[tor-talk] Terminology: Deep v Dark Web

[Katya Titov]

krishna e bera:
> On 14-01-25 06:53 AM, Katya Titov wrote:
>> I've put together an article and placed it on the Tor Trac/Wiki:
>> 
>> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/HowBigIsTheDarkWeb
> 
> Cool - it's concise and useful as a reference point for media or
> public relations.
> 
> To push the naming analogy a bit further, consider "dark matter" [0]
> used in astrophysics. If the internet is the virtual universe, what
> proportion would "dark energy" [1] - traffic which isnt indexed such
> as email, bittorrents, streaming, IM/voip/videocall, gaming?  There
> was a statistic a few years ago that more than 40% of traffic was
> bittorrent.

Thanks krishna, and thanks for the update to the page.

I agree that there's a lot of non-web traffic which could be considered
dark, as Lars also pointed out. I'm looking from a web point of view as
this is what is meant by media organisations, and I imagine by most end
users. I'm trying to capture what would be thought of as websites but
which cannot be directly accessed from the open Internet.

It would be nice to include p2p/gaming/voice networks too. The
differentiation for me is where there's an overlay network. So are
BitTorrent/VPN/VoIP/etc networks overlays? I would say yes.
Gaming/email networks? Maybe not. Where does a protocol/suite stop and
a network begin? Wikipedia has a good definition:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_network

  An overlay network is a computer network which is built on the top of
  another network. Nodes in the overlay can be thought of as being
  connected by virtual or logical links, each of which corresponds to a
  path, perhaps through many physical links, in the underlying network.
  For example, distributed systems such as cloud computing,
  peer-to-peer networks, and client-server applications are overlay
  networks because their nodes run on top of the Internet. The Internet
  was originally built as an overlay upon the telephone network while
  today (through the advent of VoIP), the telephone network is
  increasingly turning into an overlay network built on top of the
  Internet.

For me, an overlay network is a basic requirement for a dark network -
you need to do/use something other than your 'normal' software to get
to it. But for it to be a dark net then it also provides access to
something which you can't reach from the open Internet. A/The dark web
is just a subset of a dark network, as the web is a subset of the
Internet.

That's my take. I'll try to work some of the above into the page over
the next day or two.
-- 
kat