7 ms·

Making Light of the “Dark Web”

173 points by andimm 9y ago

jstanley 9y ago
Enjoyed the Experian video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjrydnr_pvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjrydnr_pvQ I can't get past the irony of Experian making a tool to help people find out if their personal data is being traded without their knowledge. Here, I translated it: "Is your personal information already being traded on Experian? Find out on the dark web. Right now we're offering a one-time Experian scan completely free. Go to xyz.onion/scan to see if your information is on Experian. Then learn how the dark web can protect your identity. Act now to keep your personal information safe."
- zeth___ 9y ago
  I still trust them more^H^H^H^H as much as facebook.
  - jpl56 9y ago
    stty erase ^H
  - msla 9y ago
    You can use ^W to erase a whole word.
wgerard 9y ago
I'm actually shocked that the "dark web" makes up anywhere close to 6% (not sure what that's a percent of, I assume it's 6% of all websites). That seems pretty high, but admittedly I don't head down that route very often.
- ryanlol 9y ago
  I don't see any reason to believe that the numbers in that infographic might be accurate.
  - b3lvedere 9y ago
    It's a very nice infographic though. Aren't nice graphics always true? :)
  - ktpsns 9y ago
    It does not even define how it measures the "size" of someting in the web. I own a website where most files are by intention not clickable from the home page (I would call them "private). By definition, is it "dark"? How do we measure how much the website is dark -- by the file size, number of files or information entropy? And how can it be measured by anybody except me? "Dark Web" is just a buzzword to sound scary and fancy, nothing more.
- fooker 9y ago
  Dark does not just mean the Tor network. Anything not indexed by search engines or behind authentication but accessible from the internet can be called part of the dark web.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    You are confusing the broader Deep Web with the subset known as the Dark Web.
  - ataturk 9y ago
    OMG! Bad guys used to send letters to communicate long distance. We must ban physical mail and the messengers who enable their dark deeds!
buildbuildbuild 9y ago
Quite interested in legal action against Experian. As a person who has faced a lot of cyberstalking in the past, I enrolled in their dark web product mostly for kicks (and it was free). ... then I posted my name buried in a long post in the most popular Tor forum. Zero notifications months later.
- CiPHPerCoder 9y ago
  I am shocked. Shocked, I say.
- buildbuildbuild 9y ago
  Am I the only one who finds Troy’s description of a tragic suicide offensive? “Many [dark markets] with their operators in jail or dead (it didn't work out so well for the operator of AlphaBay)”
  - CiPHPerCoder 9y ago
    I didn't catch the implication of suicide there. I figured he was gunned down and then saw the headline and figured "oh, arrested, yeah that sounds like it not working out very well" and moved on.
  - aaron695 9y ago
    Yes, it was a little disappointing on an otherwise humorous and informative article, but I'm sure it was just a slip and he'd change it if he spent more time thinking the wording over. PS You are OT for this thread, hence I hope the reason for the current downvotes.
  - EnFinlay 9y ago
    No, I didn't find it offensive. And characterizing a suicide by someone who broke multiple laws, got rich doing so, and then being unwilling to face the laws as "tragic" is a bit disingenuous.
    - buildbuildbuild 9y ago
mandelbulb 9y ago
>Check out his mum's face - he is so grounded! :>
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  Young man, i had enough of this. You are getting outside, sunshine, no technology, no internet. We bought you a skate-board and a e-guitar as punishment. This is what your summer looks like.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
I had trouble explaining someone what the Deep Web was. I was using the analogy : "Imagine the Internet without google.". I also tried to say "Imagine you only had access to a set of links to find content". I was unable to get over this mental hurdle when explaining this to them.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  "Imagine you sign in to Facebook and decide to read some posts in a private group."
- jayd16 9y ago
  So its like AOL homepage era dial up?
  - seandougall 9y ago
    And nearly as fast!
- b3lvedere 9y ago
  It's not perfect by all means, but maybe this analogy will work: If the internet was a fast food restaurant then the surface web would be like the counter where you order and get your food. The deep web would be like the kitchen where your food is processed. Sometimes visible, sometimes not, but nothing really secret going on. You may ask and you may get answers depending on your clearance level. Maybe the dark web would be the secrets of the fast food restauraunt they don't want customers to know about for lots of reasons. Like the recipes, the trades, the money flow, the illegal trash dumping, how to kill the competition, that time people almost died of food poisoning, etc.
superkuh 9y ago
You gotta be the change you want to see. Start putting every site you register/lease a domain for on the clear web also on the tor network with it's own onion address that you really own. I do it and now I get plenty of good traffic (along with all the bots/scans) over Tor to my technical hobby (radio) sites. It's a better system that doesn't require you to trust the DNS companies to stand up to political/business/other pressure.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  I've played around with Tor hidden services a bit, and the biggest problem I have with actually using them is discoverability. Even if a site I'm looking at does offer a hidden service version of itself, all search engine links still point to the clearnet version of the site. I wonder if Tor browser would be open to some changes to fix that problem. Maybe offering to show the onion version of a site if the site includes <link rel="alternate" href="http://[address].onion/" /> in its head would be a good first step.
  - superkuh 9y ago
    I put a big H1 link with the tor address on my domain index pages.
- tombrossman 9y ago
  Sounds great. Do you know of any clear, easy to follow guides to make this happen? Something like the DigitalOcean reference tutorials would be optimal.
  - tylersmith 9y ago
    It's not quite DO caliber but this gist was sufficient for me: https://gist.github.com/mtigas/565718bbb928ce439e95 https://gist.github.com/mtigas/565718bbb928ce439e95 It was very simple. I think what we really need is web server integration like we are starting to have with TLS.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
badrabbit 9y ago
So.. At this point it's no secret that hostile nation state actors run a large number(majority) of Tor relays and exits and target users using their favorite 0 day of the month in addition to revealing their real IP. Is it wise or even safe to use Tor at this point? The Tor network was not designed to be resistant to the current and very active global adversaries. I say this because of all the comments I am reading about supporting Tor and having an onion service. If you are someone who still thinks Tor is safe,can you explain to me what threat model would make it a relevant solution? No matter how I look at it all the threat actors Tor might help against can either deanonymize you or they are so resource bound,using a reputable VPN will thwart them just as well (with the reduced risk of a hostile 'exit') At this point,I think recommending Tor might actually be dangerous. Looking Forward to the Orchid project to go live.
- kaffee 9y ago
  Use tor for hidden services only. There's far less scope for a hostile geographic nation state to serve malware and/or record IPs. I'm also confused about what exactly a nation state learns when it sees that you accessed nytimes.com (or some other site) using tor. They learn the same thing by monitoring all internet traffic. Perhaps you could clarify your criticism of tor for the benefit of readers?
  - badrabbit 9y ago
    Certainly. As you said,a hostile nation state targeting a nobody (like myself) would gain no new information by the fact that it knows I used Tor to access nytimes. Unfortunately, intelligence community and law enforcement agencies do not presume innocence. They would presume that you're a "bad guy" who is "trying to hide". What harmless sites you visit is of little importance to them. You're a likely threat,essentially, a Tor user is an active target for proactive LE and Intelligence gathering operations. This isn't parnoia,the snowden leaks which dated around 2008 show the NSA targeting visitors of sites like linux.com (xkeyscore). When hunting for "threat" you look for the people trying to hide. For example,they love it when people use PGP encrypted emails,their sensors pick up on that and they correlate metadata gathered from that communication for further intel gathering and offensive targeting (PGP does not encrypt email metadata) So,using Tor with a nation state actor or LE agency incorporated into your threat model would be very bad in my opinion,even if all you do is visit nytimes over https via hidden service with noscript.
tbirrell 9y ago
Actually, "dark-web" is not (yet) in the list of words the bulshit generator uses. The whole generator function is in `#mk-boxed-layout script` (viewable in the element inspector) along with the word list it uses. var verbs = Array('aggregate', 'architect', 'benchmark', 'brand', 'cultivate', 'deliver', 'deploy', 'disintermediate', 'drive', 'e-enable', 'embrace', 'empower', 'enable', 'engage', 'engineer', 'enhance', 'envisioneer', 'evolve', 'expedite', 'exploit', 'extend', 'facilitate', 'generate', 'grow', 'harness', 'implement', 'incentivize', 'incubate', 'innovate', 'integrate', 'iterate', 'leverage', 'matrix', 'maximize', 'mesh', 'monetize', 'morph', 'optimize', 'orchestrate', 'productize', 'recontextualize', 'redefine', 'reintermediate', 'reinvent', 'repurpose', 'revolutionize', 'scale', 'seize', 'strategize', 'streamline', 'syndicate', 'synergize', 'synthesize', 'target', 'transform', 'transition', 'unleash', 'utilize', 'visualize', 'whiteboard'); var adjectives = Array('24/365', '24/7', 'B2B', 'B2C', 'back-end', 'best-of-breed', 'bleeding-edge', 'bricks-and-clicks', 'clicks-and-mortar', 'collaborative', 'compelling', 'cross-platform', 'cross-media', 'customized', 'cutting-edge', 'distributed', 'dot-com', 'dynamic', 'e-business', 'efficient', 'end-to-end', 'enterprise', 'extensible', 'frictionless', 'front-end', 'global', 'granular', 'holistic', 'impactful', 'innovative', 'integrated', 'interactive', 'intuitive', 'killer', 'leading-edge', 'magnetic', 'mission-critical', 'next-generation', 'one-to-one', 'open-source', 'out-of-the-box', 'plug-and-play', 'proactive', 'real-time', 'revolutionary', 'rich', 'robust', 'scalable', 'seamless', 'sexy', 'sticky', 'strategic', 'synergistic', 'transparent', 'turn-key', 'ubiquitous', 'user-centric', 'value-added', 'vertical', 'viral', 'virtual', 'visionary', 'web-enabled', 'wireless', 'world-class'); var nouns = Array('action-items', 'applications', 'architectures', 'bandwidth', 'channels', 'communities', 'content', 'convergence', 'deliverables', 'e-business', 'e-commerce', 'e-markets', 'e-services', 'e-tailers', 'experiences', 'eyeballs', 'functionalities', 'infomediaries', 'infrastructures', 'initiatives', 'interfaces', 'markets', 'methodologies', 'metrics', 'mindshare', 'models', 'networks', 'niches', 'paradigms', 'partnerships', 'platforms', 'portals', 'relationships', 'ROI', 'synergies', 'web-readiness', 'schemas', 'solutions', 'supply-chains', 'systems', 'technologies', 'users', 'vortals', 'web services');
ataturk 9y ago
Such complete bs. The media has always felt threatened by the Internet and has made it the bad guy over and over since it came into existence. The only way to put an end to this is to put an end to these breathless media outlets that promote mass hysteria. Fake news.

173 points by andimm 9y ago

Enjoyed the Experian video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjrydnr_pvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjrydnr_pvQ I can't get past the irony of Experian making a tool to help people find out if their personal data is being traded without their knowledge. Here, I translated it: "Is your personal information already being traded on Experian? Find out on the dark web. Right now we're offering a one-time Experian scan completely free. Go to xyz.onion/scan to see if your information is on Experian. Then learn how the dark web can protect your identity. Act now to keep your personal information safe."

zeth___ 9y ago
I still trust them more^H^H^H^H as much as facebook.
- jpl56 9y ago
  stty erase ^H
- msla 9y ago
  You can use ^W to erase a whole word.

wgerard 9y ago

I'm actually shocked that the "dark web" makes up anywhere close to 6% (not sure what that's a percent of, I assume it's 6% of all websites). That seems pretty high, but admittedly I don't head down that route very often.

ryanlol 9y ago
I don't see any reason to believe that the numbers in that infographic might be accurate.
- b3lvedere 9y ago
  It's a very nice infographic though. Aren't nice graphics always true? :)
- ktpsns 9y ago
  It does not even define how it measures the "size" of someting in the web. I own a website where most files are by intention not clickable from the home page (I would call them "private). By definition, is it "dark"? How do we measure how much the website is dark -- by the file size, number of files or information entropy? And how can it be measured by anybody except me? "Dark Web" is just a buzzword to sound scary and fancy, nothing more.
fooker 9y ago
Dark does not just mean the Tor network. Anything not indexed by search engines or behind authentication but accessible from the internet can be called part of the dark web.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  You are confusing the broader Deep Web with the subset known as the Dark Web.
- ataturk 9y ago
  OMG! Bad guys used to send letters to communicate long distance. We must ban physical mail and the messengers who enable their dark deeds!

buildbuildbuild 9y ago

Quite interested in legal action against Experian. As a person who has faced a lot of cyberstalking in the past, I enrolled in their dark web product mostly for kicks (and it was free). ... then I posted my name buried in a long post in the most popular Tor forum. Zero notifications months later.

CiPHPerCoder 9y ago
I am shocked. Shocked, I say.
buildbuildbuild 9y ago
Am I the only one who finds Troy’s description of a tragic suicide offensive? “Many [dark markets] with their operators in jail or dead (it didn't work out so well for the operator of AlphaBay)”
- CiPHPerCoder 9y ago
  I didn't catch the implication of suicide there. I figured he was gunned down and then saw the headline and figured "oh, arrested, yeah that sounds like it not working out very well" and moved on.
- aaron695 9y ago
  Yes, it was a little disappointing on an otherwise humorous and informative article, but I'm sure it was just a slip and he'd change it if he spent more time thinking the wording over. PS You are OT for this thread, hence I hope the reason for the current downvotes.
- EnFinlay 9y ago
  No, I didn't find it offensive. And characterizing a suicide by someone who broke multiple laws, got rich doing so, and then being unwilling to face the laws as "tragic" is a bit disingenuous.
  - buildbuildbuild 9y ago

mandelbulb 9y ago

>Check out his mum's face - he is so grounded! :>

Pica_soO 9y ago
Young man, i had enough of this. You are getting outside, sunshine, no technology, no internet. We bought you a skate-board and a e-guitar as punishment. This is what your summer looks like.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

I had trouble explaining someone what the Deep Web was. I was using the analogy : "Imagine the Internet without google.". I also tried to say "Imagine you only had access to a set of links to find content". I was unable to get over this mental hurdle when explaining this to them.

Ajedi32 9y ago
"Imagine you sign in to Facebook and decide to read some posts in a private group."
jayd16 9y ago
So its like AOL homepage era dial up?
- seandougall 9y ago
  And nearly as fast!
b3lvedere 9y ago
It's not perfect by all means, but maybe this analogy will work: If the internet was a fast food restaurant then the surface web would be like the counter where you order and get your food. The deep web would be like the kitchen where your food is processed. Sometimes visible, sometimes not, but nothing really secret going on. You may ask and you may get answers depending on your clearance level. Maybe the dark web would be the secrets of the fast food restauraunt they don't want customers to know about for lots of reasons. Like the recipes, the trades, the money flow, the illegal trash dumping, how to kill the competition, that time people almost died of food poisoning, etc.

superkuh 9y ago

You gotta be the change you want to see. Start putting every site you register/lease a domain for on the clear web also on the tor network with it's own onion address that you really own. I do it and now I get plenty of good traffic (along with all the bots/scans) over Tor to my technical hobby (radio) sites. It's a better system that doesn't require you to trust the DNS companies to stand up to political/business/other pressure.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Ajedi32 9y ago
I've played around with Tor hidden services a bit, and the biggest problem I have with actually using them is discoverability. Even if a site I'm looking at does offer a hidden service version of itself, all search engine links still point to the clearnet version of the site. I wonder if Tor browser would be open to some changes to fix that problem. Maybe offering to show the onion version of a site if the site includes <link rel="alternate" href="http://[address].onion/" /> in its head would be a good first step.
- superkuh 9y ago
  I put a big H1 link with the tor address on my domain index pages.
tombrossman 9y ago
Sounds great. Do you know of any clear, easy to follow guides to make this happen? Something like the DigitalOcean reference tutorials would be optimal.
- tylersmith 9y ago
  It's not quite DO caliber but this gist was sufficient for me: https://gist.github.com/mtigas/565718bbb928ce439e95 https://gist.github.com/mtigas/565718bbb928ce439e95 It was very simple. I think what we really need is web server integration like we are starting to have with TLS.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

badrabbit 9y ago

So.. At this point it's no secret that hostile nation state actors run a large number(majority) of Tor relays and exits and target users using their favorite 0 day of the month in addition to revealing their real IP. Is it wise or even safe to use Tor at this point? The Tor network was not designed to be resistant to the current and very active global adversaries. I say this because of all the comments I am reading about supporting Tor and having an onion service. If you are someone who still thinks Tor is safe,can you explain to me what threat model would make it a relevant solution? No matter how I look at it all the threat actors Tor might help against can either deanonymize you or they are so resource bound,using a reputable VPN will thwart them just as well (with the reduced risk of a hostile 'exit') At this point,I think recommending Tor might actually be dangerous. Looking Forward to the Orchid project to go live.

kaffee 9y ago
Use tor for hidden services only. There's far less scope for a hostile geographic nation state to serve malware and/or record IPs. I'm also confused about what exactly a nation state learns when it sees that you accessed nytimes.com (or some other site) using tor. They learn the same thing by monitoring all internet traffic. Perhaps you could clarify your criticism of tor for the benefit of readers?
- badrabbit 9y ago
  Certainly. As you said,a hostile nation state targeting a nobody (like myself) would gain no new information by the fact that it knows I used Tor to access nytimes. Unfortunately, intelligence community and law enforcement agencies do not presume innocence. They would presume that you're a "bad guy" who is "trying to hide". What harmless sites you visit is of little importance to them. You're a likely threat,essentially, a Tor user is an active target for proactive LE and Intelligence gathering operations. This isn't parnoia,the snowden leaks which dated around 2008 show the NSA targeting visitors of sites like linux.com (xkeyscore). When hunting for "threat" you look for the people trying to hide. For example,they love it when people use PGP encrypted emails,their sensors pick up on that and they correlate metadata gathered from that communication for further intel gathering and offensive targeting (PGP does not encrypt email metadata) So,using Tor with a nation state actor or LE agency incorporated into your threat model would be very bad in my opinion,even if all you do is visit nytimes over https via hidden service with noscript.

tbirrell 9y ago

Actually, "dark-web" is not (yet) in the list of words the bulshit generator uses. The whole generator function is in `#mk-boxed-layout script` (viewable in the element inspector) along with the word list it uses. var verbs = Array('aggregate', 'architect', 'benchmark', 'brand', 'cultivate', 'deliver', 'deploy', 'disintermediate', 'drive', 'e-enable', 'embrace', 'empower', 'enable', 'engage', 'engineer', 'enhance', 'envisioneer', 'evolve', 'expedite', 'exploit', 'extend', 'facilitate', 'generate', 'grow', 'harness', 'implement', 'incentivize', 'incubate', 'innovate', 'integrate', 'iterate', 'leverage', 'matrix', 'maximize', 'mesh', 'monetize', 'morph', 'optimize', 'orchestrate', 'productize', 'recontextualize', 'redefine', 'reintermediate', 'reinvent', 'repurpose', 'revolutionize', 'scale', 'seize', 'strategize', 'streamline', 'syndicate', 'synergize', 'synthesize', 'target', 'transform', 'transition', 'unleash', 'utilize', 'visualize', 'whiteboard'); var adjectives = Array('24/365', '24/7', 'B2B', 'B2C', 'back-end', 'best-of-breed', 'bleeding-edge', 'bricks-and-clicks', 'clicks-and-mortar', 'collaborative', 'compelling', 'cross-platform', 'cross-media', 'customized', 'cutting-edge', 'distributed', 'dot-com', 'dynamic', 'e-business', 'efficient', 'end-to-end', 'enterprise', 'extensible', 'frictionless', 'front-end', 'global', 'granular', 'holistic', 'impactful', 'innovative', 'integrated', 'interactive', 'intuitive', 'killer', 'leading-edge', 'magnetic', 'mission-critical', 'next-generation', 'one-to-one', 'open-source', 'out-of-the-box', 'plug-and-play', 'proactive', 'real-time', 'revolutionary', 'rich', 'robust', 'scalable', 'seamless', 'sexy', 'sticky', 'strategic', 'synergistic', 'transparent', 'turn-key', 'ubiquitous', 'user-centric', 'value-added', 'vertical', 'viral', 'virtual', 'visionary', 'web-enabled', 'wireless', 'world-class'); var nouns = Array('action-items', 'applications', 'architectures', 'bandwidth', 'channels', 'communities', 'content', 'convergence', 'deliverables', 'e-business', 'e-commerce', 'e-markets', 'e-services', 'e-tailers', 'experiences', 'eyeballs', 'functionalities', 'infomediaries', 'infrastructures', 'initiatives', 'interfaces', 'markets', 'methodologies', 'metrics', 'mindshare', 'models', 'networks', 'niches', 'paradigms', 'partnerships', 'platforms', 'portals', 'relationships', 'ROI', 'synergies', 'web-readiness', 'schemas', 'solutions', 'supply-chains', 'systems', 'technologies', 'users', 'vortals', 'web services');

ataturk 9y ago

Such complete bs. The media has always felt threatened by the Internet and has made it the bad guy over and over since it came into existence. The only way to put an end to this is to put an end to these breathless media outlets that promote mass hysteria. Fake news.