On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 2:19 PM Yuri <yuri@rawbw.com> wrote:

On 07/06/2016 12:32, grarpamp wrote:

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https://motherboard.vice.com/read/these-maps-show-what-the-dark-web-looks-li...

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What does the dark web actually look like? Well, new research maps out the relationships between a load of Tor hidden services, and shows that many dark web sites, rather than being isolated entities, are perhaps more intimately intertwined than commonly thought.

The article says "this lack of diversity in hosting infrastructure is concerning—it places the future of a large proportion of Onion Services in the hands of a limited number of groups". The future web might even have no hosting, because the new technologies like ZeroNet don't require hosting at all. I personally believe that distributed architecture is superior to centralized architecture, and is a way to go.

Agree with the need for decentralized architectures, though ZeroNet is only part of the way there. It's fine for small, static sites, blogs, and small chat rooms, but the mail and ID services are each controlled by one individual, and all their data are flooded to all users. We really need a platform on which to build decentralized apps, more like Freenet or Gnunet. As for centralization in Tor, it wasn't clear to me from the article that the related sites were actually legit as opposed to, say, clones. Since they found sites that only linked among themselves, they must have just been mass scanning onion addresses. But what we really care about are the sites a lot of people actually use. For such a purpose, finding and ranking the sites by spidering from a few well-known seed sites would be more useful than enumerating all the hidden sites. They talked about a bunch of sites being hosted by the same hosting provider, but given that they had identical SSH host keys I'd guess they were all actually the same machine, since it would be criminally negligent for a hosting provider to use the same key across all its machines.