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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, @07:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @07:16AM (#502164)

    If you've ever been on Tor, you already know that the "dark web" (I know, there's more than just Tor) is extremely small.

    Exceedingly slow and tedious to browse maybe, but not that small. By the basic nature of the beast, the addresses of a lot of sites are only communicated 'OOB', and another thing to factor in, a lot of sites are not available 24/7. One thing I will say regarding the material hosted on a number of dark web sites, the SNR is quite high, it reminds me a lot of some of the early web sites before commercialism devoured the WWW.

    But if you read articles, or look on YouTube... Wow. Just WOW.

    Eww, no thanks!, but I know what you're getting at..it royally pains me that, as part of my job, I sometimes need to watch YT video links that the PHB sends in my direction..he's a believer in the mistaken philosophy that people learn better from videos than books/paperwork..whilst this may be true in some cases, it doesn't apply when the source video material is the drek that is available on YT (especially a hell of a lot of the Khan Academy ones..)

    They always claim that it's huge: 20x the size of the web, which is a bad start since it shows they don't understand the difference with the "deep web"....

    Shhh, don't get them started about the deep web..next thing you know, you'll have to put up some random but official looking BS in http://your.site.here/MJ-12/ [site.here] folders and the suchlike just to string them along a bit when you spot the occasional weird 404 in your server logs.

    ..Then proceed to spout some crazy stories about snuff movies, muderers for hire, people who (magically I guess) hack you if you just try to go there. And they provide testimonies and "true" stories that are worst than all Nessie's & Bigfoot's viewings combined...

    You also have to remember, there's a concerted 'disinformation' campaign being mounted, so expect some FUD, let's not forget, dark web user == autojunkiepaedophile, as, apparently, that's all it really gets used for according to the Press.

    Seriously, look it up. It will either make you laugh, or -like myself- make you feel really sad about both the gullibility (the comments) & the dishonesty (the videos) on display. What a sad joke.

    Indeed