Innocuous parts of the dark web?
November 23, 2014 5:30 PM   Subscribe

The illicit parts of the dark web like Agora and Silk Road 2.0 have been pretty well-covered by the media. What's out there that's pretty vanilla but for whatever reason is a .onion site?

I'm working on an article about the deep web. It originally started as another piece on marketplaces like Silk Road 2.0, but since that got busted up the focus has shifted and I've since become really interested in the more mundane .onion sites that can only be accessed via Tor.

To give a few examples I've come across so far: a site that dispenses advice/absolution by using "computer logic;" a Post Secret-type confessional space that seems to specifically cater to people up to no good on the darknet; a poetry/gripes forum; a burgeoning deep web literary magazine called The Torist.

My question is: what are some of sites/subcultures that are pretty innocuous but are still hidden in onionland? Markets that sell completely legal goods (not hot) also of interest, if they exist.

Sidenote: per a previous inquiry on browsing the darkweb safely I boot from Tails and use Tor from a computer that's been completely wiped. If that doesn't suffice I'd like to know.
posted by joechip to Technology (3 answers total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: The only thing I've really used Tor for was a sort of darknet ILL (interlibrary loan) service where people would ask for journal articles that they didn't have access to and other people would track the articles down for them (usually through legit means) and make them available for them. Not technically legal, but not very far down the road to ruin.
posted by jessamyn at 6:39 PM on November 23, 2014 [16 favorites]


re: security, if you want to be a little more anonymous, get a 2nd network card. Your network card has a globally unique(pretty much) number. You can use tools to change that number, but if I were genuinely paranoid, I'd use a separate one that I had never used anywhere else.
posted by theora55 at 8:01 AM on November 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


Full disclosure: I've never actually used TOR, I am just fascinated by it.

But that said, I expect you're going to start seeing .onion URLs for more and more well-known, mainstream sites. Supposedly even Facebook has one now. By and large, the people who use tools like TOR who aren't doing so for sketchy-shady reasons tend to be security/infosec/privacy-enthusiast types, and their main goal isn't so much accessing secret, premium content so much as being able to browse and otherwise traipse about online without being subject to creepy targeted adverts and whatnot. I read a while back about a lady who successfully used it to hide her pregnancy from retailers, for instance.
posted by aecorwin at 8:21 AM on November 24, 2014


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