To access the dark web, you need to use dedicated software. It cannot be accessed in the same way as the regular Internet. There are many different types of browser that can be used, but TOR is probably the most popular. TOR stands for The Onion Router and that name alone probably does most of the job of explaining what the dark web is.
With the regular Internet, you log on with a browser. Say you want to learn something interesting, you type ilearnedthistoday.com into your browser address bar. Your browser looks at the DNS server to work out what server the website is stored on. The browser sends a request to that server asking for a copy. Your browser sends a unique number with the request, called an IP address. The IP address identifies your computer and it tells the server where to send the copy of the website you want to look at. Now, if you are looking at my site, you are fine, but if you are trying to look at something you shouldn’t be, that unique IP address is traceable. The authorities can track your IP address and see everything you have looked at from that computer because all servers keep records.
The dark web works on a series of overlay networks in order to stop anybody tracking the sites someone is visiting. Someone using the dark web opens up the TOR browser and types in the web page they want to visit. All of the domains on the dark web end with .onion. Let’s say ilearnedthistoday.onion (this doesn’t exist – I hope). The request is heavily encrypted and sent to a node, which is a computer operated by another TOR user on the network. When it reaches the node, a layer of the encryption is removed and it is relayed to another node. Another layer of encryption is removed and it is sent on to another node and so on. Each node in the chain knows the identity of the previous node and the identity of the next node, but that is it. Because of this, it is impossible to track where the request has come from or where it is going to because that information is nowhere in the chain. This is why it is called The Onion Router. As the request goes along, the encryption is peeled away like the layers of an onion. The request is so heavily encrypted that it is impossible to track geolocation or the IP address of the users, and users cannot get any information from the hosts. This makes traffic on the dark web anonymous and, technically, free from the authorities.
The Onion Router was developed by the United States Naval Research Laboratory in the 1990s to protect US intelligence communications online. It was released to the public in 2003. The Naval Research Laboratory released the code to the public in 2004.
The Dark Web and the TOR browser have been heralded as a weapon in the fight for free speech. Whistleblowers have released information on the dark web and various news leaks have come from the dark web. Right now, the BBC has announced that it will be reproducing its news site on the dark web so that people in countries that heavily censor their news, such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, can have a chance to see balanced news. The BBC is trying to bypass this censorship by using the Tor network.
However, despite these positive uses of the dark web, it is mostly used for criminal purposes. Child pornography, drug sales, and other criminal activities appear to make up the majority of the content on the dark web.
People imagine the dark web as a secret shadow to the real web (called the clearweb by dark web users). However, it is nowhere near that big. The regular web has about 1.18 billion websites and over 30 trillion pages. The dark web has about 300,000 sites, so it is a tiny fraction of the web. It is also, apparently, very difficult to use. It resembles the regular internet back in the 1990s. It is a dangerous place that I’m not going to venture into.
The dark web would be impossible to shut down because any agency attempting to stop it would have to shut down every node at exactly the same time, which they couldn’t do.
So, the dark web is a network that uses layers of encryption and nodes to prevent anyone know what people are looking at. You can use it by using a browser. TOR is the most popular. And this is what I learned today.
Photo By The Tor Project, Inc. – https://media.torproject.org/image/official-images/2011-tor-logo-flat.svg, CC BY 3.0 us, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20851621
Sources:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web/How_the_Web_works
https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/professionals/our-views/the-dark-web/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_web
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node_(networking)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing
https://www.avast.com/c-what-is-an-ip-address