The Dark Web: Could it look like a squid?
The dark web has recently become a topic of interest due to news surrounding wikileaks and black market site, The Silk Road. In this article, News.com.au presents two ways to conceptualize the dark web. First, imagine the entire internet to be three separate layers (surface web, the deep web, and the dark web). The surface is what most people understand to be ‘the internet’, the deep web is secured areas that require authorization and work intranets, and the dark web is an area that can only be accessed with specific software and configurations.
I’m interested in how this description can be reconciled with the concepts we learned about web structure in chapter 13. Concepts like highly connected components, directed edges, and disconnected components were combined to ultimately create the bow-tie structure.
Let’s first assume that the bow-tie structure is accurate as a basic visualization of the surface web. The deep web is protected behind security features and includes work intranets that aren’t hosted on the same types of servers as the rest of the web. Whereas the surface web can eventually reach to access the deep web, despite the security functions, we should expect the deep web to be connected to the surface web.
In fact, I don’t think the deep web really merits a special structure in our original bow-tie structure because sites on the deep web can and do connect back to the surface web (imagine links that appear on the page of your bank statement to take you back to the retailers). Even though the deep web is protected with passwords, they’re still accessible connections.
As for the dark web, the extra layer of complexity here is that dark web requires special web browsers to access. Perhaps we should think of encryption and security as bubble layers. Deep web sites can be within the surface web bow-tie structure, but each site is covered with a bubble.
Whereas no links exist from the surface web to the dark web, it appears that initially, we should see the entire dark web as a large, component that is unconnected to the bow-tie structure. However, the fact that the dark web can’t even be accessed via our standard web browser suggests that maybe we shouldn’t even be starting off the same base structure. Each dark web website is enclosed in multiple bubble layers representing encryption. Tor browser is required to access these sites, so Tor itself almost functions as a gate. I haven’t been able to find any information on whether or not websites on the dark web link to each other but it seems likely that they won’t. Therefore, the structure of the dark web may look like a squid. The body of the squid represents Tor as a gate keeper, and the websites exist on individual tentacle structures that extend from the squid. Each website is covered by a large number of encryption bubbles.