Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

The internet as it stands today with its cat pictures and weather updates and cleverly written articles, is around five million terabytes. To put that into perspective, a standard CD-ROM holds seven hundred megabytes, so you’d need a decent number of them to burn a copy of the internet for your friend to take home. What’s surprising is, we actually don’t see most of what makes up the internet we know and love. Only about four percent of that huge number is stuff we can Google, click on and consume. So if our favorite sites just make up that tiny percentage of what’s actually out there, what does the rest of the web consist of?

The way that the world wide web functions necessitates it having a few layers. The top layer which we’re all most familiar with, is called the surface, or open web. This is made up of all the content which we can browse, search for, and easily navigate to without any special tools or considerations. It’s at this layer that search engines like Google and Bing index webpages, so that they can be found using the word (or more commonly now, voice), based searches we’re familiar with. Wikipedia, your favorite news site, Youtube - all of these big name sites exist in the open web for all to enjoy at their convenience. What about the content you cannot simply search for and easily click a link to display, though?

Below the surface, on what we call the deep web, lurks the remaining 96 percent of the internet as an entity. This is home to things which cannot be found by a simple web search. Your private photos on Facebook, your online banking details, the things you store on iCloud or Dropbox. Most of this content is encrypted and protected behind a sign-in, but web developers can and do mark some of their pages as “do not index,” so that search engines skip over them. These pages are more obscured than secured, but they do make up that huge percentage of what’s not considered the general web. If you’ve ever right-clicked on a photo in your browser and used the “open image in a new tab” function, that address in the bar would typically be an example of content which lives on the deep web.

A subset of the deep web which occasionally makes the news is the so-called “dark web.” It’s been the topic of internet scaremongering, movies and tropes of all kinds for a number of years. While nefarious activity absolutely does happen on this layer, the security aspect is actually quite useful when looked at on its own. It, like the deep web layer it exists on, also is not indexed by search engines. Using a special browser, one can anonymously browse sites on the dark web, (almost, but not completely) without fear of being tracked. This has uses for avoiding targeted ads, or censorship in countries with much more restricted freedoms of information than our own. It’s by no means something all of us need to be browsing, but it’s not without its uses in the world at large.

For me, most of us can absorb this knowledge and move on with our day. But for the curious, I advise caution. With anonymity comes the feeling of lack of repercussions, which can make people feel like they can misbehave. The dark web, with its legitimate uses and interesting technological aspects, also has many pitfalls. While it’s neither illegal nor even “sketchy” to access the dark web itself, simply be sure you’re well read and confident in your ability to spot something which should not be clicked on.