As ~linksbro points out, hidden sites have a huge amount of churn. In fact, back in the days when I used to frequent the darker side of things most hacking foru

As ~linksbro points out, hidden sites have a huge amount of churn. In fact, back in the days when I used to frequent the darker side of things most hacking forums would change addresses monthly/weekly/sometimes daily. A lot of various hidden sites are ad hoc communication platforms, put up and taken down as needed. And yet, even still, there is a large amount that are incredibly well hidden and require several jumps/prior knowledge to get to (i.e. not just hitting a certain url). Ignoring all hits that went to sites dead after six months (an eternity for hidden services) is akin to the weight loss studies that throw out the data points representing people that dropped out when they didn't lose weight. Almost blatantly dishonest and shows a pretty superficial understanding of that which they are trying to study. Beyond that there are still so many statistical fallacies and logical leaps going on in this article it's pretty astounding... for instance the author editorializes that: >>> What they may instead show is that Tor users who seek child abuse materials use Tor much more often and visit sites much more frequently than those seeking to buy drugs or leak sensitive documents to a journalist. Completely ignoring the possibility that these pedophilic sites are comprised of images, which could artificially increase the amount of requests (i.e. one person looking at 10 images = 10 unique hits in the study). I could go on and on here, but I think this money quote from the study principal sheds some light upon the true objectives at play: >>> “Before we did this study, it was certainly my view that the dark net is a good thing,” says Owen. “But it’s hampering the rights of children and creating a place where pedophiles can act with impunity.” Edit: In my mind, the real takeaway from this article is that the FBI/Interpol seem pretty content leaving these sites up for extended periods of time while they go after the drug marketplaces, carders, and counterfeiters