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Comment by jrcii | Hacker News Reader

The author appears to believe that "Tor is the devil" because "4,000-5,000 hidden services are running at any given time. Secondly, the content served by these sites is almost universally illegal or immoral (by my definition anyway). A conservative estimate would be maybe 1 out of 200 or so hidden service websites contain content I would deem worthy of the protection an anonymous network provides. Sites featuring free speech dumps or libraries of hard-to-find underground literature are few and far between on the Dark Web."

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Except that the approach the author used is in my opinion completely flawed.

The author states he started from 1 (one) seed URL, and then crawled the sites, visiting links. But that's not valid, as you'd only ever come across a possible fraction of what exists.

To be able to make any authoritative claim, he would need to scan the entire IP-space, like an actual search engine would.

I'm not condoning pedophelia or anything like it, but I think it's naive to take a simple approach and then make authoritative claims about the entirety of the TOR network.

But I also think that there were flagrant abuses that could be pursued under the CFAA. Just because something isn't "per se" malware doesn't mean it wouldn't fit the legal definition.

You used to be able to set yourself up as an HSDir server, and sniff the outgoing hidden service descriptors, but the author has clearly not done this given his level of technical expertise and domain knowledge.

>scan the entire IP-space, like an actual search engine would

Which search engines do that? I was under the impression crawling was the way "actual" search engines worked.

The author, from his comment section:

geekslop says: July 7, 2015 at 9:59 pm

Appreciate the comment RedditorThrowaway. My parenthetical headline that “tor is the devil” was facetious and apparently a failed attempt at dry humor.

Are knives the devil, because knives can be used to kill people?

Their argument doesn't appear to be "Tor is bad because it can be used for bad stuff" but "Tor is bad because it is overwhelmingly used for bad stuff today". That seems to be a meaningful distinction to me.

(I don't really care about the argument/premise itself, I just find your sloppy attempt at a counter-argument to be weak)

Since we're talking about the devil: The biblical standard for acceptable collateral damage is kind of interesting. God in the old testament said he wouldn't smite a city if there are at least 10 righteous people in it. /theologynerd

http://biblia.com/bible/nkjv/Gen%2018.20%E2%80%9333

There's a much different notion of God in that passage (and much of the Old Testament) than most have now. The number 10 is arrived at after Abraham persuades God to lower the standard from 50. There are at least a few stories where mortals persuade God to change his/her mind.

Of course, him being God he would've probably known the exact amount of righteous individuals in the city. Not to mention being able to define 'righteous'.

That said, I've always been very fond of the passages in the OT where individuals managed to 'change' God's mind, as well as the general human emotions he appeared to have.

“he”?

you're right! its clearly shown in the movie Dogma that God is a she!

Actually, in that movie God is genderless. It just appears as a woman in that one scene.

What was the population of a median city at the time? :P

No, it argues that the Tor hidden services that the author knew about were overwhelmingly used for bad stuff. This is problematic in two ways: the methodology of gathering addresses was pretty suspect, and it glosses over the fact that the VAST majority of Tor traffic is headed to the open Internet, not a hidden service.

If we are doing the whole argument by shoddy analogy thing, then I'll give you:

The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.

-- Homer, The Odyssey[1]

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/368547-the-blade-itself-inci...

If you're looking for a shoddy metaphor you should probably use swords instead, because the legitimate uses of knives vastly outnumber the killing-people uses of them but swords have it the other way around.

During the time period that Homer lived, they were also used as forks.

Honest question - what examples are there of literature that can only be obtained on the dark web? Perhaps I'm closeted but I'm unaware of such books.

For example right now I'm reading a sci-fi book that remains unpublished in Russia, but it's available in the west. Or the other day had a browse of "steal this book".

Genuinely curious.

The vast majority of illegal or immoral content is not encrypted in any way.

Giving the Finger to Vasha: Child Pornography on the Internet

http://www.warplife.com/jonathan-swift/books/software-proble...

A straightford way to find many of those who profit from its distribution would be to use a bot to locate forum threads that go on for hundreds of pages.

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