Internet DNA Podcast
There may be monsters in the dark web but one man's monsters is another mans salvation and who are we to police freedom of speech Putting aside for a moment all the totally illegal stuff that I think we all agree is illegal; the more conversation is censored, in any country... even ours, the more we need somewhere to freely communicate. Now, anonymity does bring out a dark side of humanity, but we can't shut down hope as a consequence. This is all things about the dark web you wanted to know but were too afraid to ask... in case someone is watching ;)
Transcription
(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)
Abi: Hello, welcome to this week's episode in internet DNA with me, Abi
Dan: and me Dan,
Abi: this week, we're going to talk about something that I been wanting to talk about for ages, but haven't quite had the courage to dive in now I have, so we're going to talk about the dark web dive deep into the shady corners of the Tor network
I'm going to ask a lot of questions and I hope that we're going to give a lot of answers that other people might be thinking as well. So let's start from the beginning. I decided, right, this is it in the name of research. I'm going to go into the dark web and I downloaded the Tor browser, which is what you have to do.
And then, because it seems that if you're using Tor browser, you've obviously got something to hide. So before you go in. It's like go in. It's like this weird behind the mirror world before you go and you have to have a VPN so that people can't see that you're going in or where you're going when you're going in there.
So first of all, you have to get a VPN, which right aside from, if I'm going to do dodgy stuff on Tor, which I didn't. But if I was aside from that, why do I need a virtual private network?
Dan: Virtual private network does in effect is hide what you're doing from your internet service provider and therefore anybody else, now it's got a lot of other things that stops people from being able to reverse, ping you, to be able to locate you, to be able to attack you via DDoSs attacks because they don't actually know where you are.
Abi: Okay. Why is someone going to be attacking me? You maybe not. Exactly. So why do I need a VPN?
Dan: Well, so in the U S a lot of the internet service providers throttle you, depending on what you're doing. So if you're watching video, they throttle you. Whereas if you've got a VPN, they can't do any of that.
Cause they don't know what you're thinking. They drop your internet speed. Why? Because video is very high bandwidth and they make their money by you not doing high bandwidth things.
Abi: If you have a VPN. Yeah, and they don’t know they can't drop your bandwidth.
Dan: Exactly. I use a VPN to check how our advertising is displaying in different countries.
So I can say, well, I'm in France or I'm in the US, or I'm in Hong Kong or wherever our websites are meant to be based or wherever the advertising is.
Abi: And I assume there are certain professions, whether you're a lawyer or a reporter or professions where security and anonymity is important, then that again is when you're doing your research and investigation, police, things like that. , it's imperative.
Dan: And also if you're an activist of any sort, but also actually, if you're a YouTuber or you're a streamer, because otherwise people can reverse IP you and you don't want that. The other thing would be you wouldn't walk around with your passport open on the front of your clothes. You just wouldn't do it.
It's not a good security practice to walk around with your address and everything available to anybody. So. There's a lot of reasons why you might use a VPN.
Abi: So I found myself VPN. I use encrypt.me I mean, I guess you just look for some of the top VPNs
Dan: Depends what you're doing, if you're really wanting to be safe, you need a VPN that's based in a country that has very strong privacy laws, such as ,Panama, Panama have these rules because they are a financial money hiding place.
Black hole. Yeah, exactly. We all know about the Panama papers, obviously the problem that you have with any VPN based in, let's say the U S is that the government can just say, I want your records and there's nothing they can do about it. It depends what you're doing. Really, if you want to be super secretive, cause you're doing super secret things then where it's based is important.
If you're not really doing super secret things, then you could look at VPNs that are less secure in that sense. As in, you're not worried that a government is going to try and request your internet records. Which is for most people fairly, unlikely one would hope
Abi: I got myself a VPN and in, I went and I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but I went in and I was faced with the duck duck, go search engine, and I said ok I’ve seen Duck Duck go, we did a podcast on this, I assume that duck duck go is used because it does not trace or track your movements when you use it. And then I sat there with this search bar going, Oh, what should I look for? So I looked for any normal things that I might look for the normal browser, and this was what I couldn't quite get my head around.
So when you go into the dark web, there is everything. That you get in the light, fuzzy, nice web, or that it's not that fuzzy and nice cause people still
Dan: in the commercial web as people call it.
Abi: Everything’s. still there in the dark web, but there's the extra dark side as well. Am I right in saying that basically there is one big web and your browsers are a window into that web and a bit like parental control. Some browsers governed by governments will not let certain websites, or servers, be seen which is why in my normal Google browsing, I don't see gun websites and things. It's not that these websites aren't there. It's just that they're blocked.
Dan: But they aren't there. They're not on the standard web. They're basically beneath the water. I mean, they're on the internet because that's how the internet works. It's not like it's a second internet.
Abi: Okay. So we'll carry on. So what you get on the dark web is everything that you would get normally, plus a load of things that you wouldn't get normally. So it's very easy to start searching and finding illegal things.
Gun sales, drug sales, uh, credit card, information, sales, illegal hacker services, all these things, very easy to find it.
Dan: There's also a lot of activism on the dark web. And I think this is the problem with the dark web is everyone thinks, Oh, it's a criminal underbelly. And while yeah, it is the criminal underbelly. It's not just used for that.
Abi: So there's all these things that you can find or you think you can find, but actually most of it is fishing Scams and hacks that it says you can buy this gun, but actually if you tried to buy the gun, they'd just take your money. So it's criminals who don't even send that the end product. So there's a lot of just really not very nice stuff.
Dan: So this is what I was going to say, which is when I speak to people that are on the dark web, actually the game seems to be sharing links. But it seems to me that if you don't know the correct links to go to, and you don't know the right places to go to, you are just getting newbie scammed, basically.
Abi: And that's what was quite interesting. So I looked at the places that I knew that you could buy things and there's more called markets and you know that they are real because their domain names, their URLs change the whole time. And in fact, the main market that you could buy guns and drugs and credit cards and things on it was just. brought down by the fed. So all these criminals are licking their wounds and looking for somewhere else to sell, but that one is constantly moving its servers and moving the whole time. Whereas the fishing ones, the scam ones, I set up a few accounts to see if I could see any difference at all. And you can't, but they have static domain.
So they are yeah. Newbie. Scammers. So you have all this, but obviously a very small percentage of people that go on a dark web to use it illegally. But I wonder why then, and you said activism. Why would you use Tor as your search browser? What is it that you would be doing that you felt that you needed to be in that world?
Dan: Because the entire point of the dark web is anonymity. VPN you're already, no one knows who you are. And then you're going into a system which is very much designed around. You can't be traced.
Abi: So this is where activists activate meetings and Hangouts. I mean, you always look at the bad side of it. Maybe there's some good things happening in the darkness.
Dan: Sure. There are, this is one of the problems with the dark web. A lot of it is dependent upon your opinion. So if I'm to say there are activists for all number of things on there, some of those causes you might believe in some of those causes, you might not the ones that you don't believe in. You're going to call terrorists.
But the thing about it, it's a kind of freedom of speech. And unfortunately human nature when people don't know who anybody is, the darker side of human nature is the part, certainly that the media wants to call attention to obviously the government and people like Google want to say all the dark web is a terrible place full of evil.
And that'd be monsters. Of course, they're going to say that because they like your data. They liked knowing what you're doing and who you're doing it with and where you're doing it. And that's very important to them. That's a part of that control.
Abi: It felt to me like the dark web was the place where someone hadn't set the parental controls on their router.
And so everything is there, but like your kids suddenly sort of happening upon a really inappropriate movie, which I'm sure we've all done is that you can happen upon things that you really would be sort of quite. Shocked or surprised about, and it's strangely scary to know that you could buy all that ammunition or you could buy that amount of stolen goods or whatever it is to know that you're that close to it as a normal person.
That generally isn't that close to that stuff, but you could just use it. It's just like you use any other browser and go about your life, but it means that you're not being sold to or traced or anything like that, which brings me onto my next question, because my first thought before I had gone and had a look was if its so bad, why don't they just close down Tor? And that'll be the window into the dark web has gone, but that's the thing it's not all bad in there.
Dan: You have to remember that the internet was originally designed to be resilient against nuclear attack. So the very problem you have with, the, Shutting it down is it's actually built upon the thing of as long as two servers survive, you could communicate.
So it's very difficult to shut things down, especially if you don't know what they are, where they are or who they are.
Abi: But surely just preventing Tor from selling their browser. means that you couldn’t get into it
Dan: They’d just get it on the dark web wouldn't they,
Abi: Not if they couldn’t get into it
Dan: they would be a place where someone say, look, this is where you get it, or this is how you get it, or very similar way to the way anybody procures anything that the government doesn't want them to have.
Abi: So in countries where we would perceive the management or the parental controls on your window to the internet are very strong. I.e. in China, where you are not allowed to see a lot of things or in many countries I expect. And even ours, where you're not allowed to see things. So to get round that it's the similar process that people get around, any commercial or government run method or internet.
Dan: Yeah. So when you look at anything that's trying to avoid government control. Unfortunately, the bit that everybody sees is the violent and illegal bit, but there are a number of good reasons why you might not want the government to be knowing about every single thing,
Abi: especially now, and locked down. When we're not allowed to leave our house.
Dan: Or if you're an oppressed minority in some country which kill people or your in a country where certain viewpoints are seen as criminal, you definitely wouldn't want to be living in countries where they arrest you because of what you think or say. And. When we say that that's a lot of countries that's even in the UK, you can say things in the UK that will get you arrested, just for saying that you don't have to do anything.
You can just say something. And I think as we move more into that, for people to be able to say the things that they wish to say, this is my whole point about comedy, which I'm just going to stuff in here randomly is that it's absolutely important that people can say taboo things because it allows people to discuss them.
So it drags it out into the light where it can either whither or die or grow, you know, the other side of it. Which isn't purely the dark web, but is also cryptocurrencies now allowing you to spend money without people tracking you, tracing you, knowing what you're spending it on and so forth. And yet again, what everyone's told about it is, Oh, it's used to buy guns and drugs. Yeah, I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is. But so is cash. So it's not the fact that people use it to do that. Doesn't make it a terrible thing. It just makes them terrible people.
Abi: So, because I was getting the dark web, I thought I better get myself some Bitcoin so that I could research that as well.
So I looked around for a Bitcoin company and I thought, well, I should do that. Not in the dark web because the dark web, it might be a bit shady. I should do that in that. Commercial arena. Although that is just a shady, I found out that because Bitcoins are not regulated and the companies that offer them are not regulated.
Even if you put your money in, they can just disappear the next day and take your money with them. So you really have to do a lot of research on which website you're going to go to, to get your Bitcoin wallet and a website that deals in other currencies that are regulated as quite a good idea. I use one called beyond CC. I haven't checked with my money is still there. I hope it is because since I put my 50 quid in. Bitcoins have shot up
Dan: Is it a hot wallet or cold wallet.
Abi: Oh, which should it be?
Dan: One of them is connected to the internet. That's called a hot wallet
Abi: its a hot wallet.
Dan: Which one did you go for? Beyond the CC?
BeyondCC. And how did you choose BeyondCC?
Abi: I asked my friends and I hope it's still there, but that as well, it's quite difficult to navigate. And that's the thing. People can get really addicted to Bitcoin trading because it goes up and down so fast. So you can make quite a lot of money, but can also lose it quick.
Dan: Yeah. I mean, at the moment, Bitcoin is in its Tulip phase people are about lose quite a lot of money, I think.
And obviously the problem is you don't know where that tipping point is. So, you know, you could leave it in for another month and make even more money, but at some point,
Abi: okay, I'll go and check. See if. I've got another 20 quid. and I can go whoo whooo, which should I have gone for which a good one?
Dan: There's two main types outside hot and cold wallets.
Cold wallet is like storage, you have it on your computer so that’s storage you're taking it off the net. It can't be taken, much more secure., but obviously. It cant interact with the web. So you then have to transfer it to a hot wallet, but if you've got lots of Bitcoin, you don't want it all in your hot wallet. I think a lot of people start off with the one called Exodus, the thing about Exodus is it's not open source, which is kind of against the point,
Abi: and it sounds like they might make a mass Exodus with my money,
Dan: The hardware wallet for it is Trezor so it's quite, well-respected.
It's for beginners. It's got everything that you need. It's got good support because it's confusing out there. And because it's not open source, it's quite secure in a sense. The other one that people know quite a lot about is mycelium that works with ledger and Trezor, which are the hardware wallets, because these are all mobile or software wallets that you're using on the front end.
And then you've got the actual hardware, which is where it's all stored.
So for anyone that's not slightly tech savvy, I mean the whole thing does sound terrifying. Even the names. Make me go, Ooh, don’t know if I want to do that. It's quite a big thing. I mean, why you'd want to go into the dark web? I don't know, just carrying around your life in the light. That's fine. But it's interesting to discover, but yeah, everything is done to make it difficult or off-putting.
Now you need to be very, very careful about that statement because. Everything is done to preserve your anonymity. And obviously there are very big actors like governments and corporations that very keen for you not to be.
And therefore that maybe is the reason why it's very complicated and difficult. Because if it was easy, they would just come in with their dirty little fingers and have a look there as well.
Abi: And they do. That's how they shut down some of these marketplaces.
Dan: Yeah. They have to try very hard. It's like, you know, ledger was hacked a month ago, which didn't allow people to steal their money.
But revealed people's names and email addresses. Look at it in two ways. If I was some sort of freedom fighter of some sort or terrorist or some sort, depending which way you want to look at it, it's absolutely essential to do what I do. Now whether that's good or bad is completely dependent on your viewpoint.
And the government and corporations have spend a lot of money making the dark web seem very dangerous and scary.
Abi: So everything has propaganda in some way or another, but I would just like to say for all those governments, listening into internet DNA podcasts. Dear listener do not enter the dark web. It is not good.
It is bad. I'm just saying it for the government's listening. Cause we've heard to tell our listeners not to do it so that they don't shut us down too. Okay. Now that’s done, what were you saying about is it, my experience That it's not good? In such a sort of mundane thing. It was quite weird and you're right. The propaganda, I felt guilty. For just going in there and I was looking around, you know, I could surf the internet in there. I could go to my own website. I could do what I wanted in there, but because of this sort of weird hype of it, I felt wrong. So yeah, it's got a real slant on it. So do I think it's wrong?
No, I think in a lot of places where freedom of speech is not allowed. And where you're desperate or in the situation is desperate. Then it's a lifeline.
Dan: But the flip side is obviously it's a harbour for all the worst elements of humanity as well. And I think that almost is exactly what we are playing the game of right now, which is how much are you willing to trade your personal Liberty for security.
Abi: That's a theme that comes up a lot of what we said, isn't it. And I was always said, Oh yeah, no, I'm happy to trade mine. And you were like, I'm not, I'm not at all. And suddenly something happened that I never thought would and you know, the government said, you're not allowed to leave the country.
You're not allowed to leave your house. You're not allowed to do this, going to track you. We're going to trace you. We're going to find you. And I have been really, really eating my words that I've always said, Oh, it's never going to happen to me. And now I am so aware about how quickly your freedoms can be taken away and how happily you give them over.
, and then, well, it's much harder to give it back actually, as Boris Johnson said
Dan: Historically they don't give them back in their entirety. As in it's an ever tightening noose, I'm not here some sort of QAnon conspiracy theory, I'm not that sort of guy, as you know, but I do really worry about. This continual giving away of freedom for security. When the security is an illusion. Anyway, it's quite scary. I think this lockdown has shown you. Yes, we're locking ourselves away. Not like they've had to come around and bar up our door or anything
Abi: That's because we're law abiding. citizens
Dan: exactly. That's what I'm saying. You only have to look at history to see what happens when you start writing people's down, what their religion is, what their profession is, you know, you get the wrong government in power, like the Uyghurs are finding in China or the Kurds find in Turkey or the African-Americans find in the United States. If we're going to be completely silly about it, that. It's actually allows for a kind of violence, whether that's complete, you know, rounding people up into trains and putting them into concentration camps or treating them completely differently and denying them from same financial services as anybody else.
It's a dangerous thing to trust the government that it will always do. Good. Do good. Do good. Because power is one of those kinds of things that makes good people do bad things.
Like go on the dark web and we're going to have to go there. I hope we've sort of, I don't know, taken away some of the fog opened it up and just said, here you go.
It's another browser yet. There's bad, but there's good.
But actually it's your choice. You can do bad shit if you want, but if you don't want, you don't have to, you know, there's other stuff available.
Abi: Well, nice to speak to you and look forward to speaking to you next week, indeed. But I want to know more about Iris van Herpen.
Dan: Really. Yeah. I suddenly wants to know more about it since I don't even know what it
Abi: is its a her. You talked about her last time.
Dan: Oh, wearable tech
Abi: yeah. id Just had never heard of her. And so I looked her up and I thought she might be quite interesting. Interesting, but obscure people in technology.
Dan: Yes. That's a whole new podcast. Isn't it
Abi: Yes that’s not now. All right. Well, lovely to speak to
you. Enjoy your voyages on the dark web.
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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.