Dark Web Mapping Reveals That Half of the Content Is Legal (helpnetsecurity.com) 93
An anonymous reader writes: Cyber threat intelligence firm Intelliagg and dark net indexing company Darksum have released the results of their efforts to map the dark web (actually, only the Tor network). They discovered that Tor network is much smaller than commonly thought, and that around 68% of the sites analyzed can be classified as illegal under UK and US law. In related news, a recent poll found that the vast majority of people want a ban on the dark net.
Article says 68%, not 48% (Score:4, Informative)
"Of those that have been accessed and analyzed with the companies’ “machine-learning” classification method, less than half (48%) can be classified as illegal under UK and US law. A separate manual classification of 1,000 sites found about 68% of the content to be illegal under those same laws."
Seriously, guys? The only place the 48% number comes from is from the same sentence saying that a more careful count said 68%.
Re:Article says 68%, not 48% (Score:4, Insightful)
Shouldn't it be UK OR US law? Since no person is going to be under both jurisdictions at the same time?
Re: (Score:2)
Well it's likely in the UK that only 10% or less of the content is legal. There's a huge gap between both countries in what is legal and illegal, including speech and things like pornography.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
No kidding. Remember, the UK recently made porn that depicts face-sitting or female squirting illegal. As well, the UK doesn't have the free speech protections that America does, and America doesn't always have the free speech protections it's supposed to. What I find most interesting is that porno/fetish only makes up about 1% of .onion sites and drugs account for only 4%. Listening to the media, the "dark web" is 110% child porn and 93% drug trafficking, which adds up to 451% illegal. It is of course no w
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Shouldn't it be UK OR US law? Since no person is going to be under both jurisdictions at the same time?
Then it should be UK XOR US law.
Re: (Score:2)
Props....
Re: (Score:1)
Not according to the US, our laws apply to everyone, everywhere at our corporate masters
whim and convenience, except themselves of course, at which point NO LAWS apply.
Re:Article says 68%, not 48% (Score:5, Informative)
Okay wow! Thank you editors! The summary got changed and I appreciate that. Seemed like that never happened on old Slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
s/Half/One Third/g
Ah...
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah, I think you're right - the last article he pushed was monday the 28th
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
If he's gone, who do we make fun of next?
Squiddie (Score:5, Interesting)
W/o copyright, people would trade disassemblies (Score:4, Interesting)
If copyright didn't apply to computer programs, and this applied to both Sony Computer Entertainment and the free software community, there would be no need for copyleft. Instead, people could just make and share commented disassemblies of proprietary software. This already happens underground [romhacking.net].
Re: (Score:2)
It causes people to reconsider the false equivalence inherent in playing the GPL card.
Re: (Score:2)
Correct.
The fear that caused the FSF to draft the GPL was that a publisher could take a permissively licensed free program private, make improvements, and lock the improvements behind copyright. But if there were no copyright in computer programs, this fear is moot because people could lawfully share the results of reverse-engineering said proprietary improvements.
Re: (Score:2)
But if there were no copyright in computer programs, this fear is moot because people could lawfully share the results of reverse-engineering said proprietary improvements.
Not that I endorse the GPL, but it is true that not having the source is a big hindrance, and greatly reduces the number of people that can effectively make improvements to proprietary software.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Getting one on viewing gives pressure for him to inform on the others in the group.
You have at all backwards. If it's illegal for both parties then they have a mutual reason to keep it quiet. On the other hand if it's legal to consume but illegal to create then you have one side working against the other. This works for prostitution and bribes too. There should be a reward on one side. For instance, if you make it legal to give bribes but illegal to receive them then anyone who can convince a politician to accept a bribe gets rewarded. The same could work for child pornography. Yo
Re: (Score:2)
There is child porn in the Dark Web, and drug selling, and murderers for hire, and more child porn.
All of that stuff is on the normal web too. Sometimes it's even more pervasive.
Dark web needs some rebranding (Score:2)
Re:Dark web needs some rebranding (Score:4, Insightful)
Well that's part of the problem. As with the bigger issues of encryption, e.g. Apple vs. FBI, if one "good guy" government can crack it, then so can the bad guys, whom it was designed to fight.
Does anybody think Russia and China, at a minimum, can't muster the technological and financial oomph to get the same job done as the NSA/FBI?
This on top of things they also do, like the US, like phone metadata and Eye in the Sky. Sometimes they even buy the software for analysis from western companies.
If we can do it for good guy reasons, so can they, and as far as I am concerned, this is all about stopping the building of these tools to begin with, to avoid the 1984 "Imagine a boot stepping on a human face...forever."
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
I am offended at the word "Dark". It needs to be called the "Web Of Color".
Re:Dark web needs some rebranding (Score:4, Funny)
Call it "Freedom Web" and watch Fox News explode in a puff of logic as it tries to find out what side to take.
Re: (Score:3)
Freenet is a real thing, BTW, a different sort of dark net that never really caught on. More secure for uploaders than TOR, though (much better for Wikileaks) since there are no servers.
Re: (Score:2)
Nonono. FREEDOM Net. Just to use a name that is almost like another one and get everyone confused so they can't tell them apart, then as soon as something bad happens inside of one both of them can be smeared.
Re: (Score:2)
So we've got something that can be used for bad things and is pretty much useless for good things that matter unless you're part of the under class. Good luck with that.
So I assume journalists and whistleblowers are part of the "under class" along with all the people living under oppressive regimes you mentioned?
Re: (Score:2)
What about "black bodies"? (Score:1)
I hear they give off radiation.
uhhh 'dark' web? can you call it that any more? coloured? african american?
Superior summary enclosed (Score:2, Informative)
During the test period, 29,532 Tor sites were identifiable.
13,584 were accessible (the remainder is assumed to be nefarious, but left out of all the statistics).
An over-hyped text matching script determined that 6,520 of the accessible sites would probably be illegal under US and/or UK law.
The pretty chart of Tor site content percent by type is here. [helpnetsecurity.com]
Unlike the bright-net, only 1% of the dark-net appears to be porn. However, 29% is file sharing, and another 28% is "leaked data", which taken together provide
Re: (Score:2)
13,584 were accessible .... the remainder is assumed to be nefarious,
Seriously?!?
At least some of those are probably my "hello world" virtual machines where I set up a hidden services that serve literally just the static page '<html\>Hello World\</html\>', or just the default installs of things like WikiMedia, just to see if i could.
I never could figure out anything interesting to do with them; so they're just hosting empty wikis, blogs, etc; that were locked down so I'm the only one that can get in, to avoid spammers from uploading crap into them.
TL/DR: No, mos
Re: (Score:2)
Or at least change "hello world!" to "Allah akbar!"
"oh, yeah, leave it partway on, baby" (Score:4, Funny)
Dark Web Mapping Reveals That Half of the Content Is Legal
Yes, sir, certainly she was old enough, that's not the issue. The problem is that a llama can't legally consent to anything, even if she's over 21.
Re: (Score:3)
Bestiality is legal in a number of states. Only recently has there been a drive to have the government control what goes on in your hayloft, and even then it's usually after someone gets themselves fucked to death by a horse.
I know perverts are nothing if not dedicated, but I shudder at the thought of how much effort it would take to get a horse up into a hayloft.
As a corollary: Never trust a farmer with an elevator in his barn.
Re:Who cares? We care. (Score:3)
If you actually read the TFA but this being Slashdot, you didn't and I almost didn't, thinking "oh god not this shit again."
This isn't about actually banning anything but battling against the meme that the "dark web" is all illegal sites.
Re: (Score:2)
>you nerds
I think you are on the wrong web page.
Facebook is ----->that way.
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
Bye, Felicia.
--
BMO
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
About 68% of criminal activity goes unprosecuted because criminals invoke their constitutional rights. It would be so much easier if they didn't have those rights. So lets let the 32% of people who are saved by constitutional rights hang in the wind.
That's effectively what you are saying when you want to prevent the 32% of sites that are used by whistleblowers, journalists, resistance fighters and dissidents from having a platform that is safe to communicate.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't want to ban it for YOUR safety, they want to ban it for THEIRS.
I'm just sayin'...
Not really accurate. (Score:5, Interesting)
Dark? It is pitch black. (Score:2)
'Banning' the 'dark web' (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
They're following the same kind of logic that makes Donald Trump think that Bill Gates can kick ISIS off the Internet, so they think that all you need to do is find a prominent personality somehow related to darknet technology, go into his basement/office, and use a convenient control panel/big red button to make the necessary change.
Re: (Score:2)
Kicking ISIS off the internet seems easy enough. Jammers + snipping physical lines would prevent anyone from ISIS-controlled territory from communicating with the outside world. Plus, a wall of course to prevent IPOverSneakers. And every knows Donald Trump is a wall builder. It's gonna be the greatest wall.
You know, I have trouble with my cellphone inside some buildings. If the wall is high enough and thick enough, you might not need jammers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It wouldn't do everything. It would isolate those few from logistical and technical support.
If we could reliably track them. Which you then point out we have a lot of trouble doing. Either might be the right decision, I don't know how well the tracking program works.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't ban the so-called 'dark web' because you really can't identify where it is.
Unless, of course, the user or the network can be exposed by other means. The tech isn't as good as the geek thinks it is or its users or administrators can't be trusted. The geek who turns to crime has an unfortunate tendency to show off when things are going well. He needs a bigger audience than the dark net can give him.
"Intellectual property" in the US Code (Score:2)
There's no Dark Web as there's no Intellectual Property. These are scare terms not codified into science or law.
"Intellectual property" isn't well defined in the U.S. Code, to the best of my knowledge. This means a judge applying 47 USC 230(e)(2) [cornell.edu] may have to define it in case law.
I'd wager... (Score:3)
Of course the name has -nothing- to do with it.
Who would've thunk (Score:1)
*sigh* (Score:3)
"A recent poll found that the vast majority of people want a ban on the dark net."
Genius. You know what else? We should ban crime, too. Just make being a criminal illegal and *poof*, crime goes away.
Only ... (Score:2)