I finally made it to the Dark Web. If I came late to the party on this then the reason why quickly became obvious: I had no reason to be there. My curiosity was piqued when the subject of the Dark Web came up in conversation a few times recently. It seemed like I did not know anyone who had actually seen it. So I thought I’d be the first.
I found human organs for sale, assassins for hire, cloned credit and debit cards at bargain prices, gift cards worth thousands selling for fractional pennies on the dollar, weapons, drugs, abundant CP… All that stuff at least appeared to be out there. I did not click on anything that looked too weird or salacious. In fact I think the only illegal thing I actually saw was a directory of what appeared to be MP3 files of copyrighted music – as if there isn’t plenty of that to be found on the public Internet.
You read these stupid things about the Dark Web (or maybe you don’t). These stupid things had me thinking I’d bite a link that bit back, blasting Tor off to a ransomware trap. Malwarebytes did send “Inbound Traffic” warnings a few times but I looked up the IP addresses and they all pointed back to The Tor Project. I seem to have traveled through the Dark Web unscathed but for the first hour or so I don’t mind saying that simply being there made me nervous as hell.
But guess what? Once I got past the obvious CP and other moral excretions I found a decent amount of interesting stuff out there. Plenty of perfectly legitimate people with nothing to hide post WordPress and Hugo blogs to *.onion URLs and there are some active-but-not-too-active social networks. It felt like the early days of the WWW, before the advertising epidemic.
All that bad stuff you hear about on the Dark Web of today was out there in the open on the WWW in the early 1990s, and anyone who spent much time poking around the sometimes murky waters of Usenet, IRC, and other protocols knew full well there were nasty fish swimming in the #channel next door or the newsgroup down the hall. Its presentation and availability were just not as brazen as they are now on the Deep Web.
I did not find too much interesting content through any of the Tor search engines but the quantity and quality of people down on the Deep Dark Web was intriguing.
I actually found the feeling of anonymity to be paradoxically conspicuous. Being in this environment made me like more of a suspect than a curiosity seeker, and scrutiny of one’s words and movements in felt like it would be more detailed than usual.
The text-heavy tundra reminded this Internaut (bear with me here) of one of my favorite Internet websites ever: The Undiscovered Country, online since 1992 at anus.com: http://www.anus.com/tuc/ .
All in all I found that simply getting and staying on the Dark Web was the chore. Using the Tor browser, a flaky NordVPN, taking whatever “be careful out there” JavaScript precautions as necessary … it just seemed like a long way to go for someone like I who had no good reason to be there. It is a chore I would happily put up with if I had legitimate reason to go underground.
If you honestly need anonymity, if you genuinely need a lung and think you can trust some anonymous rando from the Dark Web to provide one, if you really need an assassin or a 5-figure iTunes gift card at pennies on the dollar, the Dark Web is your place.
For now I plan to stay with the Dork Web, though I think these Alternate Internets are going to mushroom and access to them will become easier.
