Many information on the Internet is hard to distinguish between true and false. The progress of technology has certainly brought a lot of convenience to people, but while everyone enjoys modern life, various new types of crimes have also emerged. In his book "The Obsolete Man", Kynte Anders lamented that "everything real has become fantasy, and everything fictional has become real". Another layer of the "dark web" hidden deep beneath the network we use every day is a perfect illustration of this situation.
If the underworld is a cancer, the dark web is a shadow spread around the world by the power of the internet. Using the dark web is not as easy and fast as using the internet, and there is little technical content. The dark web requires a certain threshold, in addition to some professional skills, but also to pay a certain cost for it, so not many people use the dark web. Generally speaking, only some people with specific needs will use the dark web.
So what exactly is the dark web? Since the murder of Chinese scholar Zhang Ying Ying in 2017, the dark web has become widely known. Since then, the dark web has become a gathering place for criminals and synonymous with illegal activities. But as we all know, in this background of advanced information, there are many news and even related information that are not true, and is the dark web really as bad as the rumors?
Let's start with the Internet, the so-called Internet or networking, generally refers to the personal use of electronic products connected to the Internet, so as to use a variety of network services, access to network information, and the network refers to the current Internet. Two concepts should be separated here, one is the deep network and the other is the dark network. The general concept of the Deep Web refers to materials on the Internet that cannot be found by standard search engines, and are those non-surface web content. The dark web, on the other hand, is a network that requires some special software or authorization, or even some special settings of hardware to connect to. You can think of the dark web as part of the deep web, but this part does not account for a large percentage.
Talking about the dark web we have to talk about onion routing (Tor), onion routing is not a router in the general sense, it is actually a kind of anonymous communication technology on the network. As we all know, it is possible to track all the information about a person's use of the network if certain technical means are used on the network. But there are some people or some organizations that don't want to be tracked themselves. One of the developers of the Onion Route is the U.S. military. In fact, the Onion Route was not developed to protect the privacy of the public, but rather the U.S. military's own intelligence agency's online activities can be hidden from surveillance. On this premise, U.S. scientists developed a network anonymity technology, which they named Onion Routing.
So here comes another question, since it is a military technology, why is Onion Routing widely used in civilian use? This is because the U.S. authorities believe that if Onion Routing is only available to their own intelligence services, it will make the traffic more conspicuous, and in order to obscure the traffic of these intelligence services, so Onion Routing is also open to the public. This has led to a very ironic phenomenon: most people who access the dark web today choose onion routing first.
Such anonymity naturally provides the soil for illegal activities, and with soil comes nourishment. Baudelaire wrote in The Flower of Evil: "Folly, falsehood, sin, greed, occupy our souls and torment our flesh, and we feed that delightful remorse as if beggars fed their lice." There is a never-ending quest for profit, even by any means necessary. The influence that drives the massive growth of the dark web is the huge profit. In 2013, the website "Silk road", which was dubbed by Chinese netizens as a dark version of Taobao, was taken down by the FBI, and it can be said to be a representative of dark transactions in the dark web. 03
"The founder of Silk road was a talented student, but the items he sold on the site were often linked to criminal activity. Examples include drugs, firearms, pornography, and even human organs. As for computer viruses, personal privacy and other "goods" not to mention, it can be said that everything in the world can be bought and sold, and there is no limit to human ugliness. Ublig used the site to extract a large amount of money from each transaction, and in just two years it earned $1.2 billion, which shows the richness of the "oil and water" in the dark web.
Due to the exaggeration of some literature and media, it seems that when people mention the dark web, they always think of guns, killings, human trafficking, violence and so on. There has been a very famous claim about the dark web, that about 96% of the data volume on the internet is hidden in the dark web. This claim is clearly a confusion between the dark web and the deep web, and even if there is no confusion, the source of this data is very suspicious. In fact if you look at the dark web users in the context of all internet users, the number is very small and it is impossible for such a small number of users to create 96% of the internet data.
And, onion routing is not the same as the dark web, many companies government and some special industries like to use onion routing because they want to protect their privacy, not necessarily to engage in illegal transactions. The most information on the dark web is about drugs, trading, fraud, and bitcoin, and while none of it is good, there is a huge amount of water in it, and transactions that are paid for but not acknowledged abound. After all, in the three no-go areas where there is no legal protection, it is actually a rampant area for scams instead.
All in all, from what we can find so far, there are indeed terrible crimes on the dark web, but that's not all there is to the dark web. In any case, for the sake of their own safety, ordinary people should not easily get involved in the dark web, after all, the normal network is enough to meet the daily needs. If it is just for curiosity, it is not necessary, after all, curiosity will kill the cat.