dark web" is actually just Tor and not the other networks I mentioned, so we'll mostly stick with that for our examples.
Believe it or not, the criminal shit that goes down over Tor only accounts for a small but vocal minority of its traffic. Much of what you'll find on Tor is blogs, legitimate marketplaces (usually doing all their sales with cryptocurrency), frontends to popular sites, and even some popular sites like Twitter and Reddit have Tor onionsites. Most of it's pretty casual, and one of the popular hangouts on Tor is Dread, a Reddit-like onionsite that has discussions on all sorts of topics, some legal, some not.
Another big thing people use Tor for is circumventing legal barriers and censorship. For example, in 2022 when Iran's government effectively shut down the nation's access to the clearweb during heated anti-government protests in response to the police killing of Mahsa Amini, political activists circumvented this nationwide censorship by using Tor to access the outside world and make their cause known.
With these things in mind, it's not hard to see that there are some legitimate uses for the "dark web" and that it's not all criminal activity. Some people even use Tor in the same way that they'd use the clearweb, solely for the purpose of added security and anonymity.
This can apply for basically every anonymizing network that makes up the greater "dark web."
Of course, let's not get ahead of ourselves and claim that everything is hunky-dory on the "dark web." There is a lot of absolutely heinous shit that happens on it every day, just as there's a lot of heinous shit that happens on the clearweb. Some onionsites (I won't say which ones, obviously) allow you to hire hackers to get information on people against their will. In addition, you'll find plenty of illegal pornography if you're not careful, there's marketplaces full of illegal "goods" like drugs, illegal weapons, and more. And, arguably worst of all, some people even use the "dark web" as an outlet to showcase their horrible crimes, such as rape, murder, trafficking, reckless endangerment, and more.
The prevalence of such things as listed above can really turn some people off from ever considering the "dark web" as a viable option. That's understandable, but this sort of shit happens on the clearweb all the time as well, maybe not as often, or as hyped-up and front-and-center, but it does happen a lot. Of course, most people don't come across that shit on the clearweb because they know how to be careful and not accidentally happen upon it. Just apply this same practice to the "dark web," only more fervently, and you should be golden.
While media coverage of the "dark web" can really stain the reputation of anonymizing networks like Tor and I2P, in reality it's not much worse than the clearweb we use every day, it's just that the bad stuff is highlighted a bit more often. Ultimately, as long as you're careful about what you click on, and practice some good foresight, the "dark web" can be a great way of staying secure and anonymous in a world chock-full of privacy-invading social media and government surveillance (look up PRISM and suddenly I won't sound so crazy).
Hopefully this blog entry taught you something, and maybe this can spark a healthy discussion in the comments. If I didn't convince you that the "dark web" is actually good, then hopefully you at least got a laugh out of my inane coping.
Until next time.
-TronNerd82
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