Alien tor websites series#

Then he or she found a document made just for the user, making it known that the Redditor was not alone. The user was following the online trail of a site he or she found. It previously created a search engine for sites with common vulnerabilities, dubbed PunkSpider, hoping to expose poor security across the internet.A Redditor writes this creepy tale about using the internet before Google. This isn't the first time Hyperion Gray has gone out looking for nasty things on the web. It just is what it is.'Īnyone who believes they’ve seen illegal content on the map, such as child exploitation material, should send an email to with the details. 'But the data itself doesn't have a motive. 'One thing i think that's interesting about this visualization is that it likely either confirms or challenges people's existing perceptions,' Towler added.

Alien tor websites series#

Second, for expert users, we are planning a series of articles doing a deeper technical analysis and hopefully coming out with some novel observations about the structure of the dark web.' 'First, novice users who only have a hazy idea of what 'dark web' means, maybe they can get a better sense for what it is - maybe not radically different from the open web that they already know - and a sense of what content is on it. Haase hopes that there are two audiences for the Dark Web Map. 'If somebody really wants to hide an onion, it's very difficult for an outsider to find it.' 'It's representative, but definitely not exhaustive,' added Haase. And some can be hidden, even from computer scientists who've contracted with the U.S. onion domains don't go to a webpage, but to file or chat servers. The map should provide a comprehensive view of the dark web, even if it doesn't give the entire picture. 'Two sites can be 'similar' in terms of HTML structure but contain totally different content.' 'The layout algorithm tries to put sites that are similar to each other close together on the map and tries to move dissimilar sites out of the way, which causes groups of similar pages to move towards each other and form into clusters,' Haase explained to Forbes over encrypted chat. That similarity is based on the structure of the website's code. They're bunched together thanks to a 'similarity algorithm' that assigns each page a score between 0.0 and 1.0. Users will note the clusters of different sites. Haase then manually redacted any screenshots that appeared to contain illegal content, going by U.S. About 6,600 sites responded, whilst the other 53,000 either timed out or returned errors. He wrote a script that downloaded the home page for each and took a screenshot.

Haas started with a list of 60,000 Tor addresses, also known as onions because of their.

As Forbes has previously reported, the aim of MEMEX was to create simple search engines for the dark web and had proven useful for cops investigating human trafficking.īut the digital cartography was entirely self-funded, explained Mark Haase, computer scientist at Hyperion Gray and the man behind the map. The map was partly based on an experiment carried out with the MEMEX project at Darpa, the research arm of the Pentagon. 'I should add that I use Tor daily for many reasons, and hidden services shouldn't be taken as the core of what the Tor project is and does.' Caceres also donates to the Tor Project. While we didn't put out this research to take a side on the debate about hidden services, it's not something that can be ignored either - there's a lot of shitty stuff out there. 'But the data clearly indicates that this is at the very least a double-edged sword.