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How the Deep Web Works · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Welcome to you stuff you should know from house stuff
0:04
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
0:12
Speaker 1: Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant. Yeah, howdye uh?
0:17
Speaker 1: And that makes the stuff as you know. That's right
0:19
Speaker 1: minus Jerry. But with no that's right, we lose a
0:23
Speaker 1: Jerry gain anale. One step forward and another step forward.
0:29
Speaker 1: Oh where Jerry? You've just been wailing on it. Well,
0:33
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say two steps back with Nol sit
0:35
Speaker 1: in five ft away, but it could be one and one.
0:38
Speaker 1: One step forward with Noel, one step back for not
0:40
Speaker 1: having Jerry. You're saying it's a step forward not having
0:44
Speaker 1: Jerry and a step forward having Nol. I'm just trying
0:47
Speaker 1: to make everyone like me doing a poor job of it.
0:54
Speaker 1: You do a great job of it. Everybody loves the chuck,
0:57
Speaker 1: not everybody who doesn't. I have some mortal in it
1:00
Speaker 1: means mortal enemies. Yeah, they want to kill trying to
1:03
Speaker 1: kill you know, we'll chuck. Yes, I will tell you
1:07
Speaker 1: what if they did want to kill you, they wanted
1:11
Speaker 1: to hire a hit many. Yeah, the deep web is
1:14
Speaker 1: a good place to start. Looking quite a segue. It's
1:18
Speaker 1: a while that one up unintentionally. Yeah, I spotted it
1:22
Speaker 1: and went after Yeah. This is about both the deep
1:25
Speaker 1: and dark web, which are two different things. The dark
1:28
Speaker 1: web is part of the deep web, thank you, But
1:30
Speaker 1: the deep web isn't necessarily dark a dark Yeah, that's
1:35
Speaker 1: very well put. The dark web is the nefarious things
1:37
Speaker 1: that go on in the deep web, and not necessarily
1:40
Speaker 1: a nefarious but the purposefully hidden. Yeah, because there are
1:44
Speaker 1: some good things in the dark web. I totally misspoke. Yeah, well,
1:47
Speaker 1: you know what. I think that it's great that you
1:49
Speaker 1: confess to it. You feel better, do Man. This is
1:53
Speaker 1: a really upfront kind of episode, isn't It's a very
1:56
Speaker 1: honest we're bearing it all man. Uh so, do you
2:02
Speaker 1: have a fancy intro story? No? You think I would? Right?
2:05
Speaker 1: My intro gets buried later on. It's a great intro,
2:09
Speaker 1: but it's just I'll use it as the intro. Okay,
2:14
Speaker 1: go ahead, okay, okay, Chuck. Yes, have you heard of
2:19
Speaker 1: our favorite band, Iron Maiden? Uh? Yeah, sure so. Iron
2:23
Speaker 1: Maiden is arguably the most awesome band of all time.
2:29
Speaker 1: Oh dude, all right, I'm not a huge fan, but
2:32
Speaker 1: you you wouldn't be, like I hate Iron Maiden. They
2:35
Speaker 1: suck of course not no, because it makes you crazy.
2:37
Speaker 1: It's right. Iron Maid has been around for a while.
2:40
Speaker 1: They're pretty smart. They know what they're doing. Um, and
2:43
Speaker 1: recently they figured out a way to maximize their touring
2:49
Speaker 1: dollars by flying their own plane. They well, Bruce Dickinson
2:53
Speaker 1: always did. He's he's a certified pilot. It's gotta be efficient.
2:57
Speaker 1: I would imagine plus fun all unless Bruce was partying
3:00
Speaker 1: too hard and then they got to fly to the
3:02
Speaker 1: next city that night. He wouldn't do that, I hope not,
3:05
Speaker 1: because that's that's dangerous. I mean, driving drunk is bad enough,
3:09
Speaker 1: but flying drunk I can only imagine. Sure. Uh, and
3:13
Speaker 1: it's probably not just drunk, you know what I'm saying. No, no, no,
3:16
Speaker 1: he's he's straight. Has he always been? I don't know.
3:20
Speaker 1: I can't verify that. Well anyway, Um, Bruce and the
3:23
Speaker 1: boys uh figured out that a good way to figure
3:27
Speaker 1: out where to tour, where to decide to tour, um
3:31
Speaker 1: would be to figure out where their music was getting pirated.
3:35
Speaker 1: The most that sounds reasonable. It does sound reasonable. It's it.
3:40
Speaker 1: It provides you with evidence of an established fan base,
3:45
Speaker 1: and a fan base that is unwilling to pay for
3:49
Speaker 1: your record, but would probably pay to see you live.
3:53
Speaker 1: How does that reason? Well, they like your music, but
3:58
Speaker 1: they don't want to pay for your CD, so why
4:00
Speaker 1: would they go see live and pay? Because it's different. Like,
4:03
Speaker 1: seeing a live show is way different than buying a CD.
4:06
Speaker 1: You can't you can't get a live show. You could
4:07
Speaker 1: get a video of a live show, it's still not
4:09
Speaker 1: the same experience. A live show is a live show. Plus,
4:12
Speaker 1: everybody always knows that anybody involved in the very entrenched
4:17
Speaker 1: in the old guard music industry does any band doesn't
4:20
Speaker 1: make any money on their records. They make it on touring.
4:24
Speaker 1: So going to see a band live also is kind
4:26
Speaker 1: of a true active fandom because you're really you're you're
4:30
Speaker 1: contributing directly to your band that you like. You know.
4:34
Speaker 1: Um So what they did was they hired a company
4:36
Speaker 1: to look at bit torrent sites and find the regions
4:40
Speaker 1: where their music was most pirate ID and they created
4:44
Speaker 1: a tour map from it and went and played those regions.
4:46
Speaker 1: Did you do you have the number one Iron Maiden
4:49
Speaker 1: pirated region? But we're gonna say Rio, all right, they're
4:55
Speaker 1: huge in South America. That's that's my guess we'll look
4:58
Speaker 1: it up afterwards, I guess. And so they were like,
5:01
Speaker 1: we're gonna start our tor and rio. Yeah, and it
5:03
Speaker 1: wasn't just that that one place, but it was basically
5:06
Speaker 1: a tour that was built on the areas where the
5:09
Speaker 1: music was most pirated. It was a Stroker genius. But
5:12
Speaker 1: they couldn't have done it without harvesting the deep web
5:17
Speaker 1: because bit torrent sites. When you search bit torrent, it
5:21
Speaker 1: doesn't the average search engine doesn't respond with a list
5:25
Speaker 1: of bit torrent activity. It'll just send you to a
5:28
Speaker 1: bit torrent site, which means that those pages of bit
5:32
Speaker 1: torrent activity, which are web pages and they do exist,
5:35
Speaker 1: they're part of what's called the deep web. That's right,
5:38
Speaker 1: the surface web as we know it, and search engines
5:41
Speaker 1: that we all use like Google and Bing supposedly only
5:46
Speaker 1: have access to about point zero three percent of what
5:49
Speaker 1: is truly on the world Wide Web. It's like scary
5:55
Speaker 1: and weird and thrilling all at the same time. Point yeah,
6:00
Speaker 1: and anything else that's buried is the deep web. And
6:03
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily Uh, the deep web is not is
6:08
Speaker 1: not when you're purposely trying to hide things, it just
6:10
Speaker 1: may not be cataloged and index a password. Sure, maybe
6:16
Speaker 1: one of those timed sites that uh don't let you
6:20
Speaker 1: access date after a certain amount of time. Could be
6:23
Speaker 1: anything with a caption involved, anything that's not hyperlinked. Uh,
6:27
Speaker 1: there's lots of reasons that something could find it so
6:30
Speaker 1: buried in the deep web. Right And and you make
6:32
Speaker 1: a good point to separate the deep web and in
6:35
Speaker 1: dark web. So let me give you an example of
6:37
Speaker 1: deep web aside from those bit torrent sites. Um, there's
6:41
Speaker 1: this company called bright Planet and they had this they
6:43
Speaker 1: provide deep web harvesting, and they had this primer on
6:46
Speaker 1: you know what is the deep web. One of the
6:48
Speaker 1: examples they used was if you look up government grants
6:51
Speaker 1: on a traditional search engine, it will probably provide you
6:55
Speaker 1: with www dot grants dot gov as one of the
6:58
Speaker 1: first returns. Right right up. Um, when you go on
7:02
Speaker 1: to grant stock CoV, you can then search and find
7:05
Speaker 1: pages of all these different government grants. You can search
7:08
Speaker 1: by keyword, you can browse, but those pages aren't going
7:11
Speaker 1: to come up on your normal Google search. You have
7:14
Speaker 1: to go to the site, which means that those pages
7:16
Speaker 1: of the actual grants are part of the deep web.
7:20
Speaker 1: Your bank account, your checking account online if you have
7:23
Speaker 1: a mobile banking or online banking, it has a web
7:26
Speaker 1: page all to its own right now, And if I
7:30
Speaker 1: searched Chuck Bryant's checking account, it would not come back.
7:35
Speaker 1: I would not get that because it's behind a password.
7:38
Speaker 1: It's a it's a website page. It's a web page,
7:41
Speaker 1: but it's password encrypted. Therefore it's part of the deep web.
7:46
Speaker 1: Twitter until it index tweets used to be you couldn't
7:50
Speaker 1: search tweets individual tweets. Now you can, so that made
7:54
Speaker 1: them formerly a part of the deep web. Actual tweets
7:58
Speaker 1: or every company on the planet has some sort of
8:01
Speaker 1: internal employee pages like internal dot discovery that only we
8:07
Speaker 1: can access, and you can't Google search any of that stuff,
8:11
Speaker 1: right or somebody could conceivably access it. Maybe it depends
8:15
Speaker 1: on the page, but you have to know the exact
8:18
Speaker 1: u r L. So the idea is, if it's blind,
8:22
Speaker 1: if search engines are blind to it, it's part of
8:25
Speaker 1: the deep web. If search engines can index it and
8:28
Speaker 1: bring it back as a return results search results, um,
8:33
Speaker 1: it's part of the surface web. Yeah, because that's all
8:35
Speaker 1: the search engine is doing. They are We might do
8:38
Speaker 1: a full podcast on search engines at some point. But
8:41
Speaker 1: the general thing is that there's an index of data,
8:44
Speaker 1: and they use spiders or crawlers because it is a web,
8:49
Speaker 1: to crawl around and locate domain names and hyperlinks and
8:54
Speaker 1: basically index all that in what they think will be
8:57
Speaker 1: most helpful to what you're looking for. Right, So, Chuck
9:00
Speaker 1: Bryant's bank account. There are some web pages out there
9:04
Speaker 1: that contain information related to that keyword search. So a
9:09
Speaker 1: search engine will keep an index with that keyword search
9:13
Speaker 1: with the u r l s, the locations, the page content,
9:16
Speaker 1: some of the page content, the meta tags or the metadata,
9:20
Speaker 1: and other very brief sketch information about those pages associated
9:27
Speaker 1: with the keyword for an index, which means that when
9:30
Speaker 1: you type in Chuck Bryant's bank account that sorry, I
9:34
Speaker 1: thought about it as I was saying it that last time.
9:36
Speaker 1: But when you type in UM Birds of Paradise bank account,
9:41
Speaker 1: bank account, um, it will the search engine goes and
9:45
Speaker 1: accesses the index. It doesn't have to go all the
9:48
Speaker 1: way across every page on the web that it can find.
9:51
Speaker 1: It just goes to its indices, and that's how search
9:55
Speaker 1: results are returned so quickly. It's not going across the
9:57
Speaker 1: internet it's already got the spider crawlers, the bots doing
10:02
Speaker 1: that constantly. The search engine is just going to the
10:05
Speaker 1: index is that the bots have created from their searches. Yeah,
10:08
Speaker 1: and it is super shallow. I mean, we said point
10:11
Speaker 1: zero three percent. We do. We do our whole job
10:13
Speaker 1: as researching online mainly, and we run into this all
10:17
Speaker 1: the time where you feel like you're getting a very
10:20
Speaker 1: slim portion of what you're trying to find out because
10:24
Speaker 1: so many of the best uh, medical journals and things
10:28
Speaker 1: like this don't just pop up as you know, It's
10:31
Speaker 1: more likely to be some headline from scene and dot
10:34
Speaker 1: com and not like a Harvard Medical Journal paper that
10:37
Speaker 1: could really help you out. Yeah. And I mean like
10:39
Speaker 1: you can get deeper and deeper with your keyword skills
10:44
Speaker 1: and your search skills, but for the most part that Yeah,
10:48
Speaker 1: the first returns of first results, depending on what you
10:50
Speaker 1: search for, are gonna be, like you said, superficial. Yeah.
10:54
Speaker 1: But even if you're super a super sleuth, a Google
10:58
Speaker 1: master like we all think we are, I mean, how
11:01
Speaker 1: can how much can that be bumping it up point one? Yeah. Well,
11:04
Speaker 1: a lot of the problem too, though, Chuck, is the
11:07
Speaker 1: so much of science is behind a paywall, really really
11:11
Speaker 1: really expensive paywalls to um, which is like, here's the
11:14
Speaker 1: first eight lines of this awesome medical research paper, exactly
11:17
Speaker 1: if you want it, give us. Yeah, which is a
11:21
Speaker 1: problem in and of itself, not necessarily related to this,
11:24
Speaker 1: but with current search engine technology, you have, like you said,
11:28
Speaker 1: a superficial result from a query um on the other
11:33
Speaker 1: end of the spectrum, and this is kind of what
11:35
Speaker 1: search instance are dealing with now. Um, the deeper you
11:39
Speaker 1: go into the deep web. Again, the surface web is
11:41
Speaker 1: point zero three percent of all of the web pages
11:44
Speaker 1: on the entire Internet. So the further you go into it,
11:47
Speaker 1: the more data you have, and you eventually can run
11:50
Speaker 1: into the problem of what's called big data, which not
11:54
Speaker 1: capitalized B or D, which refers to like companies like
11:57
Speaker 1: Google and and that that can dig and harvest and
12:01
Speaker 1: maintain a large amount of data. Yes, just it's basically
12:05
Speaker 1: data that's so much and so unwieldy you can't even
12:09
Speaker 1: process and search it. It's like not even helpful. It's yeah,
12:13
Speaker 1: it's like a really bad Internet search. Yeah yeah. Um.
12:16
Speaker 1: So the the the current state of search engine design
12:22
Speaker 1: or creation is balancing that figuring out how to get
12:27
Speaker 1: less superficial without running into the big data problem of
12:32
Speaker 1: incoherent data due to just massive amounts of returns. And
12:37
Speaker 1: you might think that these search engines do a great
12:39
Speaker 1: job because I can always find out what I need.
12:42
Speaker 1: But you don't know what you're missing, you know, right,
12:45
Speaker 1: So it's it's sort of not even correct to say
12:48
Speaker 1: that I always find out what I need. Does you
12:50
Speaker 1: meanly know you need it because it's hidden? That's true,
12:53
Speaker 1: And I mean you're you're missing quite a bit. Like, uh, okay,
12:57
Speaker 1: there's apparently fifty million registered domains on the Internet. Yeah,
13:03
Speaker 1: and that's I looked at like just in two thousand twelve,
13:06
Speaker 1: I think there're only like two hundred and fifty or something.
13:09
Speaker 1: I mean, it seems like it's doubled in the last
13:10
Speaker 1: couple of years, right, So there's five million domains for example,
13:14
Speaker 1: a lot of more garbage, yes, But how stuff Works
13:16
Speaker 1: dot Com is one domain. And I asked Tracy Wilson,
13:20
Speaker 1: who's the site director and runs stuff you missed in
13:23
Speaker 1: history class. It's one of the co hosts. How many
13:26
Speaker 1: pages there are how stuff Works? She said roughly at least,
13:32
Speaker 1: so one domain out of five fifty million has fifty
13:35
Speaker 1: thou pages itself. Right, so you kind of get an
13:39
Speaker 1: idea of the Scalpe deep web is anywhere from four
13:42
Speaker 1: hundred to five hundred times bigger than the surface web.
13:47
Speaker 1: And like you said, you don't know what you're missing
13:49
Speaker 1: because you don't know what's out there because your search
13:51
Speaker 1: returns aren't bringing you back anything. Yeah. I mean there's
13:55
Speaker 1: a lot of important stuff out there. We talked about
13:57
Speaker 1: medical papers. Um, apparently there's engineering database is financial financial information,
14:02
Speaker 1: a lot of things that could really help research. Uh,
14:06
Speaker 1: but you just can't find it, right, Um, unpublished blog
14:10
Speaker 1: posts just basically anything that a person creates on the Internet. Yeah, um,
14:17
Speaker 1: is if a page is created, it's part of the
14:20
Speaker 1: deep web. Yeah. Unless you take this stuff down, it's
14:23
Speaker 1: living there forever, just gathering dust exactly. So Um, and
14:27
Speaker 1: it's not just necessarily engineering databases or medical information. Um,
14:32
Speaker 1: there's also a lot of shady stuff too. The dark web.
14:37
Speaker 1: That's the that's the dark web. Yeah, that is the
14:39
Speaker 1: dark web. Is when is um these sites intentionally uh
14:44
Speaker 1: reroute you. Well, we'll get to how they do it.
14:47
Speaker 1: But basically it's an it's an intentional anonymity. Um, it's
14:52
Speaker 1: not oh, it just happens to be buried on the
14:53
Speaker 1: deep web because it's not index it's it is purposely
14:55
Speaker 1: hidden from the surface web, so people can't try the
15:01
Speaker 1: person searching for something, or the the end uh website.
15:06
Speaker 1: I guess like those are all just private essentially, right,
15:11
Speaker 1: and privacy advocates are way into it. You're not necessarily
15:14
Speaker 1: a child pornographer, although there is that a lot of
15:17
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff on the dark web. Um, there's
15:20
Speaker 1: also a lot of good that happens on the dark web. Yeah.
15:22
Speaker 1: The the anonymity and privacy and the desire for it
15:26
Speaker 1: isn't in and of itself proof of wrongdoing, of course,
15:28
Speaker 1: not no, which is frequently it's frequently pointed out as that,
15:32
Speaker 1: but incorrectly. Yeah, I like, I don't want the n
15:34
Speaker 1: s A and my business people like, well, what are
15:36
Speaker 1: you doing right? Exactly nothing. Yeah, I just don't want
15:38
Speaker 1: them in my business. Yeah. Um, that's an answer. That's
15:42
Speaker 1: good enough. That answer is good enough. And for a
15:45
Speaker 1: lot of people, um, they say, well, then I need
15:48
Speaker 1: to go to the dark web to maintain anonymity, um
15:51
Speaker 1: or higher hit man right to kill Chuck Bryant. That
15:55
Speaker 1: you could do? That's crazy. Um, you could do. There's
15:59
Speaker 1: a site for a while, Um, I don't know if
16:01
Speaker 1: you've heard of it or not. It's called Silk Road, Yeah,
16:04
Speaker 1: which got shut down, and I teach Chuck, I know
16:07
Speaker 1: you've heard of it. It's like the most famous dark
16:09
Speaker 1: website of all time. Yeah. The the Feds busted Um
16:13
Speaker 1: Ross Olbrick, who may or may not be dread Pirate Roberts,
16:17
Speaker 1: which was the online name that they said he's the
16:19
Speaker 1: guy running this, and he is now saying, actually that's
16:23
Speaker 1: not me, Um, but all those bitcoins are mine, So
16:27
Speaker 1: you can't seize those bitcoins. And there it's in courts now.
16:30
Speaker 1: They're trying to determine whether or not it's it counts
16:34
Speaker 1: as something that you can seize as an asset from
16:37
Speaker 1: a criminal. And they were saying that this is literally
16:39
Speaker 1: a case that no court has ever heard before. Yeah,
16:42
Speaker 1: they they it's never been questioned whether you could seize cryptocurrency. Yeah,
16:48
Speaker 1: and you should listen to our podcast on bitcoins by
16:51
Speaker 1: the way, from not too many months ago. But it's
16:54
Speaker 1: essentially just yeah, encrypted digital currency. And they have a
16:57
Speaker 1: really really fascinating, circumstantial case against a brick Um not
17:02
Speaker 1: just for operating the silk road site. Um, that's where
17:07
Speaker 1: you could buy drugs and things by the way, right,
17:09
Speaker 1: which being the operator of that in and of itself
17:12
Speaker 1: shouldn't be a crime. I'm sure that they would have
17:13
Speaker 1: prosecuted him for that if they'd been able to get
17:16
Speaker 1: their hands on him for just that. But apparently they
17:19
Speaker 1: also have him for at least two hired contract killings.
17:25
Speaker 1: One he he um I guess hired an undercover cop
17:31
Speaker 1: to do it, and the guy went to the person
17:34
Speaker 1: who he was taking the hit out on and said,
17:37
Speaker 1: this guy's trying to kill you. I need you to cooperate,
17:39
Speaker 1: and I'm going to take pictures of you dead and
17:42
Speaker 1: send them to this guy. And Old Brick apparently gave
17:45
Speaker 1: him like forty grand up front another forty after he
17:48
Speaker 1: saw the photos. So like in bitcoins? No, I think
17:52
Speaker 1: in cash, although no, it would have been in bitcoins.
17:55
Speaker 1: You're right, yea, yeah, so who knows? It could have
17:57
Speaker 1: been two bitcoins at the time or five. Well. Silk
18:01
Speaker 1: Row two point oh launched in November. It's out and
18:05
Speaker 1: um there are other uh copycatters like the black market
18:08
Speaker 1: reloaded and um which that went down for a little
18:11
Speaker 1: while after Silk Road went down, but then it went
18:13
Speaker 1: back up. I think, yeah, like, I don't know. Man.
18:15
Speaker 1: I hate to say you shouldn't try and fight crime,
18:17
Speaker 1: but you're not going to stop this stuff when one,
18:21
Speaker 1: you know, you cut off the head of one and
18:22
Speaker 1: another grows right out of it in its place. You know,
18:26
Speaker 1: it's true if the structure that's allowing for the anonymity
18:31
Speaker 1: can remain intact, which is the dark web, right, But
18:36
Speaker 1: it's not just the dark web, it's like how you
18:38
Speaker 1: traverse the dark web, like using tour. Yeah, I guess
18:41
Speaker 1: we haven't explained. UM. The Onion Router t o R
18:44
Speaker 1: is what it's called, and it is software that you
18:47
Speaker 1: use to access the deep web and the dark Web
18:50
Speaker 1: if you choose to UM, and it searches for these
18:55
Speaker 1: anonymous sites for you like a search engine, but instead
18:57
Speaker 1: of dot com or dot org or net, they end
19:00
Speaker 1: in dot onion, right the idea and onion has many
19:03
Speaker 1: layers and UM that's that's how you access it through tour.
19:08
Speaker 1: You have to buy it install it on your computer. Yeah,
19:13
Speaker 1: Firefox had UM something that it was basically a tour bundle.
19:17
Speaker 1: It was the most popular one and you could download
19:19
Speaker 1: it for free. But it's not a web browser itself.
19:22
Speaker 1: It's like an add on to a web browser that
19:25
Speaker 1: allows anonymity, and it does two things. One, it bounces
19:29
Speaker 1: your trail all over the world from server to server,
19:32
Speaker 1: so it makes you and your activity extraordinarily difficult to track.
19:36
Speaker 1: It's not just like this computer went to this site.
19:39
Speaker 1: It's like, that's that whole Onion thing. There's so many layers.
19:42
Speaker 1: It's like we can't We don't know who this is
19:44
Speaker 1: or where they're, where they are, what they're doing, or
19:46
Speaker 1: anything like that. We just know right now that this
19:48
Speaker 1: particular person happens to be there's a user on Silk Road,
19:52
Speaker 1: but we don't know who it is or anything. You
19:54
Speaker 1: can't track them because they're using tour. The other thing
19:56
Speaker 1: is that you can't get into dot onion domain site
20:00
Speaker 1: dark websites unless you're using tour, Like they won't let
20:03
Speaker 1: you in unless you're an anonymous user. Um So tour
20:07
Speaker 1: has this kind of twofold thing. But there was recently
20:10
Speaker 1: a breach in it and it turned out the FBI
20:12
Speaker 1: was using malware to break through the anonymity of tour users.
20:17
Speaker 1: And yeah, and found out a lot of people on
20:19
Speaker 1: some sites that are that were hosted by something called
20:22
Speaker 1: Freedom Hosting, which apparently had a horrible reputation for being
20:27
Speaker 1: the repository on the web, on the dark web for
20:30
Speaker 1: child pornography and knowingly like basically just not doing anything
20:34
Speaker 1: about it. Um, So the FBI had a They hacked
20:41
Speaker 1: the Freedom Hosting servers and inserted this malware. So if
20:46
Speaker 1: you went to a Freedom Hosting site, any of them,
20:48
Speaker 1: not just necessarily a child pornography, but any site hosted
20:50
Speaker 1: by Freedom Hosting, which is like say go Daddy for
20:54
Speaker 1: the dark web, um, you would get this malware package
20:59
Speaker 1: that exploited a key hole in Firefox's tore bundle. It
21:04
Speaker 1: went into your computer, said hey, give me your mac address,
21:08
Speaker 1: which is basically like your computer hardware, like serial numbers
21:13
Speaker 1: your computers and your computers a loans tracking number, and
21:18
Speaker 1: then also tell me where the computer is, and it
21:21
Speaker 1: sent it back to a server, a mystery server in McLean, Virginia.
21:25
Speaker 1: And finally, after like a month, fb I was like, yeah,
21:27
Speaker 1: that was us. We got we have everybody who went
21:29
Speaker 1: on that site's name and address and everything on them.
21:33
Speaker 1: So that's done a huge ripple. And Firefox fixed this loophole,
21:37
Speaker 1: but it's done a huge ripple. Through you know, the
21:39
Speaker 1: dark web, deep web community saying like whoa, whoa. We
21:43
Speaker 1: were anonymous before, but you know now it's it's been
21:47
Speaker 1: shown definitively that the Feds can find out who we are.
21:52
Speaker 1: So the anonymity is reduced, if not taken away, which
21:56
Speaker 1: defeats the whole purpose. Yeah, so if you don't have that,
21:58
Speaker 1: then you can keep lop the heads off of these things,
22:00
Speaker 1: and they're not going to grow back because people are afraid.
22:03
Speaker 1: People will be afraid because they won't feel like they're
22:06
Speaker 1: anonymous any longer. Well, tour has a sort of an
22:10
Speaker 1: ironic background, which we will get to right after this
22:13
Speaker 1: message break. Alright, so we're back and we left you
22:22
Speaker 1: with the the nugget that tour has an interesting background,
22:25
Speaker 1: and the background of tours actually, the US Naval Research
22:29
Speaker 1: Laboratory in two thousand three launched this program for political
22:33
Speaker 1: dissidents and whistleblowers so they can get their message out
22:36
Speaker 1: without fear of proprisal. Right, and this is still a
22:39
Speaker 1: use of tour like the New York Times wiki leaks,
22:42
Speaker 1: some other news agencies have um tour sites that if
22:48
Speaker 1: you want to go and in contact the New York
22:50
Speaker 1: Times or wiki leaks anonymously, Like you can go to
22:53
Speaker 1: their tour, their onion site and um upload documents or say, hey,
22:58
Speaker 1: I have some informa I want to share and you
23:01
Speaker 1: can do it anonymously. So the government, though, is basically
23:04
Speaker 1: law enforcements trying to track down criminals using the software
23:08
Speaker 1: that the government created to begin with. So it's an
23:11
Speaker 1: interesting loop. Um, But like we said, it's not all badness. Um,
23:16
Speaker 1: if you live in a country where bad things are
23:20
Speaker 1: going on and you don't feel safe getting on the
23:22
Speaker 1: regular web as a political dissident, you can do so
23:26
Speaker 1: on the dark web. But it offers a virtual meeting
23:29
Speaker 1: place for sometimes people are trying to, you know, combat
23:34
Speaker 1: these oppressive regimes in their countries and they can't just
23:38
Speaker 1: hop on Facebook and organize a meeting because they'll get
23:41
Speaker 1: smacked down. Right if you're a person who values privacy
23:45
Speaker 1: for whatever reason or no reason at all, Um, the
23:49
Speaker 1: deep web and the dark web offer file sharing services.
23:53
Speaker 1: Email is a big one too, Like, I know, I
23:56
Speaker 1: can't remember the name of the one Edwards Snowden has
23:58
Speaker 1: been using, but I got shut down, like just the
24:01
Speaker 1: whole company shutdown. Sorry, you're out of business now because
24:04
Speaker 1: you're helping Edward Snowden um. But there are other email
24:08
Speaker 1: um email services. Basically, everything you have on the web,
24:14
Speaker 1: if you want to do it anonymously, you have to
24:16
Speaker 1: go to a company that operates on the dark web
24:20
Speaker 1: that uses tour to to route its information or your information. Yeah.
24:25
Speaker 1: The University of Luxembourg did a study where they tried
24:29
Speaker 1: to rank the most commonly accessed stuff on the dark
24:32
Speaker 1: web and sadly what they did find a lot of
24:35
Speaker 1: things like child pornography. There were also a lot of
24:39
Speaker 1: UH sites and chat rooms for human rights and freedom
24:42
Speaker 1: of information and just people that don't want to type
24:47
Speaker 1: in a search for uh how to grow marijuana and
24:52
Speaker 1: then the next time they go to their Gmail account,
24:55
Speaker 1: they're a bunch of ads for grow lights and you're going, huh,
24:59
Speaker 1: how that happen? Well, happen because you're searching the surface
25:03
Speaker 1: web with an IP that can be traced back to you,
25:07
Speaker 1: and not even even illegal activities like that. You know,
25:09
Speaker 1: you want to research a fitbit bracelet and then you
25:14
Speaker 1: go and they say, hey, Chuck, are you fat? You
25:17
Speaker 1: want to lose weight? While else you want to fitbit?
25:22
Speaker 1: Why would you want to fit You're definitely creepy. You know,
25:25
Speaker 1: there's the big brother effect. I think everyone feels it. Uh,
25:29
Speaker 1: there's all there, the existence of the deep web, not
25:31
Speaker 1: necessarily the dark web, but just the deep web, all
25:34
Speaker 1: of those pages of information that are out there. Some
25:37
Speaker 1: companies that figure out how to exploit it, or the
25:40
Speaker 1: fact that search engines, normal search engines, aren't doing a
25:44
Speaker 1: good job of looking into the deep web. There that
25:46
Speaker 1: company bright Planet I mentioned, they have a deep Web harvester,
25:51
Speaker 1: which is basically a proprietary search engine algorithm that goes
25:55
Speaker 1: into websites and gets everything like it's not it doesn't
26:00
Speaker 1: form an index. It grabs every bit of text off
26:03
Speaker 1: of every site associated with a U r L. Sounds
26:07
Speaker 1: like big data. It is, but they're doing it for
26:10
Speaker 1: companies like big pharma, big government and saying like, oh,
26:16
Speaker 1: you want to know what your competitors up to, Well,
26:18
Speaker 1: here's every letter of every word of every strip of
26:22
Speaker 1: text on your competitor's website, including all internal stuff everything.
26:28
Speaker 1: Please give us ten million dollars for that search. Um.
26:32
Speaker 1: There's also this site called Vocative which uses something like
26:35
Speaker 1: bright planets deep web harvesting, but it does it for
26:39
Speaker 1: journalism purposes and it's basically, rather than searching using Google,
26:44
Speaker 1: you or I would for a story idea, they're um
26:47
Speaker 1: searching using a deep web harvester to find all this
26:50
Speaker 1: other information that we wouldn't be able to find because
26:53
Speaker 1: we don't know how to search the deep web and
26:55
Speaker 1: writing stories like that, And there's some pretty interesting stuff
26:57
Speaker 1: that that sites put together already. When you think about
27:00
Speaker 1: if you're only getting if you think the Internet is
27:02
Speaker 1: cool and you're only getting point of it, yeah, not bad.
27:07
Speaker 1: And you know this is the webs. The surface web
27:10
Speaker 1: is getting deeper, the deep web is getting deeper. Search
27:13
Speaker 1: engines are searching deeper. It's it's all like and they're
27:16
Speaker 1: trying to anonymize more effectively. So it's it's like this
27:22
Speaker 1: cyber war is going on. Oh yes, you know that
27:25
Speaker 1: was another good one we did. What do we do
27:27
Speaker 1: cyber War one? On cyber war you? Yeah, I knew
27:29
Speaker 1: I've heard that before, So there you go. I would
27:33
Speaker 1: have to say that this is one of those episodes
27:36
Speaker 1: where we did it, but it is not done. No, No,
27:40
Speaker 1: Sometimes we do them and it's like that's it. There's
27:43
Speaker 1: nothing more to say about this topic. Yeah, I'm interested
27:45
Speaker 1: to see what happens with Uh with old brick for sure.
27:48
Speaker 1: That's that's gonna be a big monument landmark case. You know. Uh,
27:52
Speaker 1: if you want to know more about the deep Web,
27:54
Speaker 1: you can type deep web into the search engine and
27:57
Speaker 1: how stuff works. It'll bring back super fisher results only
28:01
Speaker 1: how stuff works stuff. But it's pretty good, so you'll
28:04
Speaker 1: be happy. And since I said search bar, that means
28:07
Speaker 1: it's time for listener mat All right, Josh, I'm gonna
28:12
Speaker 1: call this uh birthday shout out that we rarely do. Okay,
28:16
Speaker 1: Hey guys, I'm a longtime listener shamelessly writing to ask
28:19
Speaker 1: for a huge favor. Here's the sitch. I first became
28:22
Speaker 1: aware of your podcast when my last girlfriend, Natalie David
28:26
Speaker 1: h introduced me to it when we started dating, and
28:28
Speaker 1: I've heard it. Thank for getting hooked as we spent
28:30
Speaker 1: a lot of time listening to your show and learning together.
28:32
Speaker 1: As huge supporters of your podcast, we were compelled last
28:35
Speaker 1: year to make the trip up from Virginia to New
28:37
Speaker 1: York when you were putting on your Tribuae night and
28:40
Speaker 1: Natalie is the one who gave us the mics on
28:42
Speaker 1: pants off T shirts and David her boyfriend. They were
28:45
Speaker 1: super cool, super nice. They sat at the table right
28:48
Speaker 1: near us, so I uh, you know, got to know
28:51
Speaker 1: him a little bit. And um, he says. Anyhow, here's
28:55
Speaker 1: where the favor comes in. She moved to Shanghai, China
28:58
Speaker 1: to teach, and she's teaching little kids English, and sadly
29:03
Speaker 1: they you know, separated when she moved over there. Uh,
29:07
Speaker 1: which to me are always like the saddest breakups, right, like,
29:11
Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong to China. So they just thought it
29:15
Speaker 1: was probably the thing to do. But they um. Because
29:18
Speaker 1: I inquired back to David, emailed them about this and
29:20
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, no, you guys broke up and he said, yeah,
29:22
Speaker 1: but we still really support each other and care about
29:24
Speaker 1: each other, and hopefully our pass across again one day.
29:26
Speaker 1: So anyway, Natalie David is in China, and because of
29:30
Speaker 1: this distance, I was at a loss when considering what
29:32
Speaker 1: to get her. He made a donation to Cooperative for
29:35
Speaker 1: Education in her name. And I know you guys like
29:37
Speaker 1: to read those names of people who contribute, but in
29:39
Speaker 1: this case, I was hoping you would just do a
29:41
Speaker 1: little something more special by wishing her happy birthday. So
29:45
Speaker 1: in January, which I think should be very soon, Natalie
29:48
Speaker 1: Happy birthday. Yeah, happy birthday. We remember you. I wear
29:51
Speaker 1: that shirt all the time. Oh, I think it's funny.
29:54
Speaker 1: And uh, I hope you're doing well in China. And
29:57
Speaker 1: don't give up on David just because he's here in
30:01
Speaker 1: stupid United States. Her new Chinese boyfriends like what that guy? Wait?
30:08
Speaker 1: Rewind that? So um Anyway, I hope you're doing well
30:10
Speaker 1: over there in China, and thanks again for all the support.
30:12
Speaker 1: And I hope you guys. I hope your pass across
30:14
Speaker 1: again one day. It was very nice that it's from
30:16
Speaker 1: David Austin Bury. If you have a special request for
30:22
Speaker 1: Chucker Me or us, you can tweet to us at
30:25
Speaker 1: s Y s K podcast. You can join us on
30:28
Speaker 1: Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know. You can
30:31
Speaker 1: send us an email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com,
30:34
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30:37
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