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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%.
My guess is that a large part of that is simple copyright infringement or other such things. The "illegal content problem" is not really a problem. It's just people afraid of free speech and sharing of information.
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.
Dark Web Mapping Reveals That Half of the Content Is Legal
Yes, sir, certainly she was old enough, that's not the issue. The problem is that a llama can't legally consent to anything, even if she's over 21.
Well that's part of the problem. As with the bigger issues of encryption, e.g. Apple vs. FBI, if one "good guy" government can crack it, then so can the bad guys, whom it was designed to fight.
Does anybody think Russia and China, at a minimum, can't muster the technological and financial oomph to get the same job done as the NSA/FBI?
This on top of things they also do, like the US, like phone metadata and Eye in the Sky. Sometimes they even buy the software for analysis from western companies.
If we can do it for good guy reasons, so can they, and as far as I am concerned, this is all about stopping the building of these tools to begin with, to avoid the 1984 "Imagine a boot stepping on a human face...forever."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Al they're saying is half the content that they could find is legal ... it's called the dark web for a reason. If they could find it all, it wouldn't be the dark web. And what they did find couldn't be all that dark - after all, they found it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If you actually read the TFA but this being Slashdot, you didn't and I almost didn't, thinking "oh god not this shit again."
This isn't about actually banning anything but battling against the meme that the "dark web" is all illegal sites.
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BMO
They don't want to ban it for YOUR safety, they want to ban it for THEIRS.
I'm just sayin'...
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Call it "Freedom Web" and watch Fox News explode in a puff of logic as it tries to find out what side to take.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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!
Freenet is a real thing, BTW, a different sort of dark net that never really caught on. More secure for uploaders than TOR, though (much better for Wikileaks) since there are no servers.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Of course the name has -nothing- to do with it.
Silence is a state of mime.
About 68% of criminal activity goes unprosecuted because criminals invoke their constitutional rights. It would be so much easier if they didn't have those rights. So lets let the 32% of people who are saved by constitutional rights hang in the wind.
That's effectively what you are saying when you want to prevent the 32% of sites that are used by whistleblowers, journalists, resistance fighters and dissidents from having a platform that is safe to communicate.
If copyright didn't apply to computer programs, and this applied to both Sony Computer Entertainment and the free software community, there would be no need for copyleft. Instead, people could just make and share commented disassemblies of proprietary software. This already happens underground.
"A recent poll found that the vast majority of people want a ban on the dark net."
Genius. You know what else? We should ban crime, too. Just make being a criminal illegal and *poof*, crime goes away.
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