A dark net is a network superimposed on the Internet, whose very constitution protects the anonymity of users. The dark web refers to the web found on it.
Are darknet and dark web the same thing?
In the same way that the public may confuse the web with the Internet, “dark web” and “darknet” are sometimes used interchangeably, as if both refer to the exact same thing. There is, however, a subtlety: a darknet designates a physical infrastructure, a network as such, while the dark web relates to the content found on it.
To put it another way, the darknet is the container, while the dark web is its content. The darknet is a network that is generally not very accessible, but participates in its own way in the vast whole that is the Internet. There is also not one, but darknets. To access them, special software must be used to access these relatively isolated spaces.
It is possible to consider the dark web as a specific subset of the deep web, since this category refers to all digital content on the web that is not indexed by search engines, for one reason or another. The dark web is considered more difficult to access than the deep web, insofar as it is necessary to mobilize specific software.
Since when does the darknet exist?
The term darknet has been invented in the 1970s to evoke networks isolated from ARPANET, the ancestor of the Internet, for security reasons. However, it was at the beginning of the 2000s that the expression began to be popularized, as the democratization of the Internet progressed. Since then, the darknet and the dark web have even been used as scary movie titles.
Technically, what is the particularity of a darknet?
Darknets are networks installed over the Internet. We also speak of superimposed networks or “overlay networks”.
In practice, a darknet is a decentralized physical network, which works peer-to-peer, like the Internet, but adding specific protocols that limit access. Most darknets ensure by default a high degree of anonymity of connected peers: in their very design, they include special attention to privacy issues.
Can darknets communicate with each other?
No, we are talking about networks superimposed on the internet AND separated from each other. Tor does not allow you to go to Freenet for example. Moreover, these do not have the same use: the first offers the means of browsing the web with a high degree of anonymity; the second is for storing and publishing static documents and pages.
In essence, we can say that each darknet satisfies specific uses, which are accessed through specific tools – Fred or FIW for Freenet, the Tor browser for the network of the same name. It must be understood that each of these tools is an entry point for applications made possible by the software layer constituted by the darknets, just as our current software is used to access certain apps of internet.
The specificity of these networks lies simply in the care they take for user confidentiality. But this confidentiality is not absolute. Security services and police forces investigate these networks, and their investigations sometimes lead them to identify Internet users and neutralize groups devoted to illegal content.
Is the dark web necessarily sulphurous?
The mere fact that it is called “dark” gives it a dark side. However, the dark web is not sulphurous in essence. It’s simply a remote area of the Internet where strong privacy practices provide both legitimate uses and illegal activities. Attempts to statistically encrypt the latter are recurrent and say a bit of everything and its opposite: in 2016, two researchers looked at the websites accessible from Tor, calculating that 57% of them were illegal. In 2020, two other scientists looked at the queries made in the search engine, and concluded that only 7% of them targeted illicit activities.
It is impossible to deny that some of the activities available on the dark web are illicit. There was a time when Silkroad was considered the “Amazon” of illegal goods and services (or the eBay of drugs, you see), before being replaced by AlphaBay, Wall Street Market and many other sites more or less specialized in weapons, pedocrime, the resale of the tools necessary to carry out your own cyberattack or order an assassination. It is also in this type of space that your personal data is resold, often for less than 10 euros.
That said, in the same way that no Internet user makes the same use of the Google search engine as his or her neighbor, it would be wrong to put all Tor or Freenet users in the same basket of illegality. . For some, this space can simply be used to discuss: the dark web has its own social networks named Connect, Union Social, Galaxy 3 or Postor. For others, they are used to reach web services from countries that prevent access – according to its co-founder Roger Dingledine, the main site visited via Tor in 2017 was Facebook.
If you are a political opponent in an authoritarian country, if you are a whistleblower and want to share information without being detected, if you live in Poland and you are looking for an abortion pill… the reasons are many, which could explain the use of this part of the Internet. In a context of phasing out of access to American social networks in Russia, Twitter decided a few months ago to adopt an address accessible from Tor for Russian users.
If it’s better protected from surveillance, why aren’t we browsing the dark web more?
Because of his reputation, certainly.
Because guaranteeing his anonymity comes at a cost, too. It takes effort. Tor, for example, works like a multi-layered VPN: instead of taking the most direct path between your computer and the server hosting the page you’re viewing, it goes through a series of encrypted servers, called some knots “. Doing so makes it very difficult (but not impossible) to trace your IP address. The downside is that the connection is much slower and slower than on the “surface web”.
Finally, if the advanced confidentiality allowed by the dark web is sometimes advantageous, the way it works poses other problems: it is impossible for the user to know who is hosting a particular site, or whether their intentions are good. Scams and malware are more frequent than in the “clear” zone. Nor if the “nodes” are always reliable.
