If You Don't Want To Read About The Apple Watch, Read This Guide To The Dark Web

I spent a week with the scammers, drug dealers, and endearing dorks inside the Dark Web. Here’s what I learned.

Last month, a federal jury in New York convicted Ross Ulbricht on seven drug and conspiracy charges related to the operation of the now notorious online bazaar the Silk Road. The Silk Road — which at its peak listed 10,000 products for sale, 70 percent of which were drugs, and did over $200 million in transactions — is, seventeen months after its seizure by the FBI, still the only site to have entered the public consciousness from the enormous, complex, and confusing part of the internet known as the Dark Web.

Indeed, in the popular imagination the Silk Road is still, if not a metonym for the Dark Web, the entire thing itself.

That's far from the truth. In the aftermath of Ulbricht's conviction, the vast internet netherworld made famous by the Silk Road is still a frenzied hive of human activity — some of it criminal, some of it fascinating, much of it mundane, all of it deeply foreign to the way most of us experience the web.

Trying to define the Dark Web, variously referred to as the Deep Web and the Deepnet, is difficult, but it's probably best thought of as a big anonymous subfloor of the internet that you can't access with a standard browser.

Over the past week, I spent my first sustained period of time hanging out in the Dark Web, using Tor, an encrypted anonymous browsing software. I wanted to know what the so-called Tor Hidden Services (servers that only receive inbound traffic through Tor networks) look like in the aftermath of the Silk Road ruling. I wanted to know what goes on in the fabled — at least among some 4chan and Reddit users — Tor image boards. More than anything, I wanted to start to get to know the shape of a part of web culture that is as widely reviled as it is poorly understood.

Here's what I learned.

Google "Tor Browser." Click on Tor Project website. Install "Tor Browser". Open "Tor Browser". Run a 10-second automatic configuration.

Congrats, you're surfing the Dark web!

Tor looks like any other modern browser and uses the basic units of internet navigation —search and hyperlinking — and yet trying to use Tor like you use Chrome is basically impossible. The reason: .Tor pages — otherwise known as .onions — go down constantly. Some of them are taken down by law enforcement. Some of them are taken down because the host get spooked. Most of them go down for reasons that are totally opaque.

Because of this, the easiest way to navigate Tor is through portals like Hidden Wiki: Basically old Yahoo-style portals that are categorized by, or at least gesture toward, the major areas of activity on Tor. Here's a clearnet (that's what Dark Web dudes and dudettes call the normal internet) version so you can get an idea. For a network that represents the bleeding edge of the internet in the popular imagination, it's a surprisingly, even charmingly, retro way of experiencing the web.

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