So I understand the general idea of the much broader deep web being stuff that isn’t indexed by search engines but I have a lot of questions about how the “dark web” works:
1. Where is all the data stored? I get that companies would store their own deep web data but would people who want to create a dark web site need to have their own servers to store it?
2. How are you supposed to find things? If this is stuff you have to look for specifically what do people mean when they say “I stumbled upon this really messed up thing on the dark web” etc.
3. How does something like the tor browser allow you to access stuff that isn’t indexed, how does it find it
4. If you use a tor browser could you technically access anything not indexed? Like if you knew what to look up you could access someone’s personal account on a surface website? I feel like the answer to that is no, but if so then, why
These questions definitely make me look questionable but I promise I’m just fascinated by how the dark web can even function
In: Technology
The dark web is in many ways simpler than people typically make it out to be. It’s basically just the same as the regular Web, except that it doesn’t get searched or indexed by popular search engines. All public-facing sites begin life on the dark web, though typically they do not stay there for long. Most people who run Websites *want* them to be found, and so they take steps right away to make that happen. Even when they don’t take those steps, crawlers sometimes find them anyway.
1) Most dark web sites have their own servers. You could run a dark site entirely in the public cloud if you really wanted to, but the people responsible for hosting and running it would know it was there and could still do all the things that people who run Websites usually do. Many dark web site operators consider that to be an unacceptable risk. They run their own servers, not because the dark web requires it, but because this way they don’t have to trust anyone else to run them.
2) Some dark web sites exist as directories and listings of other dark web sites. This is pretty much the way the Web used to be organized in the days before search engines. You still have to know where these lists are, but you can find that information if you know where to look.
3) While dark web sites usually can’t be found on search engines, they are still connected to the Internet, and therefore they still need an address of some kind. If you know the address, you can get to the site. Tor has its own form of routing connections to these addresses, but there is no way around needing an address.
4) You don’t even need tor to access most things that aren’t indexed, though tor has its own form of addressing that some sites use. However, this isn’t the same as hacking into a non-public system. Whatever authentication and authorization methods a site might implement will still work normally. You can’t just look up someone’s password unless somebody (maybe them, maybe someone else) has actually posted it somewhere.
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