The Dark Internet
In all honesty it sounds fancy as shit when I write something like that. But here’s the real truth. I don’t know what in god’s name is The Dark Internet. And the remainder of this blog post is my attempt to try and uncover it.
I was first introduced to the concept of the Dark Internet back in the 10th grade when my friends were on a torrent downloading blitzkrieg as everyone had a new fad of watching movies. That fad is yet to get over though the torrent downloading has been done away with.
Back then the speeds on offer were somewhere around 30 kbps and downloading a movie took an entire night. A friend of mine told me that there were websites and sectors of the internet where people who had the capability to download in GB’s and I stared at his face. For the remainder of that conversation I watched as four people including me took the poor guy’s case.
Even today the concept of downloading in GB’s seems a little far fetched but probably not as far fetched as it was five years ago. It’s an exciting time to say the least. Facebook for lack of a better word is trying to reinvent itself.Newer social networks are coming up. People the world over are trying to get into big data. And there’s innumerable open source projects that are coming up every single day on sites such as GitHub.
The Dark Internet in all honesty to me is that area of the internet which your mainstream search engine (read Google, Bing, Yahoo) will never cover. Because it contains information not meant for the main stream user. The mainstream user is a duffer of the first order who would rather type something on the google search bar then out of the million results that google ends up displaying, he/she would end up on the wikipedia page.
I have recently made the shift to alternative search engines. Tried to figure out what exactly is the dark internet using forums and mostly stuff on reddit. I haven’t been able to reach a consensus. Most people project it as an underground market of sorts. One where drug cartels are in full swing and bitcoins are the medium of exchange. Some speculators also claim of entire stock market exchanges on the basis of bitcoin as a currency.
As naive as I may sound two years ago I thought that the gateway to the dark internet is a membership on demonoid. I never really got that membership so I really cannot comment whether it was or it wasn’t. But here’s the thing. I think my attempts have been futile primarily because I haven’t really tried understanding it that much and perhaps maybe that’s the way that it’s meant to be.
Why try to enter a foreign land? Specially one in which you are not invited.