TechStuff Goes Dark

figured revisiting it is a good idea. That's one of those topics that tends to be in and now the news pretty frequently. In fact, the day that I record this, a couple of different news stories came out about relating to the dark Web. And when people start bandying about that name, uh, a lot of different ideas come to mind. So what is it all about? That's what we're going

to try and answer. The very name conjures up this idea of a egal goods and services, kind of a black market for the Internet, and that's definitely a part of the dark Web. In fact, you might argue it is a very large part of the dark Web, but it is not the whole picture. So here we go. First, it's good to remind ourselves of how the world Wide

Web tends to work. The web we typically use on a day to day basis, So your average Internet user, not someone who's a hacker or is trying to evade detection, just your average person. When this average person makes a regular run of the mill website so that they're creating their own website, he or she will build out this site and create links between pages on the site so you can navigate easily across the different pages. Maybe they include some links out to a few other sites that

are of a related topic or interest. Maybe some of those sites are owned by that same person, maybe they're owned by different people. Then they might build out some meta data on their web pages. This helps tag those

pages to indicate what the site is actually about. Now, assuming there are no incoming links to this website, Let's say you're Logic a brand new website and there there's no connection with anything else yet, like no one else has any incoming links to your site, then you might want to use a tool like Google's search console to

fetch the U r L of your website. You know you've established it, you've got it launched on the server you fetch the u r L using that tool, and that will help index your website and Google's search index, and that tells Google where the website is and what's on it. Then Google can sent its crawlers to explore your site, follow all the links to all the different pages and build out a better understanding of what the site is about, including those individual pages, and put them

all in search. And these links between pages and between sites are really important. The links are the web in Worldwide Web right, we call it a web because they are all these different links between different pages. So it's not just how you can navigate from one page or site to another, but it's also how search engines can find an index sites to include in search results. They send out these automatic crawlers that crawl the web and

index everything. Ranking high in search is a really good way to get traffic to your site generally, not as not as good a way as it used to be, actually, because the way that people get their links to go visit stuff changes over time. But you want to use good search engine optimization. Now that's tricky because there are different search engines, and different search engines have different priorities as to what is important for ranking and search. They

have different algorithms, and these can change without notice. So one day your site might rank really well in a particular search engine, and then the next day it suddenly is pushed to the third page or lower, and no one's seeing it when they search for whatever the terms are. Now, all of this assumes that you want people to easily find your stuff in the first place, that you want to be part of this surface web. You want search engines to index your site and make it easier for

traffic to come to you. Your website is part of this surface web, the stuff that's really easy to find and navigate to on purpose, it was made intentionally that way. Now, in actuality, that represents a very small percentage of all the information that is on the web. And if you think of it, it's kind of like an iceberg, right. The part you see above the water is only a tiny fraction of the entire iceberg. Most of the mass of the iceberg is out of So it is with

the Worldwide Web. You've got the surface web, the stuff you can see. That's a tiny percentage. What if you don't want to be found so easily, Maybe you're creating a database and that database has information in it that's important, and you want certain people to be able to get to it very easily, but you don't want the whole world to get there. Right, it's not that there's anything

wrong in the database. Maybe there's proprietary information. Maybe you work for a company and you've built out a database that needs to be web accessible because people in your company may be trusted partners. They need to have access to this information. But you don't want the general public to get it. You want to limit people. Well, there are a couple of ways you can do this. One is you can include some code in your HTML to

prevent your site from being indexed by search engines. There's a meta tag called no index all one word no index that tells search butts you don't want that site to be included on search results page. But that's kind of a minor form of protection. It does not stop other sites from linking straight to yours. Right, So I

might not show up on anyone's search engine. But let's say I've created this database and I don't have any other protection on it other than the fact that I've told it not to get indexed in any search engines. There's nothing stopping someone else from creating a link to my database that would still send people straight there. Right. This section of the web that is blocked off from search engines in general is what we would call the deep web. So this is underneath the water in that

iceberg metaphor. The deep web has tons of stuff in it, including stuff that's important but probably not very interesting for the general public, like those databases I was talking about that would be really important for some people and probably of no interest at all to of the of the

population out there. The only way to navigate the air is to type in the specific U r L in a web browser, and it may likely have other forms of security, such as a password login page where you have to have an account in order to gain access to whatever is behind that, but you can't get there unless you already know the address. Uh. It would be like navigating to a secret location on a map, and the only way you can get to the secret location is if you already know where it is. Then beyond

the deep web is the dark web. This is a subsection of the deep web. Unlike the deep web, you cannot navigate to sites on the dark Web through normal web browsers. Typically you would need special dark web browsers, the most well known of which is Tour, the tour browser bundle. Tour stands for a couple of different things. Actually, we'll get into that. A lot of shady stuff can happen on the dark web. It's not all illegal activity,

but a lot of it definitely is illegal activity. And there are tons of bad actors out there on the dark Web. I'm not talking about people who do really crappy performances and movies and film and television and plays and stuff. I mean people who are out to exploit other people and companies, people who are out to steal information for profit or cause mischief. There are a lot of them on the dark web. These are people or groups who deal in data. They look for careless folks

who do not protect their information very well. Even something is seemingly boring as an IP address can be dangerous in their hands. And because a ton of stuff on the dark web is at least of questionable legality, you probably don't want to leave a trail of where you've been. If you visit the dark web. Your Internet service provider would have a record of this, and then perhaps someday law enforcement officials serve that I s P with an order to hand over data. Maybe you did nothing wrong.

Maybe all you were doing was just being curious and seeing what happens to be out there on the deep web or the dark web. And then you're just looking around. But now you've got a trail. The I s P knows that you went there, and now the fuzzes on your tail because you didn't cover it tracks. So there's another element to visiting the dark web that you'll here mentioned all the time, and that would be VPNs or virtual private networks. Those act as sort of a stopper

between you and the dark web. There's actually a couple of different stoppers, because tour itself acts as a stopper. But the VbN is there to help provide a little protection between you and your Internet service provider. You lug into the VPN and that assigns you an I P address that is not the one that your machine actually has. Uh. This is the VPN is acting on your behalf. It's

acting as your proxy. So you're signed into the VPN, it assigns you an IP address, perhaps one that belongs to a machine that would be in a totally different country. So the IP address would indicate that you are perhaps in a completely different part of the world. It might be that you're in Topeka, Kansas, but you log into a VPN and it assigns you an IP address that

makes it look like you are in Singapore. So then you are able to visit sites through this VPN and from the perspective of the people on the other end of this, on the site end, Let's say that you're going to navigate to let's just pick an innocent website. Let's say you're going to how Stuff Works, and you're

using a VPN in order to do it. Then when you contact How stuff Works as server through the VPN, how stuff works is server is getting the IP address the VPN has provided, not your personal IP address, not your machines IP address, but rather the one from the VPN. So How Stuff Works is sending information back to the VPN via that i P address, and the VPN then relays that to you. That's a level of protection so that the I s P all all they can see

is that you're connecting to this virtual private network. They can't see, you know, what else is going on there because everything else is going through there. Uh, but tour adds another layer of protection. I'll talk more about that in a second. But visiting the dark web is risky. Maybe you're trying to do something that isn't really legal, Maybe you're encountering the scum and villainy of the Internet. Maybe you're doing something totally on the up and up.

But just because it's the dark web, it cast suspicion on you. You've got to be careful. And there are plenty of people who suggest you use a vp N all the time, by the way, not just when you go visit the dark web, but rather go ahead and use a VPN whenever you browse the Internet, which is not necessarily a bad idea if you value your privacy.

It can help keep your browsing activity private from your Internet search provider our service provider rather, and thus you don't have to worry about them seeing what kind of stuff you're looking at. Let's say that you're looking at a different Internet service provider and you don't want your current one to know. It could be something as simple as that. However, using a VPN does tend to slow things down a bit, so pages load load more slowly.

You'll get your content more slowly than you would if you directly directly connected, So you balance privacy with how quickly pages load and how quickly you get the content. Also, a good VPN tends to be subscription service. You you pay a monthly fee in order to use the VPN, and you get what you pay for. A good VPN will not keep log files. For example, because of a VPNs keeping log files, then your activity is still being logged, and it's just being logged at the VPN level, not

the I s B level. So dark web enthusiasts tend to go towards VPNs that are reputable, that don't keep log files and they are subscription based because they they provide these services. Also, dark webe enthusiast tend to gravitate toward cryptocurrencies like bitcoin to pay those fees because of that decentralized nature of cryptocurrency and also the fact that if you're using it properly and you're not using it

too frequently, your transactions are largely untraceable. They don't link back to your identity personally, so you have some safety there by, making purchases through Bitcoin really secure. Vp ns will frequently purge all their records so again, you want to look into that if you are interested in using a vp N. So some of you may be intrigued by what I'm talking about so far and you want to know more. We're gonna go further down the rabbit hole and really talk about onions in just a moment.

But first, let's sick quick break to thank our sponsor I mentioned earlier, the Tour bundle, the tor browser or Tour client. Tour grew out of the concept of onion routing. In fact, that's you know, the onion routers what Tour technically kind of stands for. And onion routing in itself was a concept that emerged out of the early mid nineties. Uh and it was funded in part by organizations like the Office of Naval Research and DARPA, so there's military

money behind it. So what the heck is onion routing? Well, it involves sending data wrapped inside a series of encrypted layers and passing through a series of relays before getting to its intended destination. And those layers of encryption are like the peel of an onion. You peel down one layer of encryption and you have another layer of encryption.

You do that again you get another layer of encryption, and finally, after you peel back that third layer, you get to whatever the data is, which, by the way, could still be in an encrypted format, it would just no longer be related specifically to onion routing. So an onion rolling network consists of thousands of computers run by volunteers. By the way, you can actually volunteer to UH to

act as a tour relay UH. You are volunteering up some of your bandwidth each month to that purpose UM, and there are a lot of folks who advocate for that sort of thing. When you're doing that, those those computers that are part of this relay system, they're running special software to act as relays. Traffic passing through an onion network will go through three relays before reaching the

intended destination. So your computer is the client that you're running a tour client technically, and when you ever you send a request out, it's going to pass through three relays on the tour network before it gets to the destination on the other side to retrieve whatever it is you're looking for. You're hopping around. If you think about spy movies, whenever people are tracing a call and they're like, oh, we've got it. It's coming from you know, Los Angeles, California. Wait, no, no,

we're tracing it back. It's actually over in Tokyo. No wait, we're tracing it back. The whole thing where that you're seeing that the call is hopping through satellites over and over and again, you're trying to trace it back to original source. That's kind of what Tour is doing. It does it in threes. So let's say I'm using the Tour browser and I want to visit super secret site X.

Here's what happens from a high level perspective. First, my Tour browser, also known as the client, will encrypt my request, and those three layers, the entity that holds the key to my request exists on the relays of the Tour network. The ultimate one, the closest layer of encryption to my data, is held by what is called the exit relay. That's the point where my request leaves the Tour network and

hits the destination. Uh. More on that in a second. So, now my request will have layers of encryption around it. Uh the first layer being the one from the exit relay. The second layer will be a layer of encryption around the first That one can only be decoded by a key that's one step back from the exit relay. That's

the middle relay. And then my client wraps one more layer of encryption around that, and the holder of the key to that outermost layer of encryption is the guard relay or entrigue relay, the first relay my request will encounter. So if you think of it as data in the center, you have layer three around that, layer two around that, and layer one on the outermost layer. I send my request out, I say I want to see super secret site X, and I'm I'm using my tour network browser.

The request then goes to that entry or guard relay, which has that first key to decrypt just the outer layer of encryption. That's all it can do. So it sees that it's got an incoming request from me. Uh, it knows that I'm the one requesting it, but it doesn't know what I'm requesting. All it knows is here's a here's a big encrypted data package. It uses the key to decrypt that outermost layer of protection around my request. The only thing it sees is where it needs to

send that data packet two. Next, it doesn't know what's inside the other layers of encryption. It just knows, oh, I need to send this to this specific middle relay, and so it does. The middle relay, all it knows is that just received an encrypted package from relay number one, the entry relay, and it uses it's key to decode that particular layer mid layer two, and all it sees is where it needs to send it to next, the exit relay. So the middle relay doesn't know that that

initial request came from you at all. It just knows that the entry relay was the one that sent it to it, and the exit relay is the one that sends it to. So then the middle relay unwraps that and then sends it on to the exit relay, which uses its key to finally unwrap the data. So the exit relay actually gets to see the data you sent. In fact, that's a very important thing to to stress. The exit relay, the last relay in the Tor network

to send something out to the Destiny nation. It's sending that information out as if it is your machine, so it can see exactly what you are sending out, and if you're sending out unencrypted information, it can see all of that. If it's in clear text, it can see all that, including things like user names and passwords. So with that in mind, you have to make sure that you are pretty comfortable with the fact that there is a machine out there that is getting access to all

of that stuff. If you're sending out unencrypted communications, if you've got another level of encryption on there, if you're using something like HTTPS, then that's not as big a concern because that information is still encrypted as it passes through that exit relay. But if you're using clear text, boy howdy, that could be a dangerous thing. If the person who owns that exit relay is not ethical, they

might take advantage of that information. Uh So, guard relays, those entry points to the Tour network are particularly vulnerable if an oppressive government wants to cut off access to Tour.

To connect to a guard relay, your client has to know which machines it can communicate with, or which one specific specifically it needs to communicate with, which means somewhere there has to be a list of all the different relays on the Tour network, because otherwise there's no way to build these circuits of relays where it goes from client to guard relay to middle relay to exit relay.

So you have to have a list somewhere. But lists are dangerous, right, What if an oppressive government gets hold of that list, then they just aim to shut down those machines and no more Tour network, or they aim to try and spy on those machines and try to decrypt the information through some means or another. So you to protect the guard relays from getting blacklisted. Tour actually maintains a secret internal list of guard relays. They are called bridges. These are a subset of entry relays, a

subset of those entry slash guard relays. Bridges are uh The overall list is secret. So when you download and launch a Tour client. When you do that, your client requests from the Tour network a uh uh an entry point where do I start? So I can start making these encryption keys. And if it needs to be a bridge, then the bridge one will send you a small selection

of potential bridges, but not the whole list. That way, if that request is compromised in any way, the whole list as it remains safe, right, or most of the less remains safe, only the ones that were shared are compromised the rest remain secret. There remains safe, so you can always recruit more volunteers to run tour software. So if you lose some, if if the government shut some down, or if a government shuts some down because they're not all located in the United States, then you can attempt

to replace them with new volunteers. The middle relay and exit relay are are different. The exit relays are also kind of a big target because if you shut down the exit relays then information can't pass from the tour network to their destinations. But that's also pretty tricky. They tend to be restricted to very trustworthy volunteers. Entry and middle points tend to be a little less of problem from that perspective, mostly because you've got so many levels

of encryption wrapping around that data. But exit relays, because of the sensitivity to data and because they are tempting targets, tend to be more trustworthy in general, and they're they're frequent reviews to make sure that those exit points are trustworthy and no one's being a jerk face, I guess. So the important thing to remember is that the entry and middle relays have no way of knowing what is

in that data. Request you're sending UM and the only one that does know is the exit relay before it sends it onto the to the destination AH. The maintenance for this entire network falls to about ten pivotal tour nodes called directory authorities. Nine of those contain lists of the relays, the tenth contains a list of the bridges. Those ten directory authorities are located mostly in Europe and the United States. In fact, Central and Eastern Europe and

the United States mainly and UH. They are the backbone of the Tour network. Using tour can help keep your communications secret. If you were to send a request through a browser, normally there'd be several points along the way where someone could potentially snoop on your traffic. So let's say that you're connecting. Let's say you're in a coffee shop and you're on a laptop and you want to connect to the Internet and you're just using regular connections.

So if you connect through the coffee shops WiFi, there could be someone at that coffee shop who's sniffing WiFi packets and trying to spy on communications that are going through the coffee shops WiFi network. And that's before it ever gets to an Internet service provider or the Internet at large. It's purely local. That's a problem no matter better, whether you're using tour or a normal browser. You don't want to try and do any sort of secure browsing

over an open WiFi network. That's that would be ridiculous. It would be like putting all your money in a super super duper high security vault and leaving the back door of the vault open. It would be like putting a back door in the vault in the first place.

It's not a good idea. So from that point, from the WiFi point, the information gets into the I s P. The I s P can see both where requests are coming from as in your location, and what the request is, so that the data itself, what you are doing, your browsing activity, all of that can be recorded and is recorded by your I s P. So if the I s P were served with legal papers later on, or if an organization like the n s A we're snooping in on that I s P, your activities would be

known to them and that request would then pass from your I s P through the inner at to the I s P that handles whatever server that you're navigating to, like whatever server holds the website that you are trying to go to, and that um would mean that that server would also know where you are and what you're asking for obviously, and so anyone snooping on that server would be able to determine what you're what you're up to.

So there are a lot of points along the line where you have an unsecured UH data connection where someone could potentially know what's going on and spy on you and maybe steal information. If you use HTTPS, that adds

a layer of encryption on top of communications. That means anyone looking at points between you and the server you're contacting, they can see that you're communicating in some way with that server, right, They see that you're sending a request to this target server, but they cannot see what the communication is because it's encrypted, So they don't know what you're saying. They just know you're talking to that server

and that the servers talking back to you. Uh. They do, however, know where you are because you're not that that information is not hidden, so they don't know what you're requesting, but they know where you are, They know when you requested it, and they know who you're talking to, and that in itself can end up being a problem. If you are working in a place that has an oppressive government, that could be enough to get you into some hot water.

And it may be that you did nothing at all wrong, but in the eyes of that oppressive regime, they're saying, well, you were talking to this entity at this time from this place, and that's all we need to come after you.

Using Tour eavesdroppers that are looking at you between you and your I s P will know where you are, and they'll know that you're sending communications to the Onion router network, but they won't know what that information um is and they don't know where the information is ultimately going, right, They just see, okay, you're sending communications to Tour. Those

communications are already encrypted and three layers of encryption. And because the outer layer only tells the data packet which relay it needs to go to for the first entry relay, for the entry relay into Tour, anyone snooping on your data at that early stage. All they know is you're sending information to the Tour network. But they wouldn't know anything beyond that. They wouldn't know where the ultimate destination was, and they wouldn't know what was actually in the information

once it hits the tour network. Now your location would be secret because it would just look like the communication is moving from one part of the tour network to the next part of the tour network. So it would be safe. If anyone were trying to snoop in on the tour network, they would just see communications passing between

relays with no meaningful information to identify you. If there were someone sniffing at an exit relay, they could get all the information coming out of the relay with the exception of your physical location, So they could get whatever the data is because it would no longer be in that those three layers of encryption, So if it's unencrypted data,

they could get that. Uh, they could essentially know who you are, but and where you were going, what what the ultimate site is that your destination is, But they wouldn't know where you are because the location would still be Tour network. But ultimately that might not be enough protection for you. So if you combine tour and HTTPS, that's best because then it really limits what information any

snooper can get when their eaves dropping on you. On the front side of the tour network, So before your information hits Tour, the snoop would only see that you're sending communications to Tour, but they would and be able to see what it was because you've encoded it in

uh in you've encrypted it. Rather on the back side of the tour network, snoops would see that there's information coming from Tour to a site, but there'd be no data linking you to that request, to that communication, So all they could say is somebody is using the tour network to connect to this site, but we don't know who it is because the communications inside are encrypted and the location data is masked to the tour network. So

it's the safest of all the options. Now, I went through great links to explain at a very very high level was going on with tour networks, because these are the sort of links that people who visit the dark web will go to in order to maintain their privacy and be able to do the things they do without getting caught, sometimes the thing as they do being extremely illegal or unethical or both. Uh sometimes illegal but not unethical. I'll explain more in just a moment, but first let's

take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All right, so you've installed a tour bundle and you're using HTTPS connections, you're using a VPN to add extra encryption, extra distance. You're protecting yourself from eavesdroppers, whether they are hackers or oppressive governmental organizations. What are you going to find when you go to the dark Web. Well, it's actually a

little hard to navigate. You have to look around for various resources to find where the the sites are because it's by its nature, it's not designed for you to be able to have like a really effective search engine for the dark Web. If you did, it would be a lot easier for law enforcement to track down dark

web sites and and target them. So there are lots of resources online that act as sort of a directory for websites that are on the dark Web, and you would find stuff that's of varying degrees of legality from it's technically legal, but it's really difficult to get hold of to this is totally illegal stuff. And it can include things like controlled substances like drugs, like illegal drugs. It can include sites that link you two hacker forums where you can learn how to exploit systems. You can

take tutorials, you can talk with other hackers. You can download malware that you could then use on other people to exploit people or systems. You could hire hackers for their services to do things of that nature. There are marketplaces that sell weapons with no restrictions on them. On this dark market. There are counterfeit goods that you could

buy super cheap that look like the real thing. Uh. Then there's also tons and tons of data of information, information that's been gathered through various means, often stolen through security breaches or credit cards skimming or other methods. Now, personally, I am mostly against purchasing anything off the dark web,

particularly dangerous stuff. I I personally find it distasteful. But in some places you might find governments that could restrict access to things that might be really helpful, and it's because of the particular laws of that region. So, for example, maybe there's an area where stuff like birth control is really hard to get hold of, and you could argue, well, that's unethical to deny people birth control so or or you know, protect and from things like STDs, that kind

of stuff. So it's important to remember what is legal and what is ethical doesn't always match up right just because something might be illegal doesn't always mean it's unethical, and just because something is ethical doesn't necessarily mean it's legal. There's a lot of leeway there. Still, there's an awful lot of dangerous and questionable stuff on these dark markets, including stuff that could really seriously cause harm to yourself or others, and some of it exploits innocent victims. So

I'm not for any of that. Like I I'd rather not see anyone hurt themselves or hurt someone else, and so for that reason, I am pretty negative toward these dark markets. But there's a lot of money to be made there, so obviously they're going to exist. Purchasing stuff on the dark market obviously comes with its own risks. Users tend to deal almost exclusively cryptocurrency, like I mentioned, because you don't want those purchases to be traced back

to you. Using your own personal credit card to buy illegal substances is a pretty dumb thing to do. But it's not all black markets filled with illegal materials. There's also gambling sites where you can take a chance to win money through various online casino games. Those may not be legal in your area, but you can find them online. Um I would seriously questioned the validity of those sites before engaging in online games of chance. But if that's your thing, those can be found on the deep web.

There are information exchanges dedicated to share as much information as possible, essentially kind of the dark web version of wiki leaks, sort of a whistleblower kind of approach. There's obviously a lot of pornographic material on the dark web too, things that again would not really fly in the surface web, even uh uh, you know, stuff that's of definite questionable

legality or is straight out illegal and ethical. You can find it much more easily on the dark web because there's much less chance of the people who are dealing in it of getting caught. It can get very upsetting, very quickly. Actually, uh, these sites are not necessarily the most reliable entities out there. You can look at a directory and say, oh, I'm gonna go visit this particular side on the dark web, and then you try and

visit it. You type in the long and complicated u r L that makes no seemingly seemingly makes no sense, and then you get an error back after you wait forever for the page to load. Uh. Or you might find that the thing you purchased never gets to you, you get scammed out of money, or you go to a gambling site and you find out that not only did you not win anything, but they took extra money

from you. Um. They're also are sites that are frequent targets of various enforcement agencies for obvious reasons, so things like markets like the Silk Road would get taken down. And that means the connection points in the dark web are constantly shifting as sites come online or go offline.

They are not as constant as most of the stuff we see on the surface web, So navigating the dark webs pretty slow due to all those jumps that you're making in order for you to visit it safely, and you might end up just getting an error message, which can get really frustrating. Dark websites also have a special designation. You don't get a dot com or a dot org type top level domain. You see a dot onion designation.

Now that's not an official route in the domain name system, but is a way of designating a site as being a tour only accessible site. And I think there are some very legitimate uses for the dark web. I don't mean to suggest that it's only a place where criminals go or illegal activity is the only thing that happens there. So, for example, let's say you are an ambassador, and you're an ambassador to a nation that has known antagonistic views

towards your home country, the country you are representing. So you're an ambassador to some country that is hostile at least in some degree towards your home, you would probably want a secure means to communicate back to your home country.

When you're trying to send messages back home, whether whether it's to your loved ones or to coworkers or your government, or whatever it may be, you want to be able to make sure those communications are secure, that the government that is at least some level hostile towards your home isn't snooping on what you have to say and either making plans to do terrible things or to alter the data in some way or prevent it from getting to

where it needs to go. Having a method to encrypt the messages and hide your location would be really help full when you're sending sensitive information back home, and some of the sites on the dark Web are all about encrypted communications so that you can have these kind of communications between people and not worry about third parties snooping

in on it. So there are a lot of opportunities for people like protesters or whistleblowers or people who are living under oppressive regimes to use the dark web to send information and files back and forth. So it is a valuable resource. It's just that when you have a resource like this that's valuable the way you can say there are legitimate uses where someone who is concerned about government overreach wants to be able to communicate freely with others.

They're they're legitimate cases where that should be allowed. It also opens up the opportunity for these dark markets. I mean there's again, if there's money to be made, if there's demand, the supply will follow. So that is an overview of the dark web. I do not recommend and just checking it out for fun zies. If you are going to check it out, I do recommend you use a VPN and that you use to our browser, and

that you enable all the security features. You don't have stuff like JavaScript turned on, and you are super careful because even if you're not doing anything illegal or unethical yourself, there are a lot of a lot of entities on the dark web that will jump at the chance of taking advantage of people who are not covering their tracks properly, so be careful out there. Well, that wraps up this discussion. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of

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