I browsed the dark web.

And it was quite...unsurprising.

How I was inspired

I was scrolling through the tech-reletated newspapers I could get for free on the Kindle Store, and I noticed that at the #1 place was held by 2600 magazine- the hacker quarterly. Now, I consider myself to be a bit of a hacker, since I use all sorts of tricks to never pay for things.

So, I signed up for a free trial. An article someone submitted talked about the Tor marketplaces on the dark web, and how they had revisited them in 2021, only to find that they had started selling COVID-19 vaccines and vax cards.

This piqued my interest. Oh, boy.

The Onion Router

Tor [www.torproject.org] is a web browser that works like this.

YOUR PC --> TOR NODE --> THE INTERNET

This is a way of accessing the Net without being tracked. This is *similar* to a VPN, but this is more of a man-in-the-middle kind of system. If you have a VPN, it looks like this:

YOUR PC --> VPN SERVER --> TOR NODE --> THE INTERNET

This prevents the website owner, your organization, your ISP, the CIA, you name it, from detecting you as easily.

On top of that, Tor supports custom .onion URL's that can only be accessed using TOR, guaranteeing the privacy of all of its users.

FAQ about TOR?

Is TOR Safe?

It's funded by the US government and was founded by the US navy. It's open source and many different people provide tor nodes.

Am I guaranteed to be undetected when using TOR?

Is it TOR or Tor?

Should I use a VPN?

VPN

I set up ProtonVPN [the free version since I'm 14 years old and cannot have a credit card and am broke].

Browsing!

So, I decided to look up some great Tor sites. I found a massively useful one called The Hidden Wiki. It contains links to Onion sites, which is great, since literally 99% of .onion addresses are unindexed, and the dedicated Tor search engines are a bit iffy. The other 1%? That's non-onion versions.

I went on a few websites listed there, and I found:

• Gun stores

• Drug stores

• Websites selling fake money

• Fake IDs

• onion hosting

• Facebook

• DuckDuckGo

• 4Chan clones

• A drug-cooking forum[!]

• etc.

Now, I had also heard of another site called Hidden Answers, which is a hidden forum that is uncensored. I wanted to visit it, but that brings me to my next point.

Onion V2 and V3...What??

There are 2 versions of Onion websites still around. V2 ones and V3 ones. V2 got deprecated in 2021 and Tor will not load them. This made getting to some sites near impossible. An example of a Tor V3 site:

http://answerszuvs3gg2l64e6hmnryudl5zgrmwm3vh65hzszdghblddvfiqd.onion

example of an onion

http://facebookcorewwwi.onion

The v3 are so much longer, and will be so much harder to detect, as you see. Fun fact: BOTH are real URLs.

V2 URLs may be accessible in other TOR browsers, but in just months, V2 will be disabled everywhere [Onion Service version 2 deprecation timeline | The Tor Project]

Conclusion

Don't go on the Dark Net. Seriously. However, I will keep posting about it, with links to websites, and news about Tor itself.