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."
Remember, this is an analogy using an unrelated but example with hindsight already established, unlike what this article is about.
The idea of the stock market was to allow people in invest in companies they believed in, sort of a put your money where you mouth is vote.
But due to the higher and higher levels of abstraction and manipulation at these higher levels of abstraction, putting your money in companies you believed in, is no longer what moves the market. Instead there have been some very bad things resulting in the manipulations of the markets at these higher abstract levels.
You might not even know where your investment is being put, had you handed it over to someone else to do for you, financial institutes and packages. Examples of very bad results include The Trillion Dollar Bet that drained Southeast Asia, including Indonesia (cia reported 88% Muslim) and gave rise to the repercussions of 911 (don't argue - follow the money instead, Worldcom, Enron, etc. some of the losers in the gamble) and Bernard Madoff's multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme.
So this deep dark net.... it may not be so bottom line (money) connected, or maybe some of it is with insider trading info, but the results eventually show in the open.
And clearly the saying, "what we make we can break" applies here regarding anonymity, a lock that can be broken, as locks are for honest people.
Its not like governments don't have their own means of inside communications, of which if the public knew what all was communicated, there would be opposition as well.
It comes down to what humans will do, good or bad, where the only difference is in what tools they use to do so.
And the higher the level of abstraction being used ... the more damage it can result in. Good things generally don't require such sneaking around, spy vs. spy... And in the virtual world, what does it matter really matter, unless it has real world results?
At what point in technology advancement will thought police enter the picture? Or perhaps that question should be in the past tense.
What does the article really accomplish? More players in the spy vs. spy game. Absolutely nothing more! Advertising the dark web.
Why increase the number of players?
The solution to the trillion dollar bet was to release the formula used into the public hands, effectively nullifying its ability to be used in such a damaging manner.
Flamebait? Really? Damn mods. This is at least Interesting, if not somewhat Informative.
You* would do yourself a favor by putting yourself in the shoes of those who do see it this way. Open up a little bit to people who are different, and maybe more different people will actually get along with you instead of just learning to hate you.
Knowing that the US has done shit like this is somewhat angering to me, a US citizen. Sad that people see it that way, as well.
* the mods.