((HOT)) Download Into The Dark Movie
Marcelene Pape
A 2019 study, Into the Web of Profit, conducted by Dr. Michael McGuires at the University of Surrey, shows that things have become worse. The number of dark web listings that could harm an enterprise has risen by 20% since 2016. Of all listings (excluding those selling drugs), 60% could potentially harm enterprises.
You can buy credit card numbers, all manner of drugs, guns, counterfeit money, stolen subscription credentials, hacked Netflix accounts and software that helps you break into other people's computers. Buy login credentials to a $50,000 Bank of America account, counterfeit $20 bills, prepaid debit cards, or a "lifetime" Netflix premium account. You can hire hackers to attack computers for you. You can buy usernames and passwords.
The terms "deep web" and "dark web" are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Deep web refers to anything on the internet that is not indexed by and, therefore, accessible via a search engine like Google. Deep web content includes anything behind a paywall or requires sign-in credentials. It also includes any content that its owners have blocked web crawlers from indexing.
The dark web is a subset of the deep web that is intentionally hidden, requiring a specific browser--Tor--to access, as explained below. No one really knows the size of the dark web, but most estimates put it at around 5% of the total internet. Again, not all the dark web is used for illicit purposes despite its ominous-sounding name.
All this activity, this vision of a bustling marketplace, might make you think that navigating the dark web is easy. It isn't. The place is as messy and chaotic as you would expect when everyone is anonymous, and a substantial minority are out to scam others.
Accessing the dark web requires the use of an anonymizing browser called Tor. The Tor browser routes your web page requests through a series of proxy servers operated by thousands of volunteers around the globe, rendering your IP address unidentifiable and untraceable. Tor works like magic, but the result is an experience that's like the dark web itself: unpredictable, unreliable and maddeningly slow.
Still, for those willing to put up with the inconvenience, the dark web provides a memorable glimpse at the seamy underbelly of the human experience - without the risk of skulking around in a dark alley.
Dark web websites look pretty much like any other site, but there are important differences. One is the naming structure. Instead of ending in .com or .co, dark web websites end in .onion. That's "a special-use top level domain suffix designating an anonymous hidden service reachable via the Tor network," according to Wikipedia. Browsers with the appropriate proxy can reach these sites, but others can't.
Many dark websites are set up by scammers, who constantly move around to avoid the wrath of their victims. Even commerce sites that may have existed for a year or more can suddenly disappear if the owners decide to cash in and flee with the escrow money they're holding on behalf of customers.
Law enforcement officials are getting better at finding and prosecuting owners of sites that sell illicit goods and services. In the summer of 2017, a team of cyber cops from three countries successfully shut down AlphaBay, the dark web's largest source of contraband, sending shudders throughout the network. But many merchants simply migrated elsewhere.
The dark web has flourished thanks to bitcoin, the crypto-currency that enables two parties to conduct a trusted transaction without knowing each other's identity. "Bitcoin has been a major factor in the growth of the dark web, and the dark web has been a big factor in the growth of bitcoin," says Tiquet.
Nearly all dark web commerce sites conduct transactions in bitcoin or some variant, but that doesn't mean it's safe to do business there. The inherent anonymity of the place attracts scammers and thieves, but what do you expect when buying guns or drugs is your objective?
Even completing a transaction is no guarantee that the goods will arrive. Many need to cross international borders, and customs officials are cracking down on suspicious packages. The dark web news site Deep.Dot.Web teems with stories of buyers who have been arrested or jailed for attempted purchases.
We don't want to leave you with the impression that everything on the dark web is nefarious or illegal. The Tor network began as an anonymous communications channel, and it still serves a valuable purpose in helping people communicate in environments that are hostile to free speech. "A lot of people use it in countries where there's eavesdropping or where internet access is criminalized," Tiquet said.
If you want to learn all about privacy protection or cryptocurrency, the dark web has plenty to offer. There are a variety of private and encrypted email services, instructions for installing an anonymous operating system and advanced tips for the privacy-conscious.
There's also material that you wouldn't be surprised to find on the public web, such as links to full-text editions of hard-to-find books, collections of political news from mainstream websites and a guide to the steam tunnels under the Virginia Tech campus. You can conduct discussions about current events anonymously on Intel Exchange. There are several whistleblower sites, including a dark web version of Wikileaks. Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent site that law enforcement officials have repeatedly shut down, is alive and well there. Even Facebook has a dark web presence.
There's also plenty of practical value for some organizations. Law enforcement agencies keep an ear to the ground on the dark web looking for stolen data from recent security breaches that might lead to a trail to the perpetrators. Many mainstream media organizations monitor whistleblower sites looking for news.
Keeper's Patrick Tiquet checks in regularly because it's important for him to be on top of what's happening in the hacker underground. "I use the dark web for situational awareness, threat analysis and keeping an eye on what's going on," he said will. "I want to know what information is available and have an external lens into the digital assets that are being monetized - this gives us insight on what hackers are targeting."
If you find your own information on the dark web, there's precious little you can do about it, but at least you'll know you've been compromised. Bottom line: If you can tolerate the lousy performance, unpredictable availability, and occasional shock factor of the dark web, it's worth a visit. Just don't buy anything there.
While astrophysicists know little about it, they often use "dark energy" as shorthand for the cause of this expansion. Based on its effects, they estimate dark energy could make up 70 percent of the combined mass and energy of the universe. Something unknown that both lies outside our current understanding of the laws of physics and is the major influence on the growth of the universe adds up to one of the biggest mysteries in physics. DOE's Office of Science is supporting a number of projects to investigate dark energy to better understand this phenomenon.
Before scientists can understand what is causing the universe to expand now, they need to know what happened in the past. The energy from the Big Bang drove the universe's early expansion. Since then, gravity and dark energy have engaged in a cosmic tug of war. Gravity pulls galaxies closer together; dark energy pushes them apart. Whether the universe is expanding or contracting depends on which force dominates, gravity or dark energy.
As the universe expanded and became less dense, it cooled. In a blip in cosmic time, protons and electrons combined to form neutral hydrogen atoms. When that happened, light was able to stream out into the universe to form what is now known as the "cosmic microwave background." Today's instruments that detect the cosmic microwave background provide scientists with a view of that early universe.
The leading theory is that dark energy is the "cosmological constant," a concept Albert Einstein created in 1917 to balance his equations to describe a universe in equilibrium. Without this cosmological constant to offset gravity, a finite universe would collapse into itself.
Today, scientists think the constant may represent the energy of the vacuum of space. Instead of being "empty," this would mean space is actually exerting pressure on cosmic objects. If this idea is correct, the distribution of dark energy should be the same everywhere.
The other possibility is that "dark energy" is the wrong label altogether. A competing theory posits that the universe is expanding ever more rapidly because gravity acts differently at very large scales from what Einstein's theory predicts. While there's less evidence for this theory than that for the cosmological constant, it's still a possibility.
To collect evidence that can prove or disprove these theories, scientists are creating a visual history of the universe's expansion. These maps will allow astrophysicists to see dark energy's effects over time. Finding that the structure of the universe changed in a way that's consistent with the cosmological constant's influence would provide strong evidence for that theory.
However, there's a major gap in BOSS's data. It could measure what was going on 5 billion years ago using bright galaxies and 10 billion years ago using bright quasars. But it had nothing about what was going on in-between. Unfortunately, this time period is most likely when dark energy started dominating.
"Seven billion years ago, dark energy starts to really dominate and push the universe apart more rapidly. So we're making these maps now that span that whole distance. We start in the backyard of the Milky Way, our own galaxy, and we go out to 7 billion light years," said David Schlegel, a Berkeley Lab researcher who is the BOSS principal investigator. That 7 billion light years spans the time from when the light was originally emitted to it reaching our telescopes today.
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