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Seeing Through a Web Darkly
Welcome
A trip through the dark web was surprising, but also not surprising.
Research for articles takes me on some interesting trips, but by far, this is the longest and strangest trip thus far in my writing career. For a piece about the dark web, I took a trip into the dark web; of course, like any good writer, I used myself as a guinea pig for the experience, because there are times when hearsay and second-hand accounts just won't do. This was one of those times.
Before this foray into the unknown reaches of the so-called dark web, I'd never cared nor even been curious about such nonsense. To be fair, the dark web isn't strictly nonsense, but it certainly isn't for the faint of heart or for those with higher-than-dirt standards of behavior and decorum. The dark web is nasty. It's vile. It's disgusting. And it's generally illegal. Surprisingly, though, it isn't dark. It looks normal. Well, I guess normal is relative, but the websites look like many other poorly crafted websites.
Most of the sites look as if they were constructed hastily and without much design expertise, but I guess when you're selling hacking services or breached data, aesthetics are really an afterthought. The sites that are set up for product or service sales actually have sophisticated (in most cases) e-commerce capability.
Before taking your dark journey, you have to download and install a special piece of software called The Onion Router (Tor) to browse these sites that oddly have .onion domain names rather than the familiar .com, .net, .org, .us, and so on. Tor is a dark web browser that also contains instructions for finding dark websites.
My guess is that dark website criminalpreneurs realized that if no one can find them, their products and services won't have much of an audience. To increase that audience, you find sites that list "resources" for your illegal needs. They're called hidden wikis. Tor helps you find a hidden wiki or two to set you off on
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Welcome to ADMIN
Woe unto us who try to hang on too dearly to the past for we shall experience the darkness that is to come. OK, so a great prophet I'm not, but my prophetic words ring true when we tarry too long in the complacence of our old, tired operating systems. But, know this: Even if you do hang onto your old operating systems for a bit too long, there's no impending apocalypse awaiting you – at least not in the short term.
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