Darknet

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A dark net or darknet is an

Tor via an anonymized series of connections.[4]

The term "darknet" was popularized by major news outlets and was associated with

whistle-blowers, activists, journalists and news organisations is also facilitated by darknets through use of applications such as SecureDrop.[6]

Terminology

The term originally described computers on ARPANET that were hidden, programmed to receive messages but not respond to or acknowledge anything, thus remaining invisible and in the dark.[7]

Since ARPANET, the usage of dark net has expanded to include friend-to-friend networks (usually used for file sharing with a peer-to-peer connection) and privacy networks such as Tor.[8][9] The reciprocal term for a darknet is a clearnet or the surface web when referring to content indexable by search engines.[10]

The term "darknet" is often used

Tor's darknet. Additionally, the term is often inaccurately used interchangeably with the deep web because of Tor's history as a platform that could not be search-indexed. Mixing uses of both these terms has been described as inaccurate, with some commentators recommending the terms be used in distinct fashions.[11][12][13]

Origins

"Darknet" was coined in the 1970s to designate networks isolated from ARPANET (the government-founded military/academical network which evolved into the Internet), for security purposes.[7] Darknet addresses could receive data from ARPANET but did not appear in the network lists and would not answer pings or other inquiries.

The term gained public acceptance following publication of "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution", a 2002 paper by Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman, four employees of Microsoft who argued the presence of the darknet was the primary hindrance to the development of workable digital rights management (DRM) technologies and made copyright infringement inevitable.[14] This paper described "darknet" more generally as any type of parallel network that is encrypted or requires a specific protocol to allow a user to connect to it.[1]

Sub-cultures

Journalist

cryptoanarchists, darknet drug markets, self harm communities, social media racists, and transhumanists.[16]

Uses

Darknets in general may be used for various reasons, such as:

Software

All darknets require specific software installed or network configurations made to access them, such as

Tor, which can be accessed via a customized browser from Vidalia (aka the Tor browser bundle), or alternatively via a proxy
configured to perform the same function.

Active

Tor is the most popular instance of a darknet,[19] and it is often mistakenly thought to be the only online tool that facilitates access to darknets.

A cartogram illustrating the average number of Tor users per day between August 2012 and July 2013

Alphabetical list:

  • BGP
    routers.
  • Decentralized network 42
    (not for anonymity but research purposes).
  • Freenet is a popular DHT file hosting darknet platform. It supports friend-to-friend and opennet
    modes.
  • GNUnet can be utilized as a darknet[20] if the "F2F (network) topology" option is enabled.[21]
  • Eepsites
    ".
  • IPFS has a browser extension that may backup popular webpages.
  • RetroShare is a friend-to-friend messenger communication and file transfer platform. It may be used as a darknet if DHT
    and Discovery features are disabled.
  • Riffle is a government, client-server darknet system that simultaneously provides secure anonymity (as long as at least one server remains uncompromised), efficient computation, and minimal bandwidth burden.[22][23]
  • Secure Scuttlebutt is a peer-to peer communication protocol, mesh network, and self-hosted social media ecosystem
  • Syndie is software used to publish distributed forums over the anonymous networks of I2P, Tor and Freenet.
  • onion services
    .
  • Tribler is an anonymous BitTorrent client with built in search engine, and non-web, worldwide publishing through channels.
  • Urbit is a federated system of personal servers in a peer-to-peer overlay network.
  • Tor
    users.

No longer supported

Defunct

See also

References

  1. ^ .
  2. ^ Wood, Jessica (July 2010) [1 January 2010, the majority was completed by the original date]. "The Darknet: A Digital Copyright Revolution". Richmond Journal of Law & Technology. 16 (4): 14.
  3. .
  4. ISBN 9798561755668.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  5. .
  6. ^ Press Foundation, Freedom of the. "SecureDrop". github. Freedom of the Press Foundation. Retrieved 28 January 2019.
  7. ^ a b "Darknet.se - About darknet". 2010-08-12. Archived from the original on 2010-08-12. Retrieved 2019-11-05.
  8. ^ Wood, Jessica (2010). "The Darknet: A Digital Copyright Revolution" (PDF). Richmond Journal of Law and Technology. 16 (4): 15–17. Retrieved 25 October 2011.
  9. .
  10. ^ Barratt, Monica (15 January 2015). "A Discussion About Dark Net Terminology". Drugs, Internet, Society. Archived from the original on 18 January 2016. Retrieved 14 June 2015.
  11. ^ "Clearing Up Confusion – Deep Web vs. Dark Web". BrightPlanet.
  12. ^ NPR Staff (25 May 2014). "Going Dark: The Internet Behind The Internet". Retrieved 29 May 2015.
  13. ^ Greenberg, Andy (19 November 2014). "Hacker Lexicon: What Is the Dark Web?". Retrieved 6 June 2015.
  14. ^ Biddle, Peter; England, Paul; Peinado, Marcus; Willman, Bryan (18 November 2002). The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution (PDF). ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management. Washington, D.C.: Microsoft Corporation. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 July 2012. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
  15. .
  16. ^ Ian, Burrell (28 August 2014). "The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld by Jamie Bartlett, book review". Retrieved 3 June 2015.
  17. ^ Taylor, Harriet (19 May 2016). "Hit men, drugs and malicious teens: the darknet is going mainstream". CNBC.
  18. ^ "Who uses Tor?". Tor Project. Retrieved 14 May 2017.
  19. ^ "Anticounterfeiting on the Dark Web – Distinctions between the Surface Web, Dark Web and Deep Web" (PDF). 13 April 2015. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 June 2015. Retrieved 1 June 2015.
  20. .
  21. .
  22. ^ Young Hyun Kwon (20 May 2015). "Riffle: An Efficient Communication System with Strong Anonymity" (PDF). Retrieved 12 July 2016.
  23. ^ Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office (11 July 2016). "How to stay anonymous online". Retrieved 12 July 2016.

Media related to Darknet at Wikimedia Commons