Slashdot Mirror
The Dark Side of the Web
Barence writes "Beneath the web pages indexed by Google lies an online world that few know exists. It's a realm of huge, untapped reserves of valuable information containing sprawling databases, hidden websites and murky forums. It's a world where academics and researchers might find the data required to solve some of mankind's biggest problems, but also where criminal syndicates operate, and terrorist handbooks and child pornography are freely distributed. Interested? You're not alone. The deep web and its 'darknets' are a new battleground for those who want to uphold the right to privacy online, and those who feel that rights need to be sacrificed for the safety of society. The deep web is also the new frontier for those who want to rival Google in the field of search." The melodrama is tempered, though: "The deep web isn’t half as strange or sinister as it sounds. In computer-science speak, it refers to those portions of the web that, for whatever reason, have been invisible to conventional search engines such as Google."
Loads of stuff is hidden on purpose...config files, site member info, etc etc. I "accidentally hacked" a law company's MySQL DB once because their phpmyadmin wasn't hidden properly and showed up on a Google search for an obscure error message I searched for. Hidden-From-Google != Nasty-Child-Pornographers......
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
The article says it was "Posted on 3 Sep 2010 at 15:47". Unless I've missed something, we're still in March 2010...
there is no mystery to this 'deep web'. massive data reserves? quite likely. personal, but unsecured servers hosting copyrighted content? even more likely.
This kind of article will only make things worse for a future defendant trying to explain he wasn't coordinating with 'the deep' in the distribution of his movies from his computer to his Mythbuntu box.