A couple of days ago, I installed the one and only Tor Browser, with the intention that if in the near future the internet in Romania (by extension the European Union) becomes locked down like it is now in the United Kingdom, I would still have some freedom of speech.
Little did I know that I would go down a rabbit hole so deep, that it became a pleasure to explore it. Now just to defend myself, in the time I was on the Tor network, I did not explore illegal content and I don't intend to use the Tor network to cause harm. This is only out of curiosity and ambiguity.
If you want to know what the Tor network is and how it works, check out this Wikipedia article right here. But if you're too lazy to do so, here's a brief explanation from me:
The Tor network is a network composed of millions of computers "talking" to each other, creating a separate network independent from the internet we all use on a daily basis. On the Tor network websites are not accessible using a normal TLD (top-level domain) like .com, .org, etc. Instead, websites are accessed using a .onion domain, this domain is composed of a hash generated by the server. This makes the Tor network private and inaccessible using a normal browser.
Now that that's out of the way, I'll start documenting my findings! Because the "dark web" is speared, I can't use Google or any other search engine to search stuff, so I use Torch instead.
My first finding was by searching for a term which most people consider controversial... "furry". Upon searching for it, lots of websites popped up. After scrolling a bit, I've found a website titled "S-Config" (which has a normal counterpart as well) is a blog run by someone called S (as I understand). The website has a very "emo" look, like the ones from the 2000s (no offence to it). And in general, it seems like a very interesting website nonetheless!
After visiting S-Config, I searched the term "Google street view", which brought me to a transcript of a 2016 podcast called "Security Now!" and I'm gonna say it... HOLY YAP! Even I don't yap that much! Anyways, it was interesting seeing it and torturing ChatGPT into summarizing it!
The podcast talked about how Adobe Flash will die, and how a telemetry code was found in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2015. Other than that, they talked about data breaches, software bugs from big companies, how anyone can hack into a camera and watch you, etc. Now the interesting part was that they also talked about how this will become the norm in the future, and they were not wrong!
Flash is dead, telemetry is just everywhere, data breaches happen every week, software bugs are a daily occurrence, and Chinese cameras that connect to strange servers are popular now!
So yeah, these were the 2 things that caught my attention. I hope to find more stuff like this in the future, it really brings me back to the days when Flash games were a norm and exploring the internet wasn't a weird thing.
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