Episode Transcript
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0:01
Hello, everyone, Happy Saturday. Chuck
0:03
here with another Saturday Selects pick this
0:06
week, How the Deep Web Works January.
0:10
This is a good one. Everyone's deep Web is deep
0:13
and dark and scary, or at least it can be. And
0:15
we dove into that it's changed a lot over
0:17
the past six years. But this
0:19
is a pretty good early peak at the deep web. And I was
0:21
proud of this one. So give listen. I hope
0:24
you enjoy it. Have a great weekend. Welcome
0:30
to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My Heart
0:32
Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
0:39
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
0:41
there's Charles Depy, Chuck Bryant, yea
0:44
Audie uh and it
0:46
makes the Stuff you should Know. That's right, mineus
0:48
Jerry. But with no that's right, we
0:51
lose a Jerry gain a Knoll. Yeah.
0:54
One step forward and another step forward?
0:58
Oh for you
1:00
are you've just been wailing on it. I'm not gonna
1:02
say two steps back with Nol, sitt and five ft
1:04
away, but it could be one and one. One
1:07
step foward with Nol, one step back for not having
1:09
Jerry. You're saying it's a step
1:11
forward not having Jerry, and a step forward
1:14
having nol. I'm just trying to
1:16
make everyone like me doing
1:20
a poor job of it. You
1:23
do a great job of Everybody loves the chuck,
1:26
not everybody who doesn't. I have some
1:28
mortal enemies. Mortal enemies.
1:30
Yeah, they want to kill them trying to kill you. H
1:34
we'll chuck. Yes, I will tell you what if
1:38
they did want to kill you, they wanted
1:40
to hire a hit many. Yeah. The
1:42
deep web is a good place to start, looking quite
1:45
a segway. It's been a while. I t that one up.
1:48
You did unintentionally. Yeah,
1:50
I spotted it and went after it. Yeah. This is
1:52
about both the deep and dark web,
1:54
which are two different things. The dark
1:57
web is part of the deep web, thank you. But the
1:59
deep web is necessarily dark, all
2:01
dark. Yeah, that's
2:04
very well put. The dark web is the nefarious
2:06
things that go on in the deep web, not
2:08
necessarily nefarious, but the purposefully
2:11
hidden. Yeah, that's true, because there are some
2:13
good things in the dark web. I totally misspoke. Yeah,
2:16
well you know what. I think that it's great that you confess
2:18
to it. You feel better, I do.
2:21
Man. This is a really upfront kind
2:23
of episode, isn't it. It's a very honest
2:25
we're bearing it all. Uh
2:30
so, do you have a fancy intro story?
2:32
No? You think I would? Right, My intro
2:34
gets buried later on. It's
2:37
a great intro, but it just I'll
2:40
use it as the intro. Okay,
2:42
go ahead, okay, okay,
2:46
Chuck. Yes, have you heard of our
2:48
favorite band, Iron Maiden? Ah?
2:50
Yeah, sure so. Iron Maiden is
2:53
arguably the most awesome band
2:55
of all time. Oh
2:58
dude, all right, not a huge
3:00
fan, but you you wouldn't be like I hate
3:02
Iron Maiden. They suck, of course. Not no,
3:05
because it makes you crazy. It's right. Iron
3:07
Maid's been around for a while. They're pretty
3:09
smart. They know what they're doing. Um
3:11
and recently they figured
3:14
out a way to maximize
3:17
their touring dollars by
3:19
flying their own plane. They well, Bruce
3:21
Dickinson always did. Yeah he
3:23
was. He's a certified pilot. It's gotta be efficient.
3:26
I would imagine, plus fun unless
3:28
Bruce was partying too hard and then they got
3:30
to fly to the next city that night. He wouldn't
3:33
do that, I hope not, because that's
3:35
that's dangerous. I mean, driving
3:37
drunk is bad enough, but flying drunk I
3:39
can only imagine. Sure. Uh,
3:41
and it's probably not just drunk, you know
3:43
what I'm saying. No, no, no, he's he's straight
3:46
straight has he always been? I
3:48
don't know. I can't verify that well anyway,
3:51
Um, Bruce and the boys uh
3:53
figured out that a good
3:55
way to figure out where to tour,
3:57
where to decide to tour, um be
4:00
to figure out where their
4:02
music was getting pirated the most.
4:05
That sounds reasonable. It does sound
4:07
reasonable. It's it. It provides
4:10
you with evidence of an established
4:12
fan base and a
4:14
fan base that is unwilling to pay
4:17
for your record but
4:20
would probably pay to see you live. How
4:22
does that reason? Well,
4:25
they like your music, but they don't
4:27
want to pay for your CD, so
4:29
why would they go to see live and pay? Because it's
4:31
different, Like, seeing a live show is way
4:33
different than buying a CD. You can't you can't
4:35
get a live show. You could get a video of a live
4:37
show, it's still not the same experience. A live show is
4:39
a live show. Plus, everybody always
4:41
knows that anybody involved
4:44
in the or entrenched in the
4:46
old guard music industry does
4:48
any band doesn't make any money on
4:50
their records and make it on touring, So
4:53
going to see a band live also is
4:55
kind of a true act of fandom because
4:57
you're really you're you're contributing
5:00
directly to your band that you like. You know.
5:02
Um, So what they did was they hired a company to
5:05
look at bit torrent sites and
5:07
find the regions where their
5:10
music it was most pirate ID and they
5:12
created a tour map from it and went and played
5:14
those regions. Did you do you have the number
5:16
one Iron Maiden pirated region?
5:21
But we're gonna say Rio, all
5:23
right, they're huge in South America. That's
5:25
that's my guess. We'll look it up afterward,
5:28
I guess Rio. And so they were like, we're
5:30
gonna start our tor and Rio. Yeah. And it wasn't
5:32
just that that one place, but it was
5:34
basically a tour that was built
5:37
on the areas where the music was most pirated.
5:39
It was a Stroker genius, but they
5:41
couldn't have done it without harvesting
5:44
the deep web because bit
5:46
torrent sites. When you search bit torrent,
5:49
it doesn't the average search engine
5:52
doesn't respond with a list
5:54
of bit torrent activity. It'll
5:56
just send you to a bit torrent site, which
5:59
means that those pages is of bit touring activity,
6:01
which are web pages, and they do exist.
6:04
They're part of what's called the deep web. That's
6:06
right, the surface web as we know
6:09
it, and search engines that we all use
6:11
like Google and being supposedly
6:14
only have access to about point zero
6:16
three percent of what is truly on
6:19
the world wide Web. It's like
6:23
scary and weird and thrilling all at
6:25
the same time. Point three
6:28
And anything else that's
6:30
buried is the deep web. And it's
6:32
not necessarily the
6:36
deep web is not is not when you're purposely
6:38
trying to hide things. It just may not be cataloged
6:40
and index may
6:43
a password. Sure, maybe one
6:45
of those timed sites that uh
6:47
don't let you access date
6:50
after a certain amount of time, could be anything
6:52
with a captution involved, anything
6:54
that's not hyperlinked. Uh, there's
6:56
lots of reasons that something could find it is all buried
6:59
in the deep web. And and you
7:01
make a good point to separate
7:03
the deep web and the dark webs. Let me give you an example
7:05
of deep web aside from those bit
7:07
torrent sites. Um, there's this company
7:10
called bright Planet and they had this price they provide
7:12
deep web harvesting, and they had this primer on
7:15
you know, what is the deep web. One of the examples
7:17
they used was if you look up government
7:19
grants on a traditional search engine,
7:22
it will probably provide you with
7:24
www. Dot grants dot gov as
7:27
one of the first returns right straight up. Um,
7:30
when you go onto grants dot CoV, you can then
7:32
search and find pages of
7:35
all these different government grants. You can search by
7:37
keyword, you can browse, but those pages
7:39
aren't going to come up on your normal Google
7:41
search. You have to go to the site,
7:44
which means that those pages of the actual grants
7:46
are part of the deep web. Yeah,
7:48
your bank account, you're checking account
7:51
online, if you have mobile banking
7:53
or online banking, it has a web page
7:55
all to its own right now. And if
7:59
I searched Chuck Bryant's
8:01
checking account, it would not come back.
8:04
I would not get that because it's behind a password.
8:07
It's a it's a website page. It's
8:09
a web page, but it's password
8:12
encrypted. Therefore it's part of the deep
8:14
web. Twitter until it index
8:16
tweets used to be you
8:18
couldn't search tweets individual
8:20
tweets. Now you can, so that
8:23
made them formerly a part of the deep web.
8:25
Actual tweets or every
8:28
company on the planet has some sort
8:30
of internal employee pages
8:33
like internal dot discovery
8:35
that only we can access and
8:38
you can't Google search any of that stuff, right,
8:40
or somebody could conceivably access
8:42
it. Maybe it depends
8:44
on the page, but you have to know the exact
8:47
u r L. So the idea is,
8:49
if it's blind, if
8:51
if search engines are blind to it, it's
8:53
part of the deep web. If search engines
8:55
can index it and bring it
8:57
back as a return results search
9:00
results, Um, it's part of
9:02
the surface web. Yeah, because that's all the search
9:04
engine is doing. They are We
9:07
might should do a full podcast on search engines at
9:09
some point, but the general thing is
9:11
that there is an index of data, and
9:14
they use spiders or crawlers
9:16
because it is a web, to crawl
9:19
around and locate domain names and hyperlinks
9:22
and basically index all
9:24
that in what they think will be most
9:26
helpful to what you're looking for. Right,
9:29
So chuck Brian's bank account. Yeah, there
9:31
are some web pages out there that contain
9:33
information related to that keyword
9:36
search. Yes, so a search
9:38
engine will keep an index with
9:40
that keyword search with the u
9:42
r L s, the locations, the page
9:45
content, some of the page content, the meta
9:47
tags are the metadata,
9:49
and other very brief
9:52
sketch information about those pages
9:55
associated with the keyword for an index,
9:57
which means that when you type in Chuck
9:59
Brian, it's bank account. You got a quit saying
10:01
that. Sorry, I thought about it as
10:03
I was saying it that last time. But when you type
10:06
in um Birds of Paradise
10:09
bank account, bank account, um,
10:12
it will the search engine goes and
10:14
accesses the index. It
10:16
doesn't have to go all the way across every page
10:18
on the web that it can find. It just goes
10:21
to its indices, and that's
10:23
how search results are returned so quickly.
10:25
It's not going across the internet. It's already
10:27
got the spider crawlers, the
10:29
bots doing that constantly.
10:32
The search engine is just going to the index
10:34
is that the bots have created from their searches.
10:37
Yeah, and it is super shallow. I mean, we said
10:39
point zero three percent. We do. We do
10:41
our whole job as researching online
10:44
mainly, and we run into this all
10:46
the time where you feel
10:48
like you're getting a very slim portion of
10:50
what you're trying to find out because
10:52
so many of the best uh, medical
10:55
journals and things like this don't
10:58
just pop up as you know, it's
11:00
more likely to be some headline
11:02
from CNN dot com and not like
11:04
a Harvard Medical Journal paper that could
11:06
really help you out. Yeah, And I mean, like you can
11:08
get deeper and deeper with
11:11
your keyword skills and your search
11:13
skills, but for
11:16
the most part that Yeah, the first returns of
11:18
first results, depending on what you search for,
11:20
are going to be, like you said, superficial.
11:23
Yeah. But even if you're super a super
11:25
sleuth, a Google master
11:27
like we all think we are, I mean, how can
11:29
how much can that be bumping it up point one?
11:32
Yeah, Well, a lot of the problem, to the chuck
11:34
is the so much of science
11:36
is behind a paywall. Yeah, yeah, really
11:39
really really expensive paywalls. To um,
11:42
which is like, here's the first eight lines of this awesome
11:44
medical research paper exactly if you want it,
11:47
give us. Yeah,
11:49
which is a problem in and of itself, not necessarily
11:51
related to this, but with current
11:54
search engine technology, you have, like
11:56
you said, a superficial result
11:59
from a core um
12:01
on the other end of the spectrum, And this is kind
12:03
of what search instances are dealing with now, Um,
12:06
the deeper you go into the deep web. Again,
12:09
the surface web is point zero three
12:11
percent of all of the web pages on the entire
12:13
Internet, So the further you go into
12:15
it, the more data you have, and
12:18
you eventually can run into the problem of what's
12:20
called big data, which not
12:22
capitalized B or D, which refers
12:24
to like companies like Google and and that
12:27
that can dig
12:29
and harvest and maintain a
12:31
large amount of data. It's just it's basically
12:33
data that's so much and so unwieldy
12:37
you can't even uh process
12:39
and search it. It's like not even helpful. It's
12:41
yeah, it's like a really bad Internet search.
12:44
Yeah. Um, so the the
12:46
the current state of
12:48
search engine design
12:51
or creation is balancing
12:53
that figuring out how to get less
12:56
superficial without running
12:58
into the big data problem of of
13:00
incoherent data due
13:02
to just massive amounts of returns.
13:05
And you might think that these search
13:07
engines do a great job because I can always find
13:09
out what I need, But you don't know what you're missing,
13:12
you know, right, So it's
13:14
it's sort of not even
13:16
correct to say that I always find out what I need
13:18
because you may even know you need it because
13:20
it's hidden. That's true, And I mean you're you're
13:22
missing quite a bit. Okay.
13:46
There's apparently fifty million
13:49
registered domains on
13:51
the Internet. Yeah, and that's I looked
13:53
at like just in two thousand twelve. I think
13:55
there're only like two hundred and fifty or something.
13:57
I mean, it seems like it's doubled in the last couple
14:00
years. Right, So there's five million domains,
14:02
for example, a lot of more garbage, yes, but
14:05
how stuff Works dot Com is one domain,
14:08
And I asked Tracy Wilson, who's the site
14:10
director and runs stuff you missed
14:12
in history class. It's one of the co hosts.
14:15
How many pages there are how stuff Works?
14:18
She said roughly at least,
14:21
so one domain out of five fifty million
14:23
has fifty pages itself.
14:26
Right, so you kind of get an idea of the scope.
14:29
Deep web is anywhere from
14:31
four hundred to five hundred times
14:33
bigger than the surface web. And
14:36
like you said, you don't know what you're missing
14:38
because you don't know what's out there because your search
14:40
returns aren't bringing you back
14:42
anything. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of important stuff
14:45
out there. We talked about medical papers. Um, apparently
14:47
there's engineering databases, financial
14:50
financial information, a lot of things
14:52
that could really help research.
14:55
Uh, but you just can't find it, right. Um.
14:58
Unpublished blog posts or just
15:00
basically anything that a person creates on
15:03
the Internet. Yeah, Um,
15:06
is if a page is created, it's
15:09
part of the deep web. Yeah,
15:11
unless you take this stuff down, it's living there forever, just
15:13
gathering dust exactly. So. Um,
15:16
and it's not just necessarily engineering
15:18
databases or medical information.
15:21
Um. There's also a lot of shady
15:23
stuff too. The dark web. That's
15:26
the that's the dark web. Yeah, that is the dark
15:28
web. Is when is um the sites
15:31
intentionally uh
15:33
reroute you. Well, we'll get to how
15:35
they do it, but basically it's a it's
15:37
an intentional anonymity.
15:40
Um, it's not. Oh, it just happens to be buried
15:42
on the deep web because it's not index it's it is purposely
15:44
hidden from the surface
15:46
web, so people can't track
15:49
the person searching for something
15:52
or the the end uh
15:55
website. I guess like
15:57
those are all just private essentially,
15:59
right, and privacy advocates are way
16:01
into it. You're not necessarily a
16:03
child pornographer, although there
16:05
is a lot of that kind of stuff on the dark web.
16:08
Um, there's also a lot of good that happens on the
16:10
dark web. Yeah. The the anonymity
16:13
and privacy and the desire for it isn't
16:15
in and of itself proof of wrongdoing, of course,
16:17
not no, which is frequently it's frequently
16:20
pointed out as that but incorrectly. Yeah,
16:22
I like, I don't want the n s A. And my business people like,
16:24
well, what are you doing right? Exactly nothing.
16:26
Yeah, I just don't want them in my business precisely.
16:29
Yeah. Um, that's an answer. That's
16:31
good enough. That answer is good enough. And
16:34
for a lot of people, um, they say,
16:36
well, then I need to go to the dark web to maintain
16:38
anonymity, um or higher
16:41
hit man right to kill Chuck
16:43
Bryant. That you could do. That's crazy,
16:46
Um, you could do. There
16:48
was a site for a while. Um, I don't know if
16:50
you've heard of it or not. It's called the Silk Road, Yeah,
16:53
which got shut down, and I teach
16:55
Chuck, I know you've heard of it. It's like the most famous
16:58
dark website of all time. The
17:00
the Feds busted um ross
17:02
Albrick, who may or may not be dread
17:04
Pirate Roberts, which was the online
17:07
name that they said he's the guy running this,
17:09
and he is now saying, actually that's not
17:12
me. Um, but all those bitcoins
17:14
are mine, so you can't
17:16
seize those bitcoins. And there
17:18
it's in courts now they're trying to determine whether
17:21
or not it's it counts as something
17:23
that you can seize as an asset
17:26
from a criminal. And they're saying that this is literally
17:28
a case that no court has ever heard before.
17:31
Yeah, they they it's never been
17:34
questioned whether you could seize cryptocurrency.
17:37
Yeah, and you should listen to our podcast on bitcoins
17:39
by the way, from not too many months ago.
17:42
But it's essentially just yeah, encrypted digital
17:45
currency. And they have a really really fascinating,
17:48
circumstantial case against a
17:50
brick Um, not just for operating
17:53
the Silk Road site.
17:55
Yeah. Um, that's where you could buy drugs
17:57
and things, by the way, right, which being the operator
17:59
of that in and of itself shouldn't be a crime. I'm
18:01
sure that they would have prosecuted him for that
18:04
if they'd been able to get their hands on him for
18:06
just that. But apparently they
18:08
also have him for at least two
18:11
hired contract killings. One
18:14
he he um,
18:16
I guess hired an undercover
18:19
cop to do it, and the guy
18:21
went to the person who he was taking
18:24
the hit out on and said, this guy's
18:26
trying to kill you. I need you to cooperate, and
18:29
I'm going to take pictures of you dead and
18:31
send them to this guy, and Old Brick apparently
18:34
gave him like forty grand up front, another forty
18:37
after he saw the photos. So like in
18:39
bitcoins, No, I think in
18:41
cash, although no, it would have been in bitcoins.
18:44
You're right, yeah, yeah, so who knows?
18:46
It could have been two bitcoins at the time or five
18:48
thousand. Well, silk Row two point oh
18:51
launched in November? Is it out? Now? It's
18:53
out? And um there are other copycatters,
18:56
like the black Market reloaded and
18:59
which that one down for a little while after silk Road
19:01
went down, but then it went back up. I think, yeah,
19:03
Like, I don't know, man, I hate to say you shouldn't
19:05
try and fight crime, but you're
19:08
not going to stop the stuff when one, you
19:10
know, you cut off the head of one and another grows right
19:12
out of it in its place. You know, it's
19:15
true if the structure
19:18
that's allowing for the anonymity can remain
19:21
intact, which is the dark web,
19:24
right, But it's not just the dark
19:26
web, it's like how you traverse the dark
19:28
web, like using tour Yeah, I guess we
19:30
haven't explained. Um, the Onion Router
19:32
t o R is what it's called and it is
19:35
software that you use to access the
19:37
deep web and the dark web if
19:39
you choose to UM and it
19:42
searches for these anonymous
19:44
sites for you, like a search engine, but instead
19:46
of dot com or dot org or
19:48
dot net, they end in dot onion the
19:51
idea and onion has many layers and
19:54
UM that's
19:56
that's how you access it through tour. You have to buy it and install
19:58
it on your computer. It makes it for free.
20:02
Yeah, Firefox had UM something
20:04
that it was basically a tour bundle.
20:06
It was the most popular one and you could download
20:08
it for free. But it's not
20:10
a web browser itself. It's like an add on to
20:12
a web browser that allows anonymity.
20:15
And it does two things. One, it
20:17
bounces your trail all over the world
20:20
from server to server, so it makes you and
20:22
your activity extraordinarily difficult
20:24
to track. It's not just like this computer went
20:26
to this site, right, It's like that's
20:29
that whole Onion thing. There's so many layers. It's
20:31
like we can't we don't know who this is or where they're,
20:33
where they are, what they're doing, or anything like that.
20:35
We just know right now that this particular
20:38
person happens to be it. There's a user on
20:40
silk Road, but we don't know who it is or
20:42
anything. You can't track them because they're using
20:44
Tour. The other thing is you can't get
20:46
into dot onion domain sites,
20:49
dark websites unless you're using
20:51
tour, Like they won't let you in unless you're
20:53
an anonymous user. Um So,
20:55
tour has this kind of twofold thing,
20:58
but there was recently a breach in it and it turned
21:00
out the FBI was using malware
21:03
to break through the anonymity of tour users.
21:06
And yeah, and found out a lot of people on
21:08
some sites that are that were hosted by
21:10
something called Freedom Hosting, which
21:12
apparently had a horrible reputation
21:15
for being the repository on
21:17
the web, on the dark web for child pornography
21:20
and knowingly like basically just not doing anything
21:23
about it. Um So,
21:25
the FBI had a They
21:29
hacked the Freedom Hosting
21:31
servers and inserted this
21:33
malware. So if you went to a Freedom
21:35
Hosting site, any of them, not just necessarily
21:38
a child pornography but any site hosted by Freedom
21:40
Hosting, which is like say go Daddy for
21:42
the dark web, um
21:45
you would get this malware package
21:48
that exploited a key hole
21:50
in Firefox's tore bundle.
21:53
It went into your computer, said hey, give
21:55
me your mac address, which
21:57
is basically like your computer hardware,
22:00
like serial numbers your
22:03
computers and your computers alans
22:05
tracking number, and then also
22:07
tell me where the computer is, and
22:09
it sent it back to a server, a mystery
22:12
server in McLean, Virginia. And
22:14
finally, after like a month, FBI was like, yeah,
22:16
that was us. We got We have everybody who went on
22:18
that site's name and address
22:21
and everything on them. So that's been a huge
22:23
ripple and Firefox fixed this loophole.
22:26
But it's a huge ripple through you know, the
22:28
dark web, deep web community
22:31
saying like whoa, whoa. We were anonymous
22:33
before, but you know now it's
22:36
it's been shown definitively that the
22:38
FEDS can find out
22:40
who we are. So the anonymity is
22:42
reduced, if not taken away, which
22:45
defeats the whole purpose. Yeah, so if you don't
22:47
have that, then you can keep lopping the heads
22:49
off of these things, and they're not going to grow back because people
22:51
are afraid. People will be afraid because
22:54
they won't feel like they're anonymous any longer. Well
22:57
tour has a sort of an
22:59
ironic background, which we will get
23:01
to right after this message break. All
23:19
right, so we're back and we left you with
23:21
the the nugget that tour has an interesting
23:23
background, and the background
23:25
of tours Actually, the US Naval
23:27
Research Laboratory in two thousand three launched
23:30
this program for political
23:32
dissidents and whistleblowers so they
23:34
can get their message out without fear
23:36
of reprisal. Right, and this is still
23:38
a use of tour Like the New York Times,
23:40
Wiki Leaks, some other news agencies
23:43
have um tour
23:45
sites that if you want to
23:47
go and contact the New York Times or
23:49
Wiki Leaks anonymously, like
23:52
you can go to their tour their onion
23:54
site and UM upload
23:56
documents or say hey, I have
23:58
some information I want to share, right, and you
24:00
can do it anonymously. So the government,
24:02
though, is basically law enforcements trying to track
24:04
down criminals using the
24:07
software that the government created to begin with.
24:09
So it's an interesting loop. Um.
24:12
But like we said, it's not all badness.
24:15
Um. If you live
24:17
in a country where bad things are
24:19
going on and you don't feel safe getting on
24:22
the regular web as a political dissident,
24:24
you can do so on the dark web. It offers
24:27
a virtual meeting place for
24:30
sometimes people are trying to, you know, combat
24:33
these oppressive regimes in their
24:35
countries, and they can't just hop
24:37
on Facebook and organize a meeting
24:40
because they'll get smacked down. Right, if
24:42
you're a person who values privacy
24:44
for whatever reason or no reason at all. UM,
24:48
the deep web and the dark web offer
24:50
file sharing services. Email
24:54
is a big one too, Like, I know, I
24:56
can't remember the name of the one Edwards Snowden has
24:58
been using, but I think it got shut down, like
25:00
just the whole company shutdown. Sorry, you're out
25:02
of business now because you're helping Edward Snowden.
25:05
UM. But there are other email
25:07
UM email services
25:11
basically everything you have on the web. If
25:14
you want to do it anonymously, you have to
25:16
go to a company that operates on the dark
25:18
web, right, that uses tour to
25:20
to route its information or your information.
25:23
Yeah. The University of Luxembourg
25:27
did a study where they tried to rank the most commonly
25:29
accessed stuff on the dark
25:31
Web, and sadly
25:33
what they did find a lot of things like child pornography.
25:36
There were also a lot of uh
25:39
sites and chat rooms for human rights
25:41
and freedom of information and
25:43
just people that don't want to
25:46
type in a search for, uh,
25:50
how to grow marijuana? And then the next
25:52
time they go to their Gmail account, they're
25:54
a bunch of ads for grow lights and
25:57
you're going, huh, how that happened? Well
26:00
to happen because you're searching
26:02
the surface web with an IP that
26:04
can be traced back to you, and not
26:06
even even illegal activities like that. You
26:08
know, you want to research a fitbit
26:11
bracelet and then you
26:13
go and they say, hey, Chuck,
26:15
are you fat? You want to lose weight? WHI
26:18
else? You want to fitbit? Alrightaddy,
26:21
why would you want to fit? And yeah, you're definitely
26:23
creepy. You know, there's the big brother effect.
26:26
I think everyone feels it. Uh.
26:28
There's all there, the existence of the deep web,
26:30
not necessarily the dark web, but just the deep web,
26:33
all of those pages of information
26:35
that are out there. Some companies have figured out
26:37
how to exploit it, or the fact
26:39
that search engines, normal
26:42
search engines, aren't doing a good job of
26:44
looking into the deep web. There that company, bright
26:46
Planet I mentioned they have a
26:48
deep Web Harvester, which
26:50
is basically a proprietary search
26:52
engine algorithm that goes into
26:55
websites and gets
26:57
everything like, it's not that doesn't them
27:00
an index. It grabs every bit of text
27:02
off of every site associated with
27:05
a u r L. That sounds like big data. It
27:08
is, but they're doing it for companies
27:10
like big pharma, big
27:12
government and saying like,
27:15
oh, you want to know what your competitors up to, Well,
27:17
here's every letter of
27:19
every word of every strip of text
27:22
on your competitor's website, including all internal
27:25
stuff everything. Please
27:28
give us ten million dollars for that search. Um.
27:31
There's also this site called Vocative which
27:34
uses something like bright Planets deep
27:36
web harvesting, but it does it for journalism
27:39
purposes, and it's basically, rather
27:41
than searching using Google you
27:43
or I would for a story idea, they're
27:45
um searching using a deep web
27:48
harvester to find all this other information
27:50
that we wouldn't be able to find because we don't
27:52
know how to search the deep web and writing
27:54
stories like that. And there's some pretty interesting stuff
27:56
that that sites put together already. Well,
27:59
when you think about if you're only getting if you think the
28:01
Internet is cool and you're only getting
28:03
point three of it, yeah, yeah,
28:06
not bad. And you know this is the webs the
28:08
surface web is getting deeper. The deep
28:10
web is getting deeper. Search engines
28:12
are searching deeper. It's it's all like and
28:15
they're trying to anonymize more
28:19
effectively. So it's it's like this cyber
28:21
war is going on. Oh, yes, you know,
28:24
that was another good one we did. What
28:26
do we do cyber war one? On cyber war you? Yeah,
28:28
I knew I've heard that before, so
28:31
there you go. I would have to say that this is one
28:33
of those episodes
28:35
where we did it, but
28:37
it is not done. No, no, Sometimes
28:40
we do them and it's like, that's it. There's nothing
28:42
more to say about this topic. Yeah, I'm interested
28:44
to see what happens with uh with old
28:46
Brick for sure. That's that's gonna be a
28:49
monument landmark case. You know. Uh.
28:51
If you want to know more about the deep web, you
28:53
can type deep web into
28:55
the search engine and how stuff works. It'll
28:58
bring back superficial results only how
29:00
stuff works stuff. But it's
29:02
pretty good, so you'll be happy. And
29:05
since I said search bar, that means it's
29:07
time for listener maw All
29:10
right, Josh, I'm gonna call this uh birthday
29:12
shout out that we rarely do. Okay,
29:15
hey, guys, I'm a longtime listener, shamelessly
29:17
writing to ask for a huge favor. Here's
29:19
the sitch. I first became aware of your
29:21
podcast with my last girlfriend, Natalie.
29:24
David introduced me to it when
29:26
we started dating, and i've heard it. Thank for getting me hooked,
29:29
as we spent a lot of time listening to your show and learning
29:31
together. As huge supporters of your podcast,
29:33
we were compelled last year to make the trip up from
29:35
Virginia to New York when you were putting on your
29:37
trivia night. And Natalie is the
29:39
one who gave us the mics on pants
29:41
off T shirts and David
29:44
her boyfriend. They were super cool, super nice.
29:46
They sat at the table right near us, so
29:49
I, uh, you know, got to know him a little bit. And
29:52
um, he says. Anyhow,
29:54
here's where the favor comes in. She moved to Shanghai,
29:57
China to teach and she's
29:59
teaching little kids English, and
30:01
sadly they you know, separated when
30:03
she moved over there, which
30:06
to me are always like the saddest breakups,
30:10
right like, there's nothing wrong to
30:12
China. So they just thought it was probably
30:15
the thing to do, but they, um, because
30:17
I inquired back to David emailed him about this, and it's
30:19
like, oh no, you guys broke up and said, yeah,
30:21
but we still really support each other and care about each other,
30:23
and hopefully our pass across again one day.
30:26
So anyway, Natalie David is in China,
30:28
and because of this distance, I was at a loss when
30:30
considering what to get her. He made a
30:32
donation to Cooperative for Education
30:35
in her name. And I know you guys like to read
30:37
those names of people who contribute, but in this case,
30:39
I was hoping you would just do a little something more special
30:42
by wishing her happy birthday. So on
30:44
January, which I think should be very
30:46
soon, Natalie, Happy birthday. Yeah,
30:48
happy birthday. We remember you. I wear that shirt all
30:50
the time. My wife thinks it's funny. And
30:53
uh, I hope you're doing well in China,
30:56
and don't give up on David just
30:59
because here in the stupid United States.
31:02
Her new Chinese boyfriends like what that guy?
31:05
She's like nothing, but wait, rewind
31:07
that. So um, anyway, I hope you're doing well over
31:09
there in China, and thanks again for all the support, and
31:12
I hope you guys, I hope your paths across again
31:14
one day. That it was very nice that is from David Austin
31:16
Bury. If you have a
31:19
special request for Chucker,
31:21
Me or US, you can tweet
31:24
to us at s y s K podcast.
31:26
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff
31:28
you Should Know, and if you want to send an email
31:31
to Chuck, Jerry and Me, you
31:33
can address it to Stuff podcast
31:35
at how stuff works dot com.
31:40
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's
31:42
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my
31:44
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31:46
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