Kyle Terry talk on exploring darknets

The dark side of the web — exploring darknets

A glimpse of his talk:

“We should be allowed to be curi­ous about some­thing and go do research on it with­out feel­ing guilty,” Terry said.

Dark­nets are fre­quently described as the “hid­den inter­net.” It’s com­prised of the sites and pages that don’t show up on Google searches and most often make head­lines for all the wrong reasons.

“The biggest chal­lenge for the dark­net is con­tent. When­ever it’s in the head­lines it’s for things like pornog­ra­phy or drug or guns,” Terry said.

One of the more recent devel­op­ments was the shut­ting down of a site called The Silk Road, where trans­ac­tions for things like drugs and firearms pro­lif­er­ated. But, Terry has been look­ing specif­i­cally at the more advan­ta­geous aspect of what the dark­net pro­vides: anonymity.

“The dark­net was used dur­ing the Arab Spring to orga­nize protests, it’s been used to share infor­ma­tion in China. In Iran, the inter­net is heav­ily cen­sored and mon­i­tored. TOR has been key to keep­ing users anony­mous so that the gov­ern­ment there can’t iden­tify indi­vid­ual tar­gets,” Terry said.

TOR is a soft­ware bun­dle that encrypts and redi­rects traf­fic between an end user and its des­ti­na­tion for the spe­cific pur­pose of keep­ing the user anonymous.

Fig­ur­ing out a way to fun­nel the ben­e­fi­cial aspects away from the unsa­vory con­tent remains a chal­lenge, but Terry feels that more users would have such an effect.