Many people have never heard of the Deep Web and that’s not surprising. It is not discoverable by standard means and you can’t find it through search engines, including password-protected pages and encrypted networks.
The whole point of the DeepWeb is to guard against traffic monitoring, analysis and anything that could infringe on one’s right to personal freedom and privacy. (Unlike the article that you’re reading here, which can be readily accessed by the general public and the authorities.)
Experts believe that the Deep Web is actually considerably larger than the surface web, but although its name sounds ominous, a big part of it is composed of academic resources, libraries and databases maintained by universities and research organisations. If you’ve ever used a computer catalog then you’ve already come into contact with the Deep Web. There are alternative search engines that can access certain parts of it. Those search engines include Deep Web Technologies, TorSearch and Freenet.
The 'Dark Web' or 'Darknet' is part of the Deep Web and its contents are also not accessible through search engines. But the Darknet is more than that - it is completely anonymous. That’s right, both Web surfers and website publishers are entirely operating within the Darknet, it is extremely difficult, expensive and isn't always successful.
Darknet is a private overlay network where connections are made only between trusted peers and using non-standard protocols and ports. It is well knows as the largest criminal marketplace there is. Here you can buy everything from drugs to women and even assassinations. Some of the services are offered by conman who will take your money and run, but there are people genuinely selling illegal stuff too.
Not that long ago the famous criminal online marketplace Silk Road was taken down by a major police operation which made it into the international press. The most commonly traded illegal items appeared to be hacked PayPal accounts, drugs, fake passports and other ID. Many businesses only accept bitcoins because they can be used to conduct entirely anonymous transactions.
Darknet anonymity is also secured by using an onion network. When we are using the Internet the computer directly accesses the server hosting the website that we are visiting, but in an onion network the direct link is broken and the data is instead bounced around intermediaries before arriving at its destination. The communication is registered on the network but the transport medium is prevented from learning who is doing the communicating. An example of it is Tor, which makes popular onion routers user friendly.
The onion network was originally developed and first used by the military, the US Navy to be precise. The military, government agencies and law enforcement are still active users of this network because it helps them to communicate with their contacts without revealing their location. Sometimes politicians conducting secret negotiations use them too. Other less common users include journalist and bloggers living in countries with harsh censorship and a controlling regime. For those people online anonymity is the only way to express their views without risking prosecution. Of course this means that criminals use it too for the same reasons and they are the Darknet most publicized users.
Many people assume that the Darknet looks a lot more sophisticated than the pedestrian Internet, but the structure of most of the websites (excluding those hosted by organised criminal networks and tech professionals) is very basic and the sites themselves don’t have many impressive graphics and are slow to load. The reason for this is that many Darknet websites are created by amateurs and a considerable number of those are also hosted by people running the site on their own computer.
Here are two different views on Darknet :by two different authors.
