Have you ever wanted to hide from search engines to avoid this intrusive advertisement? Or have you ever wanted to say everything that you think about something without a fear to be punished?
Most of us heard the name of this part of internet lots of time but haven't got any ideas about what it is. So today I decided to dig out some information about Darknet and share it with you. All information that I'm telling here is not secret and can be easily searched by Google or whatever search engine.
What is the Darknet?
Darknet is a highly anonymous Internet segment which you can’t connect through a standard browser. There are a lot of communities involved in illegal activities, including weapons selling, stealing of bank cards, selling drugs, etc. But there are also many legitimate and harmless projects like libraries and literary journals. People choose this network in order to preserve the privacy and freedom of speech.
Darknet is the deepest part of the Deep Web - Internet sector, in which the content is not indexed by search engines.
How to enter the Darknet
To have access you need to download the Tor browser from the official site.
First turn off your browser's JavaScript, cookie and plug-ins. If you find something interesting for yourself, do not use a credit card for purchases, as there is a chance that your data will be stolen. Virtual money such as bitcoin is a common currency there. You should also be very careful. It’s better to enter Darknet with a virtual operating system running in Virtualbox or from the flash card.
When you entered the first time you must choose between two options: just connect and configure the network settings. If you want to use a browser to access the blocked site, then select "connect". If you want anonymity, then you need the option "set up." Tor works with conventional browsers, but with a more complicated scheme, which has a negative effect on the speed of pages loading. With its help, you can visit the hidden sites but not all functions would work. You can make sure that it is configured correctly, click on the link
About Darknet sites
Sites in the Tor network are located in the domain zone .onion. There are no common modern search engines like Google and Yahoo. You will need to search for a suitable site through link directories (Hidden Wiki, TorDir and TorLinks) manually, but resources in the Darknet tend to frequently change addresses and sometimes even disappear.
Positive and negative sides of Darknet
Darknet - is primarily a huge virtual "black market". Here you can buy and sell everything that is banned in the World Wide Web: drugs, weapons, stolen personal data, forged documents, and pornographic content.
But most important is a positive side - Darknet is a way of communication of people with liberal opinions that can’t be shown in a conventional network, even if their thoughts are really pure and disinterested, especially in countries with severe censorship of the Internet. Here you can also find a lot of information devoted to cybersecurity and different scientific topics.
Onionland
The largest section of the Darknet is Onionland based on Tor onion routing technology. The advantage is in the fact that data is anonymously transferred from one user to another by repeated random nodes in the encrypted form. It is impossible to track this route and intercept the information.
How does Tor work
In the case of Onionland Tor Hidden Service provides anonymity not to the sender and recipient, but to the whole server and its visitors. You can enter the hidden sector only by connecting to the Tor network. Standard DNS-servers do not allow opening sites with the .onion suffix, and URL-addresses of anonymous networks are a set of symbols generated with a key in the time of the site creation.
If you want to learn more about such a misterious part of internet as Darknet, then watch this amazing Ted video that I personally like
Before you dive into the Darknet, think about whether you need it, whether the advantages of this action outweigh risks, whether you have enough knowledge to behave properly in its depths. In conclusion, Darknet can be both bad and good - it all depends on the user's motivation and willingness to look a little deeper.
Disclaimer
This article is for informational purposes only and does not encourage you to commit any illegal actions that are prohibited on the territory of your country.