Archive for August 2017
“There Is Basically No Dark Web. It’s Only A Few Webpages” — Tor Co-founder
Talking at the DEF CON convention in Las Vegas, the Tor Project co-founder Roger Dingledine said that the dark web doesn’t exist and it’s just a few web pages. He added that media has wrongly labeled it as a heaven for illegal activities. Also, only 3% of Tor users connect to a hidden .onion website.
You might have come across numerous articles outlining the massive size of dark web and how it’s used by criminals to perform illegal activities and trade. However, who’d know the dark web in a better manner than a Tor co-founder?
At the DEF CON convention in Las Vegas, on Friday, Roger Dingledine, one of the three Tor Project founders, said that there are tons of misconceptions about the same. According to The Register, Dingledine bashed the journalists for giving a bad name to the Tor network by calling it a heaven for pedophiles and terrorists.
“There is basically no dark web. It doesn’t exist. It’s only a very few webpages,” he told.
If you’re interested in numbers, only 3% of Tor users connect to a hidden .onion website, said Dingledine. This means that majority of users are using it for simply analyzing their activities on the indexed web. They are, most probably, using it for stopping the website owners from tracking them.
According to his data, surprisingly, Facebook is the most popular website visited by Tor users. Today, more than a million people visit Facebook using Tor browser, thanks to the network’s hidden service launched in 2014.
Dingledine also made attempts to calm down those who feared that different intelligence agencies have already cracked Tor and compromised the integrity. “Intelligence agencies didn’t need to set up their own stepping-stone nodes he said, since they could – if they wanted to – just monitor those who did run them,” as reported by The Register.