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Dark Web Mapping Reveals That Half of the Content Is Legal (helpnetsecurity.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Cyber threat intelligence firm Intelliagg and dark net indexing company Darksum have released the results of their efforts to map the dark web (actually, only the Tor network). They discovered that Tor network is much smaller than commonly thought, and that around 68% of the sites analyzed can be classified as illegal under UK and US law. In related news, a recent poll found that the vast majority of people want a ban on the dark net.
"Of those that have been accessed and analyzed with the companies’ “machine-learning” classification method, less than half (48%) can be classified as illegal under UK and US law. A separate manual classification of 1,000 sites found about 68% of the content to be illegal under those same laws."
Seriously, guys? The only place the 48% number comes from is from the same sentence saying that a more careful count said 68%.
During the test period, 29,532 Tor sites were identifiable.
13,584 were accessible (the remainder is assumed to be nefarious, but left out of all the statistics).
An over-hyped text matching script determined that 6,520 of the accessible sites would probably be illegal under US and/or UK law.
The pretty chart of Tor site content percent by type is here.
Unlike the bright-net, only 1% of the dark-net appears to be porn. However, 29% is file sharing, and another 28% is "leaked data", which taken together provides a much more believable 58% porn content.
This 'vast majority' of people, like most non-technical people, don't understand how things actually work. You can't ban the so-called 'dark web' because you really can't identify where it is. Even making Tor illegal (yeah, and good luck with that, too) would only get rid of part of the Dark Web.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!