Response to “The Internet, the Deep Web, and the Dark Web by Daniel Miessler
In digesting all of the assigned readings for this week, this article in particular stood out to me. I feel like this is owed to the fact that for my Rebuilding the Internet Project, my partner Lexy and I focused on these exact terms and ideas. It is always nice to know that you project coincided with the class well enough for the material discussed to make an appearance a few weeks later!
In this project, we used boxes that encapsulated each other to show the three different web types, and just how big they are in relation to each other. In our post, we specifically looked at the iceberg photo that is commonly referred to when talking about this topic. Seeing the diagram in this weeks article and its content is really interesting in comparing to the iceberg diagram photo we used in our post.
I also really enjoyed the actual definitions that Daniel Miessler uses.
The idea of indexed and non-indexed were two new terms for me to learn. The (surface web) internet is indexed, which can be seen in search engines having keywords and other phases to generate results. This means that for the deep web the user must search directly, while the dark web needs a specific proxy software to access.
When I first learned that there were different forms of the web, I generally bunched the deep and dark web together, and just thought of them as being the place where people could buy drugs, guns, and hitmen. I feel like I am not alone in this misconception, so it is important to make the information wide spread in order to facilitate this distinction. In reality, this false generalization is only true for the dark web, while the deep web encompasses mainly medical records and legal documents.
One of the most mindblowing facts to me is that the internet we know and use is a VERY small percentage of the overall web, and that’s hard for me to imagine. Every scholarly journal, Facebook post, and photo you have ever seen makes up a mere 4% of the internet.
In getting completely off topic, there was a trend on YouTube not too long ago where people would access the dark web in order to buy “mystery boxes” and they would open them on camera, to which they would be filled with scary items. Now, most of this probably was scripted, but it gave people an insight into how terrifying the dark web can be.
Overall, I really enjoyed the little article. It perfectly emcompassed Lexy and I’s Rebuilding the Internet project, while adding a few details that we did not cover. I also think that this is an interesting topic to learn about and vaguely everyone should hold some information about.
