DARK WEB
“Curiosity got me bad, as soon I clicked ‘join’, live stream started. Viewing was free; you only had to pay if you wanted to be director. Live stream showed a creepy looking room with the strangest lighting. I found it very mysterious but what I witnessed next left me almost dead. My mind begged me to stop but my body was unable to move. Beneath the feed of a web cam was a log in page to chat room. Loads of messages flooded at my screen, as I filtrate into chat room. About 150–200 people were in the chat room, commenting in their respective languages; Arabic, Farsi, English, Japanese etc , but I wondered how many were anonymously just witnessing this brutal curse to humanity like me. Majority of messages read ‘start’ or ‘go, go, go’ or likewise something very similar. My heart fell down to what I saw next, a girl blind-folded tied, and handcuffed to a wooden rusty chair. Next to her, stood the crazy hockey mask worn skinny man with no mercy in his eyes. I saw the girl screaming her lungs out. I couldn’t believe my eyes, my mind denied to register what I saw next. Before I could understand any further, everyone was sat quiet — everyone except one user, Italiangoat, who I figured was the director of this show. Soon, it all started. A dark, big man dragged her to the center of the room. She tried escaping but ropes were gripped too hard around her. She stopped screaming as they unleashed blindfolds, realising her near death. She looked straight into the camera. God knows her face still keeps fidgeting in my dreams. The commands from the director started to roll in. It read ‘lay her sideways on the floor, kick her in the stomach, kick her in the face, kick her hard, stomp on her private parts, take her eyes out’ and it continued for next several minutes. I was so shocked at this point that I could barely move. When the italiangoat commanded his last wish to slit her throat, I saw the skinny man began typing and seconds later, screen showed message from admin demanding another $500 to fulfil this merciless job. The woman was tortured for this sum. If I had money to stop this, I would’ve given up all my life savings to stop this madness but I was barely making minimum wage. I couldn’t watch any more as I realised Italinegoat agreed to pay. I quickly shut the screen but forgot to switch off my speakers. I still hear her screams every night. I still believe I could’ve saved her if I had enough money or power.”
Information had to be transferred to several hundred universities and institutes for research purposes worldwide. It’s back in 1979. Only source available to fulfil this call was internet, but that meant it had to be sent individually to every computer or user, making the task at hand time taking and tiring. The purpose solely demanded need for automatic information-sharing panel around the world that could be accessed by anyone anywhere. Tim Berners Lee, an English engineer and computer scientist, looked upon it as an opportunity to connect “hyper text” to internet. The term hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson in 1965. The term initially was rolled as piece of a paradigm developed to create and use linked content. In 1988, this newly developed relationship between internet and hypertext links gave birth to “World Wide Web”, shortly known as WEB. World Wide Web or web didn’t become publicly available until 1990 when first few websites were designed, before it was only accessed by some colleges in America. The first web search engine “Archie” was developed in 1990 but due to limited space, it only provided listing and not the content for each website. By 1994, there were 11 million Americans available online. In 1996, when GOOGLE was launched by Larry and Sergey, it acted as a whole game changer with its ability to come up with plethora of information in matter of seconds. By this era, Nokia had already released first web enabled phones. Web continued to grow at an incredible rate and is still growing up till today with millions of web pages being designed on daily bases.
Web is owned by none. It is the most widely used technology in today’s world. It’s been estimated that every web page is an average of only 19 clicks away from every another web page. Can you feel how big this city is and how it’s taking up all part of our lives? From a 5 year old kid playing games online to 80 year old reading news online finds it essential and integral part of their daily lives. It can easily be accessed by any age group anywhere in the world. But was the web this tireless since the beginning? Actually, no. Today searching web is handy and effortless but back in 90’s it was as complicated as solving Rubik’s cube. One had to know specific wording of a website’s title to reach up to there and sometimes, that used to take about a week or so.
Web, often mistakenly understood as internet, can hypothetically be explained as a big virtual city. The city provides users the power to communicate with one another in web languages where web browser acts as translators. The large packet of information is stored in servers, publically available to everyone. These packets of information travels through wireless connectivity or telephone lines in binary numbers, that later translates into human friendly languages by web browsers making it easy for humans to understand and interpret. People often confuse the term web with internet or vice versa. The internet connects the participants while the web connects the information. In most simple words, internet can be defined as a gateway that allows user to gain access to web, a big virtual city. Without a door, It’s utterly impossible in penetrate into this virtual city.
This big virtual city is divided into layers. The very first layer, Surface web, is the part of the web that could easily be found using regular browsers. The Surface web is less than 1% of the total web. These are the websites that you, I and, millions of other people surf on daily bases. Next comes the encrypted websites, hidden or private part that government and other sector uses to store, and transmit their personal data or information. These websites cannot be indexed upon GOOGLE for one reason or another. The last and the most disturbing part, dark web, is the much wider part of the web, mostly used for illegal activities such as human-trafficking, selling and buying fake identities and passports, drugs mafia, hit men, hackers etc.
Dark web has been the most mysterious part of the web for years and is still believed to be myth by some people. It is the encrypted or hidden part of the web that can only be accessed by proxy browsers such as TOR that let users anonymously peek into dark web. TOR or THE ONION ROUTER was first developed for US NAVAL ARMY in December, 2006 to communicate anonymously. Over the years, TOR has reshaped itself. It can now be easily downloaded by an average user who knows little to nothing about proxy servers to hide their identities.
The users can buy anything on dark web using bitcoins- the virtual currency. The products and services ranging from hit men to fake passports and nationalities. One can also devote his body for scientific experiments. The most popular group of websites on dark web includes Silk Road, The human experiments, Red Rooms, Cannibals Café, Shadow Web, Hell, Darkcode etc. Some of the website and forums are discussed in details below.
The website Silk Road was developed by Ross William Ulbricht. The website was the first modern dark web black market. It was best known site to sell and purchase illegal drugs. The transactions were anonymous and hidden, allowing buyers to buy drugs without any fear. When June 2011, Gawker published an article about the silk road and traffic at site drastically increased, U.S Senator, Charles Schumer, ordered FBI to shut down the website. The official website was shut down 2013 and the developer, Ross William Ulbricht was arrested but the similar black market websites such as silkroad3.0, silkroad 2.0 etc are still being operated and used to buy and sell drugs.
The Red Rooms are believed to be one of the spookiest websites available on dark web. Red rooms show the live stream of torture or murder of a person. Its existence is challenged by a lot of people but other claim to witness brutal incidences on such websites. These websites can only be reached upon with direct links.
Cannibals café are forum devoted to “human meat for sale fresh frozen”. This forum has now been banned by German Government however, the similar forums still exists. The chat on these forums normally starts with recipients asking to arrange a meeting to be eaten up alive by fellow human being.
The human experiment is a room on the dark web that are operated by bunch of sick people who believes in ideology that not all humans are equal and to prove this ideology they abduct people from streets and perform immortal and brutal experiments.
There are few hundreds of paedophile websites on dark web that portray explicit content. It’s believed that the contributors to such forums use street kids and their own kids to abuse, video tape and earn money by selling such content online.
These websites cover the most part of the dark web and are observe to be the creepiest available out there. Due to anonymity, it’s hard tracking down culprits or victims. Reading the story scripted in the first part of the essay, one might has taken it as fictions or imaginary story but it is not. Likewise, in 2003, a series of leaked videos called ‘Daisies Destruction” took world wide web by storm. These series of videos showed a man sexually abusing little kids around 2 to 7 years old to death. The videos were sold in black market of paedophiles for millions of dollars. These brutal and inhuman stories are the reflection of the incidents that take place on dark web on daily bases to entertain the pleasure needs of mentally sick people who enjoy watching or torturing others but alas, there’s no end to it.
In a nut shell, web has transformed its root in most dangerous and resilient ways. Starting as a medium of communication, it has now flourished up to taking upon lives of human beings. There’s no end to limits of web, deep web or dark web. It’ll continue to grow until eternity so, let’s sit back and wait for another evolution to drain upon us.