The Invisible Areas Of The World Wide Web
Even after more than 20 years of online access, the world is still at the beginning of the Internet revolution.
Now the importance and influence of digital technology and media has already dwarfed that of television. The pace of digital change and its impact will continue to accelerate over the next ten years.
The Internet: Still in the Early Evolutionary Stages
The Internet has globally transformed data and communications like nothing before. The inventions of the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location.
The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts of wide area networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, United Kingdom, and France.
The Internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research and development of information infrastructure.
Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the government, industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this exciting new technology. Following the Second World War and lasting through to the late 1980’s, a Cold War was fought between the world’s two superpowers, the United States and the now defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
While military build ups, political sparring, and diplomatic manoeuvring were the most obvious activities, there were also many spin-off effects into other areas including some nearer and dearer to the heart of librarians and documentarists, such as research and education. For example, the Soviet Union’s jump-start of the space race with the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 sparked a dedicated effort in the United States to boost scientific research. Academic and research libraries, by and large, became beneficiaries of the government largesse that resulted from this “knowledge race.”
Collections boomed in order to keep up with the production of scientific literature. In order to control the resulting surge in bibliographical data, computers were enlisted to process the information then published as print or microfilmed indexes, and which subsequently would be transformed into databases accessible through the large host services that sprang up in the early 1970s
This Internet now includes the World Wide Web which includes both the Deep Web and the Dark Web.
The Dark Web has a sinister, even foreboding, reputation for good reason. People go to the Dark Web to anonymously buy illegal narcotics, even to see child pornography. Terrorists use the dark web to hide and organise. There are libraries of pirated books and music on the dark web. If the internet is an online world of towns and cities, then the dark web is the red-light districts, the hideouts of criminals and all the other dark alleys and criminal enterprises that exist the underground economy.
Nevertheless, the dark web is growing. More than growing, before long it will change the Internet as we know it.
Now okay, with that opening you might be picturing a darkness descending, pushing out the light of the Internet. In your head might be scenes reminiscent of a modern Batman movie as some villain takes over Gotham by shutting out the lights.
The thing is there is a lot more to the dark web than villains of every type.
The dark web is simply the portion of the Internet that can only be accessed on darknet, overlay networks that require specific software, configurations or authorisation to access. The dark web is only a small part of the deep web, as the “deep web” is the portion of the Internet not indexed by web search engines.
Basically, the dark web is comprised of small peer-to-peer networks and larger and growing dark web networks like Tor, Freenet and I2P. The Tor portion of the dark web requires someone to download free software to be used as a browser.
The name “Tor” comes from an acronym for the original software project name “The Onion Router.” Tor simply directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network. Round and around your signal goes in thousands of relays in an unknown sequence. This conceals your IP address and location.
The dark web then is certainly used by criminals, but it is increasingly also being used by individuals in countries that ban access to certain parts of the Internet, or that even hunt down and arrest people who say certain things or communicate with political dissidents.
The dark web is also being used by people in freer nations who simply are tired of their Internet traffic being watched and monetized by corporations. Some people would also rather not have their Google searches used against them in the future. Many aren’t interested in criminal behavior, but just have a penchant for privacy from government surveillance or the corporate world.
For more information: please read Cyber Security Intelligence’s book Easy Cyber Knowledge
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