deepest, darkest spam
Viagra anyone? Penis extension delivered tomorrow? Weight loss guaranteed? We all appreciate that spam has always been one of t’internet’s biggest issues but, if anything, it seems to be getting worse. A couple of months ago my spam receipt via this blog, usually about twenty or thirty a day, rocketed to several hundred and continues to climb stratospherically. And the worst thing is half of it’s in Chinese so I can’t even get my hands on the fantastic offers they undoubtedly promise.
For a couple of weeks I deleted them as ‘marked spam’ but to little avail and the stream continued. Intrigued, I started looking at their website addresses, an eclectic jumble of ad-hoc numbers and letters, which didn’t appear to make much sense to me and I couldn’t understand how or why they would be of value to anyone seeking to sell or promote anything…and then I stumbled upon the Darknet, aka the Underweb, Deep Web, Dark Web, Hidden Web. What the…
Aha. As it turns out these websites are unsearchable and that’s the whole point, you’re not meant to find them. And neither for that matter are the authorities. The Deep Web, or whatever pseudonym you care to use, is specifically designed to be used anonymously. Don’t believe me? Go Google it and see how far it gets you. People trading over the Darknet, and using their network of servers, browsers and online marketplaces, don’t want to be traced; they don’t want to be found.
At its core appears to be ‘Tor’ – a three letter acronym for ‘The Onion Router’, a heavily layered (geddit?) and massively encrypted network specifically designed to hide everything about its’ users. Bouncing the individual’s IP address around thousands of different points on the network essentially renders it unidentifiable and hence, untraceable. And what better honeypot for the pornographers, the drug-dealers, people-traffickers, fraudsters and criminals to do business on. Not that I know this from personal experience you understand, but I am led to believe you can buy everything from fake ID to counterfeit passports, from heroin to temazapan, from an AK47 to someone to pull the trigger for you. Believe it or not, in a controlled experiment, cocaine was ordered online from Holland and delivered two days later by the Royal Mail. I kid you not. Oh, you mean you’re more surprised that, following its recent privatisation, Royal Mail actually managed to deliver it!
By all accounts, the tussle against organised crime being fought on this battleground by the authorities is being well and truly lost. The only success of note was the recent shutting down, following a two-and-a-half-year investigation by the FBI, of the notorious online marketplace, Silk Road. However, they seem as effective as I am in stopping my spam as only days after this, at least five ‘Silk Road 2.0s’ had taken its place! Ironically, and here’s the rub, any ideas who designed Tor in the first place? Yep, the US Government. My, that’ll teach em!
Come back Viagra, all is forgiven.
