Dark

I have seen the Dark Web. I may not have delved any deeper than the Deep Web, although links to alleged CP (you know what that stands for) sites were all over the place. But I think there were actually more pleas from site owners to not even discuss that matter than there seemed to be actual links to content. The only illegal thing I actually saw was a site with a bunch of copyrighted MP3 files for download — like there isn’t enough of that on the public Internet. I clicked on a link that allegedly would have taken me to a directory of hitmen and professional assassins. That link did not work, nor did a majority of the links out there. Needless to say (or maybe it is needfully said) I was not out there looking for anything like that. I had just heard time and again about how 96% of the Internet is not visible to most people, a figure I find rather hard to believe but worth exploring.

I also ventured into the Dark Web because the subject of it has come up among friends the last couple of weeks. I don’t know anyone who has seen it, so I figured I’ll go first. Having not given it a lot of thought until now I decided that the notion that the Dark Web is completely saturated with CP and other nasty shit had to be ridiculous. And it is. There is plenty of activity down there but — based on my admittedly brief survey — I wouldn’t say that even a majority of it is illegal. But again, it feels like the early days of the open Internet where clicking a bad link from what you thought was a trusted source could land you on some godawful bestiality porn. That kind of shit washed up on usenet, or so I heard. Bad CP pron would be titled something innocuous, tricking people into downloading it. I always wondered if that was not an FBI trap, since even the mere possession of CP, whether you obtained it intentionally or not, was enough to have commandos raid your house.

Question I’m asking myself now is, do I want to set up shop out there? Moving this .MOBI to the darkness almost makes sense, but there’s no reason I’d have to retreat from the open Internet entirely. I could echo this site to a .onion address, as I’ve seen other legitimate bloggers do.

Not going to lie, though. I was actually feeling pretty nervous about getting into this weird world, and still feeling anxiety after shutting down Tor and apparently escaping the DW unscathed. I didn’t care about the warnings that I might see things that can’t be unseen, or that I’d be traumatized by some ghastly image. I was more concerned about malware, or unwittingly biting a link that bites back, causing the Tor browser to explode with ransomware attacks or other perils. I don’t think I’d have any recourse if something on the Dark Web happened to brick my computer. The Malware Bytes software that I use did kick off a number of times, saying it blocked connections to things. It does not do that so much on the open Internet.

For additional cloak and dagger tension I accessed the Dark Web from behind a VPN. I don’t especially crave anonymity, so this is overkill for me. The VPN element can actually slow things down considerably.

To get to the illegal marketplaces you have to register, at least on all the ones I encountered. I’m not ready to do that, as I don’t have an anonymous email account at a place like protonmail. I am kinda curious about the credit card marketplaces, where sellers claim they make clones of credit cards with cc numbers and PINs skimmed from ATMs and other card readers. I’m not curious enough to actually obtain one but it’s an interesting little business to learn about. Other items for sale include human organs, weapons, and I don’t remember what else. I’ve heard about all this stuff for years now but never dove in just to see if it was real.

In some ways the Dark/Deep Web feels like the early days of .MOBI — not this Sorabji.MOBI but the introduction of the .MOBI TLD (Top Level Domain). Back in the early 2000s domainers seemed to think .MOBI was the next .COM and that every brand name owner would want their mark appended with .MOBI. By most accounts .MOBI’s prospects fizzled when Apple put the .COM button on the iPhone. From there publishing and templating systems adopted to making multiple versions of a single site which responded to the abilities of whatever device was being used to access it.

But in those early prospecting days there were all kinds of .MOBI sites, and the atmosphere around them felt like the so-called Wild West days of the early WWW. dir.mobi is one I remember off the top of my head. It was a directory site, similar to Yahoo, but only for .MOBI content. No trace of that site’s content seems to exist, though the domain itself is still alive and parked. A similar site, mobile-dir.mobi, is surprisingly still around with its “Stake Your Claim On The Mobile Web Now!” headline echoing the excitement that once surrounded .MOBI. The most high profile .MOBI I remember serving mobile-friendly content off the pure .MOBI domain was time.mobi, which now sends you to time.com.

Another resemblance between the DW and early .MOBI is the backwash of old content that’s been circulating on the open Internet since the early 1990s.

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I have not been .MOBI much lately. In fact I am not .MOBI at present, typing this from home. Trying to get things going again with my so-called business but it just gets harder every day.