The addresses of sites on this network end in .onion. You can open sites only using a special browser or an extension for a regular browser.
The Tor network is readily used not only by civil activists and public organizations, but also by commercial companies and special services of different countries. Edward Snowden passed information about the PRISM intelligence program to The Washington Post and The Guardian via Tor. Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation offers to send information about abuses through this resource. A secret division of the British Government Communications Center uses Tor in its data protection infrastructure.
The number of hidden services of the Tor network can exceed 600,000 resources.
It has its own site directories and mail services, social networks and messengers, trading platforms and libraries, file hosting and torrent trackers. Many popular sites have their own “mirrors” on the Tor network: the Facebook social network, the WikiLeaks disclosure site, the independent search engine DuckDuckGo and many others.
Tor became known in many ways thanks to the scandalous story with the Silk Road trading platform, which offered to buy prohibited goods and services (including weapons, drugs, hiring killers). The annual turnover of this closed site reached $ 200 billion. 70% of sales were narcotic substances.
The digital currency bitcoin allows you to buy and sell anonymously in the darkweb. The main idea of this currency is decentralization. No one can interfere with the transaction, block the transaction or interfere with it. You only need to install a client program that will connect with other equally equal and self-sufficient programs. Naturally, this form of existence opens up wide opportunities for anonymous transactions. Including money laundering or terrorist financing. In Russia, the issue of the legality of bitcoins has not been settled, but the authorities are still leaning more towards banning cryptocurrencies.
If you want to learn more about the scandalous Silk Road project, as well as about bitcoins and politics inside the darkweb, you can recommend the 2015 film “Deep Web”. By the way, it is not available for purchase and download in Russia. But, ironically, the restriction can also be circumvented by means of anonymization.
