[tor-talk] These Maps Show What the Dark Web Looks Like

[Sean Lynch]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 2:19 PM Yuri <yuri at rawbw.com> wrote:

> On 07/06/2016 12:32, grarpamp wrote:
> >
> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/these-maps-show-what-the-dark-web-looks-like
> >
> > What does the dark web actually look like? Well, new research maps out
> > the relationships between a load of Tor hidden services, and shows
> > that many dark web sites, rather than being isolated entities, are
> > perhaps more intimately intertwined than commonly thought.
>
>
> The article says "this lack of diversity in hosting infrastructure is
> concerning—it places the future of a large proportion of Onion Services
> in the hands of a limited number of groups". The future web might even
> have no hosting, because the new technologies like ZeroNet don't require
> hosting at all. I personally believe that distributed architecture is
> superior to centralized architecture, and is a way to go.
>
>
Agree with the need for decentralized architectures, though ZeroNet is only
part of the way there. It's fine for small, static sites, blogs, and small
chat rooms, but the mail and ID services are each controlled by one
individual, and all their data are flooded to all users. We really need a
platform on which to build decentralized apps, more like Freenet or Gnunet.

As for centralization in Tor, it wasn't clear to me from the article that
the related sites were actually legit as opposed to, say, clones. Since
they found sites that only linked among themselves, they must have just
been mass scanning onion addresses. But what we really care about are the
sites a lot of people actually use. For such a purpose, finding and ranking
the sites by spidering from a few well-known seed sites would be more
useful than enumerating all the hidden sites. They talked about a bunch of
sites being hosted by the same hosting provider, but given that they had
identical SSH host keys I'd guess they were all actually the same machine,
since it would be criminally negligent for a hosting provider to use the
same key across all its machines.