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SYSK Selects: How the Deep Web Works · Stuff You Should Know

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