The internet is a massive galaxy of websites, and all that you browse on a daily basis is just the tip of an iceberg. Combine all your Google queries, Facebook chats, tweets, posts on social media sites, and everything else you do on the internet today, and it will only be a fraction of what the web truly is.
It is widely believed what goes on the internet stays on it forever, and it's nearly impossible to erase everything without a trace. You may be able to delete a photo from Facebook, but there's a permanent footprint online, somewhere in the vicinity of the hidden web world, commonly referred to as "dark web."
The dark web came into being after the US military used anonymous methods to communicate online. It started off as The Onion Router project, or Tor, in 1997. But the Tor we know today was the brainchild of MIT students who worked with the Naval Research Laboratory mathematicians to make it happen.
You'd be surprised to know how big really the web is. Here are 10 lesser-known facts about the dark web every netizen must know.
- The internet we use on a regular basis, otherwise known as the Surface Web, is only 4 percent of what the web really is.
- Dark net is often a safe haven for hackers and community forums where everything from bomb recipes to child porn and human trafficking can be found.
- The dark web bounces your IP address to multiple locations, making it hard for anyone to trace your origin location.
- The dark web consists of 91,850 petabytes worth information, according to a study conducted in 2003. In comparison, the surface web consists of 167 terabytes.
- There are nearly 550 billion individual documents on dark web, which is an ocean compared to surface web's 1 billion.
- The Onion Router, or Tor, is the easiest (free and user-friendly) method to access the dark web. You can look at it as the wardrobe entry to the world of Narnia.
- All the transactions that happen on dark web are using Bitcoins (1 Bitcoin = $1,819)
- You can purchase weapons, weed, fake identifications such as American passports, copied credit cards on the dark web, and that's just the surface of what you can really buy.
- One bad move in the dark web, like clicking on a wrong link, can upload malware into your computer, which can be used to steal your passwords.
- Dark web is also the place where you can hire a hitman who can do the job for you, or a burglar to steal anything you want.
