Most people use less than 4% of what is available on the Internet. I'm hoping if you are reading this you are one of the few who want to put it to better use. However, even if you only want to surf the web and check you email, this information is still useful to you in my opinion.
Information is knowledge, knowledge leads to understanding, understanding leads to inner fulfillment that will help you achieve whatever you choose. It is my belief that no matter the subject, the knowledge is useful to know.
There is nothing wrong with this, and for many people it serves their needs completely. My father for example.. He is 80 years old. He pays a few bills online, obsessively checks his bank account balance, and plays a few silly games. He has no interest in using it for anything else. To be honest, I am quite thrilled that I have gotten him to try using it at all.
The Deep Web is not the realm of those monsters that want to overthrow governments and kill people, as the media seems to want to paint it. It is just part of the internet that is not indexed. It is simply called the deep web because it cannot be discovered on the surface web.
So it is, in other words, simply a part of the internet that isn't indexed by conventional search engines (Yahoo/Bing/Google) is called the Deep Web. It is perfectly legal.
The indexed portion of the Web contains about 4.49 billion sites, according to this source. The Deep Web is 400-500 times the size of the indexed portion of the web according to some estimates. I personally believe this estimate is on the low side.
Unfortunately, and largely the fault of the media, it is quite often confused with the dark web, which is completely different. So maybe we should clear up that difference before we go any further.
The main characteristic of the Dark Web is anonymity, which makes it appealing to a lot of different types of people. It is definitely a tool used for shady and illegal activities. Sale of drugs, firearms, stolen credit card number, PayPal account, child pornography, and just about anything you can think of.
However, the dark web is also used for many other legitimate activities. Perhaps not all legal depending on your prospective, but things where anonymity is used to protect people. Edward Snowden, the man who exposed the US Governments mass surveillance program, used the dark web to send information to reporters and other media.
Journalist and activist also use the dark web to avoid being traced by autocratic governments, or others who may want to harm them.
I countries such as Russia, China, and North Korea where the government restricts the majority of the internet and social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, individuals can use dark web tools to circumvent the censorship.
Ok, So It's Not All Bad and Scary.
How to Access the Dark Web
The Dark Web is only accessible via the TOR Network that was mentioned previously. With Tor you can access websites with the .onion extension. These are Dark Web sites that cannot be accessed through the normal browsers.
Perhaps I will explain exactly what Tor is and how it works in the future, but basically anonymizes your web traffic by encrypting it and routing it through several computers, called nodes, before sending it to its destination. You gain this anonymity using other surface and deep website through the Tor network as well.
A few things to keep in mind about Tor:
If you want additional anonymity, I will be writing about accessing the Tor network through an anonymous VPN service.
