Much like old age snuck up on me, the digital Internet has taken over the world before I knew what was happening. E-mail, entertainment in the form of videos and games, education through virtual universities, research through online reference works, music, news, and shopping for any thing you might want. Oh yeah, I almost forgot social networks. Web sites have all the existing information in the world! There is much good that has resulted from the Internet but there is also a dark side.
Fifteen years ago Ian Clarke, an Irish teenager with a flair for inventions, created a revolutionary new way for people to use the Internet with complete anonymity. By downloading Clarke’s software, anyone can use the Internet without detection. It is called Freenet and can be installed with minimal computer skills in a couple of minutes. Needless to say, it is used for all kinds of nefarious purposes such as bomb making instructions for terrorist and child pornography. “The Darkweb” is the fastest growing part of the Internet and is 400 times the size of the commonly defined www. Experts say that Google is bringing to the surface a very small fraction of “The deep web”. Law enforcement and government agencies have been trying to crack it and have had some success.
Professor Juliana Freire of the University of Utah, who is leading a deep web search project called Deep Peep, says, “It’s not feasible to index the whole deep web because of sheer scale. There is just too much data”. The Internet continues to expand in unpredictable and messy surges. I wonder where we go from here? And I wonder if we really want to go there.
