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posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 01 2017, @01:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the single-purpose dept.

Dark web sites don't link to each other very often:

Researchers have just conducted a comprehensive mapping of the dark web and found that it's not much of a web at all. They started with a few central hubs in the ".onion" domain (sort of like .com on the surface web) and used an algorithm to crawl along links from site to site, finding only 7178 sites, connected to each other through 25,104 links. (Sites with no inbound links couldn't be counted.) Their key finding is that 87% of these dark web sites don't link to any other sites. The dark web is more of a set of "dark silos," they write in a preliminary paper posted on arXiv yesterday. Dark websites linked to surface websites and to other dark websites at the same rate, ruling out dark sites' ephemerality as an explanation for their scant interconnections.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @02:03AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @02:03AM (#502097)

    Maybe they don't want to be found by normies? Pretty sure it's like a private club, do all of them need to be open to the public just to show that they aren't made up of evil schemers?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @04:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @04:18AM (#502122)

    I wouldn't want to be a member of your society either.

  • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday May 01 2017, @05:33AM

    by MostCynical (2589) on Monday May 01 2017, @05:33AM (#502134) Journal

    surely part of the entire concept of the 'dark' part of the name should be a cling *clue, but, by the researchers' definition 'if it ain't linked, it ain't a *web* site."
    Pretty much self-limiting the outcomes.

    If your website turned up in their research, you'd be doing your best to move/hide/do *something* to make sure it wasn't found a second time...

     

    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Monday May 01 2017, @07:58AM (1 child)

    by anubi (2828) on Monday May 01 2017, @07:58AM (#502171) Journal

    To me, that is the whole idea of a "dark web". Even its very existence is not known except to those privy as to how to access it.

    It would not surprise me if they insisted on "port knocking" before they will even open a HTTP port to you.

    These are extremely exclusive private parties, but rely on the public internet to get the traffic to and from them.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @01:38PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @01:38PM (#502255)

      Port knocking is fine too, just another factor of authentication, if you can call it that.
      As with IRL private clubs, you'd still need to traverse down public highways and roads to reach it, unless you're staying next to it.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @08:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @08:05AM (#502173)

    This.

    If you are not in the club you will not even get in to see what you are looking for.

    Back in the day you on DC you had to share a minimum amount of data, and in some cases specific min slots and bandwidth. After a while you would be invited to more exclusive hubs. Same with BT.

    Now, if you don't have a foothold in the darknet (tor), the undernet, or the overnet it is hard to get a foothold.