"Dark Web" is like a Black Hole By Katherine Lightwood

"Dark Web" is like a Black Hole

By Katherine Lightwood 

If you follow my blog you might know that I am doing my internship on 'Digital Marketing' and at the starting classes of our teacher told us a lot about "The Internet World". And it festinated me so much. Today in the evening, all of my colleagues were discussing the recent Facebook scandal that had happened. Where do all those data go? And what will happen next was confusing me a lot. I was discussing this with my colleague Praveen and when he used the term "Dark Web". And that's how I got today's topic for my blog post. 

The term 'darknet' was coined in 70's, and it was meant as a way to describe networks isolated from ARPANET (advanced research project agency network). ARPANET eventually became the commercial internet run by the private telecoms we all use today. ARPANET was created by the US Department of Defence, and it was created to share data about their projects in research laboratories with the universities. And it was the first packet switching network which is the foundation of modern networking. 

Now, I am not talking about the world wide web here and that didn't show up till 1990. Tim Berners-Lee set up the first web server in CERN. The internet is a massive piece of hardware. It enables communication instantly on a global scale. And in fact, there are hundreds of cables spanning the ocean along with ground-satellite communication, radio to radio communication just to make this thing work.

A few years ago Facebook unveiled the second URL for their site. That can only be accessed through TOR, which is a software that allows users to log in anonymously from nearly anywhere on the planet, even in counties where Facebook is heavily or blocked. This made Facebook the first big company in the web to offer a platform in the dark web.

This internet browsing is taking place on a level of the internet called the "Surface Web". But beneath it are many more layers of the internet and that is called 'The Deep Web". At the top of these layers are the websites that can be accessed but can't be found by doing a simple search on Google or Bing. Think online banking, government database pages, pages that are password encrypted. But what if, you keep going down all the way to the bottom of the deep web. Well, here you will find the 'dark web'.  Here, users can communicate through encrypted messages, combine and sell anything with total anonymity.It's been called the 'wild west' of the internet because operating in the shadows are extremists, criminals, and trolls. But, where did the dark web come from and how does it work?

Firstly, the dark web is not a 'place', it's a term that describes the part of the internet that hides your identity and location. Now, as I've discussed above TOR is a popular browser through which you can browse the 'darknet'. Which looks like normal web browsers where you can visit any site you like but unlike normal web browsers which would register your IP address straight away, the TOR browser bounce my request to enter the site via several computers around the world by encrypting and decrypting your identification as it goes so that no one knows that from where the request came from.

So, that was my thought of the day. To see more posts like this make sure to visit our main page. And do not forget to visit our institute's page to know more about graphic design, 3D, animation courses and other awesome stuff. Till then good day to you.

Katherine Lightwood