As privacy awareness grows, the dark web has presented a more appealing and secure browsing alternative for some users compared to popular browsers.
The dark web is a network of websites that only run on anonymous browsers, which will hide the identity of the user and the people who run the sites. Perhaps the best-known anonymous browser is Tor, a platform that supports about 60,000 services like websites and chat services. It is legal to use Tor, but it does host illegal content.
Tor is the deep web's browser of choice, but how does it work exactly and should you use it? Hey, Mashable Explains is nominated for a Webby Award and we need your help to win! To vote, head over.
@gowenfawr I disagree. If I merely said it's illegal, then then logical response is 'but so is downloading child porn for research'. I elaborated on my reasoning on purpose: illegal things are not always bad in the sense that they may still serve the common good. And misuse of Tor for filesharing really does use a load of cpu and bandwidth. Strictly speaking, no, it is not illegal to download Tor. But, there is the potential for that to get muddy in the United States and you should keep an eye on news regarding various court rulings.
In the popular imagination, anonymous browsers are a breeding ground for criminals. While the dark web does provide cover for illegal activities like storing child pornography or buying banned drugs, it also asserts a need for privacy that is often ignored on the larger Web.
Here’s what you need to know about Tor:
1. It Protects the Identity of the User Through ‘Hopping’ Across Devices Worldwide
There are about 350,000 daily users of Tor in the US (Wikimedia)
In order to protect your identity, Tor sends your communication through a random path in a network of relays until it reaches its destination. Tor will bounce your internet request across the network. This circuitous path will make it seem as if the request was coming from another device. While this process can make searching Tor agonizingly slow, it is the framework for anonymous browsing.
There are some limitations to anonymous browsing. While traffic within the Tor network is encrypted, it becomes visible when it retrieves information from the destination. Researchers have shown it’s possible to eavesdrop on traffic from these exit nodes. This is why it is important to use encrypted connections like HTTPS, identified by the green lock and https:// in the address bar. Here are some other activities that may compromise your identity on Tor:
Tor Browser users: HTTPS Everywhere can help you avoid being tricked by a malicious exit node. Block all unencrypted requests! pic.twitter.com/q37Ycsnu1V
— HTTPS Everywhere (@HTTPSEverywhere) October 22, 2016
Tor will encrypt your data within its network. Each computer node your message passes through will decrypt your data one layer at a time (hence the name ‘onion router’) to find out where to send the message to next. Limiting access to information every step in the process has foiled most snooping attempts.
2. To Find a Site on Tor You Need to Know the Address of the Onion Service
Sites only available on the Tor network are known as Onion services. To help keep the services anonymous, the sites are only accessible through sixteen mostly random letters and numbers followed by “.onion”, according to the Tor Browser User Manual. The list of Onion Services include marketplaces dedicated to making cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin untraceable and selling drugs.
3. Less Than Half of the Activity on the Dark Web is Illegal
The dark web is not as dark as it appears (Getty)
Despite its nefarious undertones, much of the activity on the dark web is legal and even trivial. About 55 percent of content on the dark web is legal, according to Terbium Labs, a dark web data intelligence provider. Terbium Labs crawled 400 random sites one day in August for the study. So what kind of legal content lives on the dark web? Tor users can access websites like the dark-web replicas of popular sites like Facebook and ProPublica.
While some users seek the dark web as a sanctuary for illegal activities, others use it to safeguard their right to privacy. In fact, the public appetite for decentralized exchanges extends to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, as more people seek relief from the vice grip of surveillance nets. Here are some legitimate reasons people use Tor, according to the Tor Project.
4. The Dark Web Was Originally Meant to Safeguard Government Communications
“Onion Routing” was originally developed in order to protect intelligence communications online. The United States Naval Research Laboratory created Tor in the mid-1990s. The project was transferred to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1997 and underwent its first round of software testing on 20 September 2002. Tor was publicly launched a year later.
Since the Naval Research Laboratory released Tor’s code under a free license in 2004, privacy advocates have championed the software. The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation funded Tor’s continued development. Tor’s developers founded the nonprofit The Tor Project to maintain Tor.
5. Anyone Can Volunteer to Be Part of Network Running Tor
You can sign up as a relay on Tor
Anyone can volunteer their computer to be part of the Dark Web network. As the number of volunteer relays grow, so does the network’s speed. Tor relays can run on almost all operating systems, but works best for current distributions of Linux, according to the Tor Project. You can also contribute to the Tor community simply by downloading and using the service. As more people use the Dark Web, the level of anonymity increases, because it becomes harder to single out users.
Dear Lifehacker,
I've been hearing a lot about Tor these days (with a shoutout on House of Cards!), but I'm not entirely sure what it does or why I'd ever use it. What exactly does Tor do? The House of Cards Hacker Is the Best Worst Thing About Season 2
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Sincerely,
Frank Overwood
Dear FO,
We've talkeda lot aboutTorover the years because it's the easiest way to browse the web anonymously, but it's not always clear why that matters or why you'd need to use it. Let's take a look at what Tor does, who uses it, and perhaps most importantly, what Tor doesn't do. How Can I Stay Anonymous with Tor?
Even with recent revelations that the NSA is listening, Tor is still probably the best way to…
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What Tor Does
Tor is short for The Onion Router (thus the logo) and was initially a worldwide network of servers developed with the U.S. Navy that enabled people to browse the internet anonymously. Now, it's a non-profit organization whose main purpose is the research and development of online privacy tools.
The Tor network disguises your identity by moving your traffic across different Tor servers, and encrypting that traffic so it isn't traced back to you. Anyone who tries would see traffic coming from random nodes on the Tor network, rather than your computer. (For a more in-depth explanation, check out this post from our sister blog, Gizmodo).
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To access this network, you just need to download the Tor browser. Everything you do in the browser goes through the Tor network and doesn't need any setup or configuration from you. That said, since your data goes through a lot of relays, it's slow, so you'll experience a much more sluggish internet than usual when you're using Tor.
What Tor Is Good For
If you want to be anonymous—say, if you live under a dictatorship, you're a journalist in an oppressive country, or a hacker looking to stay hidden from the government—Tor is one of the easiest ways to anonymize your traffic, and it's free. It's far from perfect, though (we'll get to that in a moment).
On a more general level, Tor is useful for anyone who wants to keep their internet activities out of the hands of advertisers, ISPs, and web sites. That includes people getting around censorship restrictions in their country, police officers looking to hide their IP address, or anyone else who doesn't want their browsing habits linked to them.
Tor's technology isn't just about browsing anonymously. It can also host web sites through its hidden services that are only accessible by other Tor users. It's on one of these hidden service sites that something like The Silk Road exists to traffic drugs. Tor's hosting capabilities tend to pop up in police reports for things like child pornography and arms trading, too.
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So is it something that everyday users need? Probably not, at least not yet. But it's become popular because of its usefulness in many of these more specific situations.
What Tor Doesn't Do
Tor is handy, but it's far from perfect. Don't think just because you're using Tor that you're perfectly anonymous. Someone like the NSA can tell if you're a Tor user and that makes them more likely to target you. With a enough work, the government can figure out who you are. Motherboard points to a recent FBI bust that shows how this might work:
The FBI's big child porn bust this summer also raised some suspicion from privacy advocates over how easy it is for the Feds to infiltrate Tor. The FBI managed to crack the anonymous network by injecting malware into the browser, in order to identify what it called 'the 'largest child porn facilitator on the planet.' In the process, the malware revealed the IP addresses of hundreds of users.
Furthermore, anonymity is not the same as security. It's hard to hack into the Tor network, but the browser is a different story. As we found at least year, the NSA can get into your browser a lot easier than it can the network and once it does, it gets access to everything else. So, 'man in the middle' style attacks on Tor are still possible with help of internet service providers. Tor responded to these possible attacks with these comments:
The good news is that they went for a browser exploit, meaning there's no indication they can break the Tor protocol or do traffic analysis on the Tor network. Infecting the laptop, phone, or desktop is still the easiest way to learn about the human behind the keyboard.
Tor still helps here: you can target individuals with browser exploits, but if you attack too many users, somebody's going to notice. So even if the NSA aims to surveil everyone, everywhere, they have to be a lot more selective about which Tor users they spy on.
Just using Tor isn't enough to keep you safe in all cases. Browser exploits, large-scale surveillance, and general user security are all challenging topics for the average internet user. These attacks make it clear that we, the broader internet community, need to keep working on better security for browsers and other internet-facing applications.
As the How-To Geek points out, you still need to use HTTPS whenever possible to protect yourself from man-in-the-middle style attacks. Likewise, Tor's only as strong as its browser, which has had security flaws before, so it's worth making sure you always have the newest version.
So Should You Use Tor?
As we mentioned above, if you're an average user looking at cat GIFs and browsing Facebook, you probably don't need to worry about the government spying on your activity, and Tor is just going to slow down your connection. It's more likely that you need to secure your internet rather than anonymize it, say, when you're using public Wi-Fi. In that case, you'd want to make sure you're using HTTPS on all sites that support it, and possibly even use a VPN to encrypt all your traffic when you're away from home.
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If you want to stay anonymous because you're downloading large files and don't want people to see what you're downloading—say, on BitTorrent—Tor is not a good solution. It won't keep you anonymous, and you'll slow down everyone else's traffic for no reason. In this case, you'd want a proxy or a VPN instead.
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Is Tor Illegal
In other cases where you want to stay anonymous, Tor will do the trick, and it'll do it freely and easily. But we recommend considering a VPN too—as long as you use a VPN dedicated to anonymity that doesn't keep logs of your traffic, it can provide quite a few advantages over Tor (though you'll usually have to pay some money).
Is Using Tor Browser Illegal
Most importantly, remember: nothing is 100% anonymous or secure, whether you're using Tor, a VPN, or anything else. If you think you need something along these lines, think about what exactly you're doing and what you need to protect—half the battle is picking the right tool for the job.
Illegal Downloading Facts
Good Luck,
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