Dark web

This article is about darknet websites. For the part of the Internet not accessible by traditional web search engines, see Deep web. For the comic book storyline, see Dark Web (Marvel Comics).

The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets (overlay networks) that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access.[1][2][3][4] Through the dark web, private computer networks can communicate and conduct business anonymously without divulging identifying information, such as a user's location.[5][6] The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web.[7][2][8]

The darknets which constitute the dark web include small, friend-to-friend networks, as well as large, popular networks such as Tor, Hyphanet, I2P, and Riffle operated by public organizations and individuals.[6] Users of the dark web refer to the regular web as Clearnet due to its unencrypted nature.[9] The Tor dark web or onionland[10] uses the traffic anonymization technique of onion routing under the network's top-level domain suffix .onion.

  1. ^ "Going Dark: The Internet Behind The Internet". NPR. 25 May 2014. Archived from the original on 27 May 2015. Retrieved 29 May 2015.
  2. ^ a b Greenberg, Andy (19 November 2014). "Hacker Lexicon: What Is the Dark Web?". Wired. Archived from the original on 7 June 2015. Retrieved 6 June 2015.
  3. ^ "Clearing Up Confusion – Deep Web vs. Dark Web". BrightPlanet. 2014-03-27. Archived from the original on 2015-05-16.
  4. ^ Egan, Matt (12 January 2015). "What is the dark web? How to access the dark website – How to turn out the lights and access the dark web (and why you might want to)". Archived from the original on 19 June 2015. Retrieved 18 June 2015.
  5. ^ Ghappour, Ahmed (2017-09-01). "Data Collection and the Regulatory State". Connecticut Law Review. 49 (5): 1733. Archived from the original on 2021-05-01. Retrieved 2020-09-06.
  6. ^ a b Ghappour, Ahmed (2017-04-01). "Searching Places Unknown: Law Enforcement Jurisdiction on the Dark Web". Stanford Law Review. 69 (4): 1075. Archived from the original on 2021-04-20. Retrieved 2020-09-06.
  7. ^ Solomon, Jane (6 May 2015). "The Deep Web vs. The Dark Web: Do You Know The Difference?". Archived from the original on 9 May 2015. Retrieved 26 May 2015.
  8. ^ "The dark web Revealed". Popular Science. pp. 20–21. Archived from the original on 2015-03-18. Retrieved 2021-04-15.
  9. ^ "Clearnet vs hidden services – why you should be careful". DeepDotWeb. Archived from the original on 28 June 2015. Retrieved 4 June 2015.
  10. ^ Chacos, Brad (12 August 2013). "Meet Darknet, the hidden, anonymous underbelly of the searchable Web". PC World. Archived from the original on 12 August 2015. Retrieved 16 August 2015.