
We can’t let the dark web give online anonymity a bad name - tzury
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/dark-web-drugs-porn-internet-freedom
======
finnthehuman
The dark web doesn't give online anonymity a bad name.

Charlatans use the dark web to advance their goal of branding anonymity as
bad.

Clickbait hot take bloggers, "journalists" who should know better, and other
useful idiots are all more than willing to assassinate character and tear down
something they don't care about if it confers a benefit to themselves
(attention, status, ad impressions, etc...).

Those are the bigger problem. Not the "dark web."

It's nice that this author is making the principled case for anonymity. But
that should be secondary to showing people the bigger picture, and how to
"smell out" when they're being mislead for someone's myopic goals.

~~~
slededit
I don't see how pointing this out helps advance the goal of web anonymity.
Unless you are suggesting we somehow find a way to change human nature.

~~~
alphapapa
It helps us see through the deceptive arguments against anonymity. You don't
think that's helpful?

~~~
slededit
Not really, no. While logically inconsistent the form of rhetoric used appeals
to humans which are behaviorally dominated by group association. Pointing out
its logical inconsistency appeals to a very small subset of the population who
probably already agree with you.

~~~
alphapapa
What a cynical, defeatist attitude. The Internet is full of people, and you
don't know who reads what. Everyone has to learn somewhere, to start from
something.

Your logic essentially is, "No one can learn anything; their opinions are
fixed," but that's obviously false, as we have all learned or else we would be
unable to read and write and do everything else we do.

In fact, your posting your own comment contradicts your logic, as according to
it, there's no point to saying what you said, since it can't change anyone's
mind.

~~~
slededit
It is not defeatist to suggest energies would be better spent elsewhere.
Defeatism would be if I said we could never convince people of the need for
privacy.

------
TheAceOfHearts
I dislike how they immediately lump "hackers, drugs and porn" together as bad
things.

Hackers and others within that category are great. Thanks to hackers you can
get full access to devices that would otherwise be locked down. Thanks to
hackers you can take full control of your media content, playing it without
constraints and on any device.

Drugs are a huge market, let's tax it. Most people buying drugs are likely
harmless members of society. We're wasting time and money chasing down buyers,
sellers, and service managers. There's an absurd amount of people in jail for
engaging in fully benign activities.

Porn is a huge industry which pretty much everyone likes. A few rotten apples
don't mean you have a rotten tree. Oh, we also waste a lot of money chasing
down prostitutes and the like. I'm sure many sex workers would love to
continue what they're doing without having to worry about the risk of cops
showing up.

~~~
JulianMorrison
The porn that's a bad thing is child porn, rape porn, and violence porn.

~~~
JupiterMoon
Really none of these should be called porn+. They are various forms of abuse
imagery and are both crimes and evidence of crimes.

\+ (Assuming the rape and violence are real not just actors)

~~~
khedoros1
> They are various forms of abuse imagery and are both crimes and evidence of
> crimes.

They can be that and still be porn to some people.

------
Powerofmene
Anonymity is a good thing if you have a tech savvy abusive ex as a good friend
of mine does. He has tracked her time and time again until she found a mentor
to help her hide on the web. It certainly opened my eyes to legitimate uses of
the dark web. It is not just a place for shady characters anymore.

~~~
joekrill
I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Just because something can be abused for
nefarious purposes doesn't mean we should ban it or abandon it. People use
cars to kill people -- perhaps we should ban those? People use binoculars to
violate privacy -- maybe we should ban those, too?

~~~
Powerofmene
I am not suggesting we ban anything. What I was saying is that while being
able to conduct ourselves on the web (and be tracked and all that goes with
that) is fine for many, actually most, people; for some it is not. I am not
suggesting banning the dark web either as it is a better way for some to have
access to places they otherwise would not because they are being tracked by
someone intent on harming them. Or more simply put, people should be able to
access the Internet or the dark web if that is the choice they make....no need
to presume they are doing something wrong if they choose the anonymous one.

~~~
joekrill
Ah ok I guess I misunderstood your comment. Though, to be honest, I still
don't quite understand what you were getting at. :$

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m52go
Right now it's the "dark web." Tomorrow it'll be the "decentralized web."

The world's always been full of dirty things, but holding everyone's freedom
random for "protection" was usually not the way we operated.

~~~
paulddraper
You've undersold the problem.

The way we operated was to issue warrants.

But now these dirty things operate in more and more virtual and less and less
physical ways. So the old tools aren't working like they used to, and people
are looking for ways that do work.

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k-mcgrady
>> The dark web showcases the worst parts of the internet

Are there any useful websites on the 'dark web'? I'm thinking of the kind of
things we hundreds of millions use every day that are legal (social networks,
email, youtube, etc.). If so why aren't more people using them? And if not
that seems like the easiest way to change the image of the 'dark web' and
bring more regular people on to it.

~~~
MBCook
Basically... no. I read a post recently where someone tried to calculate what
percentage of TOR sites were legal/legit. I thought it was from Bruce Schneier
but I can't find it so I may be wrong.

The person found a handful of thins like Facebook were available and some big
journalistic organizations can be contacted that way. There were a number of
indexes of known .onion URLs.

Most of the rest was hacker services for sale, scam sites, child porn, etc.

Outside of passing info to journalists (not much traffic) or talking where
state censors couldn't find you in a repressed regeime... what would make 'the
dark web' useful enough to normal people that it would get used in any sort of
scale? There's an obvious advantage for criminals to use it but I don't see
something to compel non-criminals. Thus it seems to have sort of naturally
segregated into a mostly criminal thing.

~~~
stale2002
In most 1st world countries, there isn't much censorship, so obviously most
people wouldn't have much of a reason to use a service like tor, where the 1
and only important feature is censorship resistence.

If governments or powerful corporations start to engage in more censorship in
the future, then more people will have a motivation to protect themselves
against censorship.

------
jasonkostempski
Start by not calling it "the dark web".

~~~
13of40
Maybe throw up two instances of it, with one dedicated to drugs, hitmen, and
child pornography and the other for political discussions or whatever.

~~~
krapp
You can't legally dedicate a network to illegal activity, and even if you
could, criminals would probably never go near it.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
I assume that was sarcasm

~~~
13of40
Yep

------
jancsika
Here's a solution to the "bad name" problem.

Let's call it the Debian "Words of Encouragement" messaging app. Its purpose
is to allow Debian members to send short, pithy words of encouragement to each
other to spread goodwill through the universe.

Here's how to build it:

1\. Fork Bitmessage.

2\. Have the client fetch the Debian strong set at startup. Only those
keyholders may send and receive messages.

3\. Limit it to one fixed-size message per day, to be sent at a pre-determined
time.

4\. If no message is in the queue, either send an acknowledgment of receipt
for the last message or a randomly generated message.

5\. Repeat forever.

Now you've got a private information retrieval system that has no scaling
problems, no Sybil attacks, and essentially no bad actors. (Or if a bad actor
happen to materialize, well, they just signed their bad act with a key that
someone in the Debian ecosystem should be able to tie to a human identity if
it came to that.)

And you don't have to worry about giving it an approachable UX because Debian
devs don't care about that shit.

Boom-- state-of-the-art decentralized messaging service that whose anonymity
and metadata-mining resistance scales with Debian's own interest in granting
its developerbase anonymity.

~~~
corndoge

       a key that someone should in the Debian ecosystem should be able to tie to a human identity
    
       anonymous
    

Not sure I follow

------
nitwit005
These media spin terms get tiring. Saying you need a special way to log into a
website is too boring, so they call it "The Dark Web". People saying lewd
things in chatrooms is uninteresting, so it becomes "Virtual Rape".

I just end up having to explain to my older relatives that it's nonsense when
they ask me about it.

~~~
krapp
I don't believe the mainstream media invented the term "dark web." Blame
computer scientists and tech culture for that.

~~~
jackewiehose
I blame the governments. They admittedly don't like people talking privatly.

~~~
openasocket
You know Tor is a US Navy project that still gets a large portion of its
funding from the US Government, right? If you're going to talk about something
a broad as the system of government, there needs to be some nuance and
specificity in your statements.

~~~
jackewiehose
No, I didn't know that. Thanks to the US Navy.

I just expressed my personal perception. I see politicians talking about, that
the government should be able to decipher whatsapp etc.

They probably don't like tor either.

~~~
openasocket
I wouldn't worry about it too much. I've yet to see any US politician make a
serious case for making non-backdoored encryption illegal, or banning Tor. A
couple people have mentioned the idea, but no one's proposed legislation or
anything like that.

~~~
colejohnson66
Back during the whole Apple v. FBI thing last year:

A New York lawmaker proposed mandating backdoors or face a $2,500 fine per
device.[0 §1(C)]

Senators Burr (R-NC) and Feinstein (D-CA) tried to introduce the "Compliance
with Court Orders Act of 2016".[1 §3]

Thankfully, neither made it anywhere, but the fact that many politicians are
so clueless about modern technology is scary.

[0]:
[https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2015/a8093](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2015/a8093)

[1]: [https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2797124/Burr-
Fein...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2797124/Burr-Feinstein-
Encryption-Bill-Discussion-Draft.pdf)

~~~
openasocket
A few people have made proposals, though nothing has been taken seriously. The
first one was a NY state proposal that never got out of committee. The second
is weird. It seems to be a draft of a bill, I don't know if they actually
proposed this in committee. And it's odd. It requires that companies must
provide data to law enforcement with a valid court order. Which is redundant:
of course if law enforcement has a court order for a company to provide data
they have to provide it, unless they can contest the court order. The uses the
phrase "make data intelligible" which reading further seems to mean you have
to decrypt the data. So it looks like it's meant to require companies to be
able to decrypt any of their secure systems with a valid court order, hence
requiring a backdoor. But Section 3.(b) says "Nothing in this Act may be
construed to authorize any government officer to require or prohibit any
specific design or operating system to be adopted by any covered entity." That
seems to clearly state this Act can't require a company to put a backdoor in
their system. It's really an odd little document.

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jszymborski
A good start is calling it something other than the "dark web"...

