Skip to main content

Is the Dark Net Key to our Privacy?



DARK NET | DARK WEB | DEEP WEB | SURFACE WEB

Darknet, dark web, deep web, surface web, what are all these terms? Don’t worry. I’ll explain them one by one and also tell you how the darknet is key to our privacy.

Starting with the surface web, it is the web which is completely indexed by the search engines. Like, if you can access the internet, you can access the surface web. For instance right now while you are watching my video on youtube you are accessing the surface web.

Now coming to the deep web, it constitutes of the 96% of the online content, the remaining 4% is the surface web. The deep web is not indexed by search engines, for example, if you want to shop online you can simply search on any search engine like google or bing and you will get a whole list of different online shopping websites because it is available on the surface web, but if you want to know somebody’s credit card number you won't get that on google, it's not that easy. Because that information is secured with some password or encryption inside the deep web which can only be accessed by the servers the owner has provided access to. So, in simple words, even when you are checking your emails by logging into your account using a password you are surfing the deep web.

Now the most important, the darknet or the dark web, which are often used interchangeably but there is a little difference between the two. Darknet refers to a network on the internet whereas dark web refers to websites on the darknet.

Darkweb is, so to speak, a subset of the deep web that is intentionally hidden and requires special browser like Tor to access. Tor stands for ‘The Onion Routing’. Like the onion is protected layer by layer, so is Tor.

Let me give you a simple analogy suppose you have a message which you want to be delivered to your friend but before reaching your friend it has to pass through 3 servers on its way. Let us say A, B and C. The server A only knows that something has come from you and it has to be delivered to server B. Server B knows that it has come from A has to be delivered to C. The same is with server C it delivers the message to the destination without knowing that it has come from you and your friend, then, has access to your message. Thus each server in the network acts as a layer of encryption for the message and only you and your friend know what's inside the message.

You must certainly have heard of the Dark Web as the place of criminal activity and it is but not to the extent we know it. You will find all kind of criminal activities like buying credit card numbers, illegal drugs, guns or hacked Netflix account details. Almost everything is there but that is not the purpose dark web is even built for.

The Tor Project claims that out of 2 million people who use Tor per day only 1.5% of them visit the hidden sites. The majority of Tor users are those who use it just to protect their privacy.

In 2014, the Internet Watch Foundation found 31,266 URLs that contained child porn images. Out of those URLs, only 51, or 0.2% were accessed on the dark web. That means the dark web is not the only place of crime, the surface web is too. It all depends on the way we use them.

As an analogy, would you allow a cop to break into your house and rummage through your belongings? Of course not. But that’s just what's happening to your computer and cell phone devices every day. Even the most trusted apps take our data with or without our permission and they can access it at any time.

It is our right to protect our privacy and for that, we need privacy and anonymity tools at all times. Tools like Tor and Virtual Private Networks to protect our browsing history the way they protect the darknet websites.


Sources-

https://techlog360.com/darknet-vs-dark-web-vs-deep-web-vs-surface-web/

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3249765/what-is-the-dark-web-how-to-access-it-and-what-youll-find.html

https://www.wired.com/2015/06/dark-web-know-myth/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luvthTjC0OI


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gravitational Time Dilation

Do you know what happened in the movie 'Interstellar', when the protagonist returned from his voyage and found that his daughter was even older than him? Well, I'll tell you how that happened.  You all must be familiar with the name of the famous scientist Albert Einstein, he was the one who suggested that space and time are interrelated where space is the three-dimensional world we live in. both of them are together termed as four-dimensional spacetime. Every object in the spacetime curves it.  The heavier the object, the greater is the curve. This is what we call warping of spacetime. Let's take the example of putting a ball on a bedsheet. When we stretch the bedsheet and put a ball on it, we'll observe that it creates a curve at that place and the heavier the ball, the larger is the curve.  The warping of spacetime is the reason that the earth revolves around the sun because mas of the earth is comparatively very small than that of the sun, so the sun creates a h...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mathematics of Rubik's Cube

Have you ever wondered why this Rubik's Cube which is often considered as a children's toy fascinates the mathematicians too? Surely because there is too much mathematics involved in it. What if you take a Rubik's cube and separate every piece of it and then you close your eyes and start assembling it again in any preferred configuration. When you take the first corner piece you'll have 8 possible positions of putting it as there are a total of 8 corner pieces in the cube. Then for the second piece, you'll have 7 possible positions as one position has already been occupied by the first piece you have put. Now, for the third piece, you'll have 6 possible positions and so on until for the last piece you'll have only one position left. So when you multiply them it becomes 8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 or rather simply 8! . And each piece can be arranged in 3 possible orientations, it gives us 3^8 possibilities for each permutation of the corner pieces. Now coming to the e...
Post a Comment
Read more