Have You Ever Visited The Deep Web?

TheFarrier wrote: »

How does one access this deep web ??

Never heard of it before now, it has piqued my interest slightly.
Is it worth a snoop around??

syklops wrote: »

As opposed to the regular web which is...?

This one.

Smidge wrote: »

I don't know anything about it tbh but was just thinking having read through this thread.......

If there is so much CP and images on it would agencies not use it to find missing children etc?
Can it not be hacked or traced?

It's almost impossible - even the NSA are having massive trouble trying to crack it, as evidenced by one of Snowden's leaked slideshows called "Tor Stinks". It details several possible ways of trying to identify Tor users but concludes by telling analysts that if their target is indeed using Tor, they're better off looking for slip ups than trying to crack the network (for example, Tor isn't going to help you if you do something silly like using a personal email address when registering on a hidden forum, etc).

For example, the owner of Silk Road was caught because he used a personal gmail account in his early days when asking a question about setting up his server on a dev forum. The Irish guy Eric Eoin Marques, who ran Freedom Hosting, was caught through a combination of tracking his financial accounts and an exploit in a particular version of the Tor browser which allowed users to be tricked into leaving the deep web.

In other words, Tor is secure apart from personal screwups and the occasional exploit. The majority of users will not be caught - that is, unless intel agencies' capabilities increase substantially.

One thing to bear in mind is that Tor hides where connections are going by encrypting the routing information in packets which travel through it. From Snowden's documents we know that the NSA et al are attempting to essentially destroy the concept of asymmetric encryption using super computers and attempting mathematical breakthroughs - if they ever succeed, everything on the internet which relies on encryption is f*cked, including Tor.

Bloody hell, just had a look at the hidden wiki on it. Clicked a link which was like a normal wiki page but just a list of child pórn sites. Even the names of them are sickening

syklops wrote: »

In some ways, the so called deep web is one of the last bastions of a free internet. Unsurprisingly the powers that want to control the internet surround the "deep web" in child porn and sex traffcking and drugs to discredit it. From you're reading of that "hidden wiki", everyone who goes to the deep web is a pervert by association.

There was a time when I would have dismissed this as an unproven conspiracy theory, but Snowden's latest releases actually prove, in writing, that intel services do plant various things in order to try and control public perceptions of various events and parts of the internet. The latest documents show a very chilling attempt at mass mind control - not in the sense of directly f*cking with people's minds in a sci-fi manner, but in the sense of trying to control the public discourse and misrepresent popular opinion using censorship, massive hoards of fake social media accounts to add voices to one side of various debates, etc etc etc.

It now wouldn't surprise me at all if Tor and others, while undoubtedly attracting a fair amount of pedos and criminals on their own, had their ugly parts enhanced artificially in order to scare people away from them.

PizzamanIRL wrote: »

I bet you feel warm and safe now that you're back on goold ol' boards.

Lemonparty, all is forgiven!

Just found silk road. Very strange looking at a shopping website with "1g of pure uncut peruvian cocaine" on it. Everything priced in bitcoin

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

It's almost impossible - even the NSA are having massive trouble trying to crack it

You can get enough info to identify people if you're running lots of the servers that the TOR network uses (usernames and passwords have been gotten). Surely most of them must be run by the NSA or similar.

"If you actually look in to where these Tor nodes are hosted and how big they are, some of these nodes cost thousands of dollars each month just to host because they're using lots of bandwidth, they're heavy-duty servers and so on. Who would pay for this and be anonymous?"
link

i seen ken bigleys head been choped off when i was a teenager. just after it happend.i havent been back to the deep web since. scared me for life.

BillyMitchel wrote: »

Very strange world alright. How many would be trolls though? People probably go on that and try live out a fantasy without actually doing anything.

Tbh I think putting that sort of stuff down to trolls is pretty dangerous in itself. We live in a big world, and some people deal with the hand life has dealt them in different and sometimes shocking ways.

We'd all feel better if we convinced ourselves that such people don't exist or occupy their own small realities, but they do. Look at some of the **** that's common on the 'clear' web.. forums and sites which advocate anorexia, home abortions, suicide and the likes. It's not that big a stretch to assume that people with severe mental problems have carved out their own niches on the parts of the web that remain hidden from most people.

Stavros Murphy wrote: »

That's a very respectable name, I'll have you know. I've had worse.

Ill say..... . Lads, Id be careful on the deep web/darknet/whatever. Sign out of everything beforehand and delete any caches too. Its easy to pick up something nasty and even easier to happen across stuff that no one here really wants to see:(

Cienciano wrote: »

Ah now, we've all done that at some point. Just a normal part of discovering your sexuality :pac:

In your ass though? I though the norm was in your mouth?!*

EDIT:* think I just sank to a new level and I'm going to vomit.

face1990 wrote: »

You can get enough info to identify people if you're running lots of the servers that the TOR network uses (usernames and passwords have been gotten). Surely most of them must be run by the NSA or similar.

Funnily enough they're not, the Snowden slides state that they have access to an extremely low number of nodes.

"If you actually look in to where these Tor nodes are hosted and how big they are, some of these nodes cost thousands of dollars each month just to host because they're using lots of bandwidth, they're heavy-duty servers and so on. Who would pay for this and be anonymous?"
link

Ironically, Tor gets a huge amount of funding from the US Navy, who use it for confidential communication while abroad. Since they need to make sure it's uncrackable up to the highest standard they know of, by definition they're going to be trying to make it stronger than the NSA's ability to crack it, which would be the US military's "benchmark" for how strong encryption should be.

It's essentially a big dilemma - the US government wants easy access to identifying Tor users, but they know that if they make it accessible for themselves, it will also be accessible for others. So you effectively have the Navy actually competing with the NSA in trying to help develop stronger encryption and easier cracking respectively. Nice balance really

It must also be pointed out that large criminal gangs of various kinds also use Tor and they would presumably be more than happy to fund their own anonymity, so that's probably where the rest of these nodes are coming from.

syklops wrote: »

but if you include all the nodes accessible by all of the US intelligence service, lets just say I wouldnt want to bbe on the FBI's most wanted list and depending on Tor for my freedom. NSA, ONI, CIA etc etc.

Well, it's fair to say that the Dread Pirate Roberts of Silk Road had been on their most wanted list for years, and in the end the only way they could get him was when he ****ed up with his personal email address, they never actually managed to target his Tor connection... Same seems to apply to the Irish guy

Vivienne23 wrote: »

,

One thing I did see which I thought was shocking was PayPal accounts that you could buy and "cash in" , I.e hacked accounts with an amount for sale , I shuddered to think that could be me someday ...

Just a thought, but if you had access to such accounts why wouldn't you just empty them yourself rather than sell that option to a third party - presumably for less money?

sbsquarepants wrote: »

Just a thought, but if you had access to such accounts why wouldn't you just empty them yourself rather than sell that option to a third party - presumably for less money?

Obviously because by using that "hot" money you're taking a substantial risk, by selling it for Bitcoin they're washing their hands of it, and the eejits who buy from them are getting "hot" money which is almost certainly the subject of theft investigations. :pac:

As always, a lot of successful crime relies on a steady supply of gullible muppets.

The Backwards Man wrote: »

To me it's a lot like Waterford. I have absolutely zero interest in ever going there.

ignorance is bliss,