Stikked
Hal Hodson is a technology reporter at New Scientist
Whether for privacy or profit, much of the internet is hidden away -
we reveal the places that Google won't take you
OVER the past two decades, we've created a whole new world that's
visible only through a screen. Visibility and transparency have long
been hallmarks of the online world. We're used to being able to see
anything posted on the web, and we're used to the idea that anything
we do there may be visible to anyone else.
That's not true though. To understand why, consider how you find
things online. It's tempting to think that anything anyone has ever
published can be magicked to your screen with the right keywords.
That's partly true - if Google or Bing has indexed it, and your
internet service provider (ISP) lets you go there, you'll find it.
But those "ifs" are bigger than they may seem. It turns out that an
even greater proportion of the online world is dark than of the
physical universe: it is estimated that just 0.03 per cent of the
web is searchable.
Like dark matter and dark energy, we know the dark web is out there,
but we can't see it directly. Entire uncharted realms lie beyond the
reach of the crawlers that tirelessly catalogue the web on behalf of
search giants: databases, internet relay chat records, and the raw
data behind research papers. Much of it is unsearchable, because
most people aren't searching for it. And if they do search for it,
and don't find it, they assume it's not there to be found. "There's
this underlying assumption that if it's not online it doesn't
exist," says Ken Varnum, a systems manager at the University of
Michigan library in Ann Arbor.
But it's not just obscurities that may be overlooked. Search engines
and online stores exist to make money, and to do so they make
constant, almost imperceptible suggestions about what you should be
looking at. In some ways, this is benign: online shops prefer to
direct you to products like those you've previously shown interest
in. But the same algorithms can steer you away from things you might
like to see. And then there are things the online giants insist you
see. For example, last year Google banned an ad blocker program from
its app store. What's visible and invisible online is not
necessarily up to you: commercial interests can dictate what's
allowed on your screen.
Legitimate businesses aren't the only players in the invisibility
game any more, though. Privacy enthusiasts have developed a variety
of services that let their users tap into the dark web. One such
service, Tor, covers your online tracks by blending your internet
traffic into data from many servers worldwide to make you
functionally invisible. It has notoriously been used by criminals,
allowing, for example, the Silk Road black market to flourish for
almost three years before the FBI took it down. But it wasn't
invented by those looking to break laws, nor is it their exclusive
domain: it's widely used by activists and others who are persecuted
or living under surveillance.
That latter epithet could be applied to an increasing number of us.
In the past year, we've learned that government agencies and
marketing firms are able to keep amazingly detailed records of our
online activities. This might be for the purposes of national
security; or it might be to sell us more stuff. The problem is that
most of the data collected this way is visible to those who collect
it - but not to us.
Fed up, in 2012 Caleb James DeLisle started Hyperboria, an
alternative to the normal web. Like Tor, it binds people together in
a network that severs the link between them and their IP addresses.
Its denizens have built analogues of Twitter and Facebook there,
allowing them to communicate and socialise without fear of snoopers.
But Hyperboria is hard work, requiring far more than just a browser
and an internet connection. You have to access your command prompt,
install something called the cjdns protocol, and find someone
willing to vouch for you and become the bridge that lets your
computer connect to Hyperboria. This may explain why the user
headcount still languishes in the hundreds. Other anonymous networks
are even less popular, although they're growing in the wake of
Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA surveillance.
All of these new darkling networks rely on the existing cables and
servers that make up the standard internet, where ISPs are free to
block traffic to them. To become credible alternatives, then, they
will need their own wires and switches to carry their traffic. This
is beginning to happen. Across the US, small groups of dedicated
hackers are building their own wireless networks to run Hyperboria
on. In Portland, Oregon, you can now send an email across town
without ever connecting to the wider internet.
But can these alternatives win over the path of least resistance?
Perhaps. "Expediency is a very powerful thing," says Varnum.
Technologies are being developed to make invisibility easier. The
Enigmabox, designed to run on any internet connection, automatically
encrypts its users' email. Users don't need to understand the EUR283
box; they just plug it into their router.
Two hundred people are now on the network, says Enigmabox founder
Claude Hohl, based in Switzerland. While Enigmabox doesn't yet talk
to the other independent networks - such as the Portland meshnet or
Hyperboria - they're working on it. "When every alternative network
connects to all the others, that's when you start to have a global
network," he says: a true alternative to the internet.
Once it gets big enough, this dark internet will no doubt attract
attention from the very forces that have driven people into its
depths. But DeLisle says Hyperboria won't be as quick to succumb to
centralised control as today's internet, "which requires central
authorities controlling it".
Much more than our surfing habits depends on the outcome of this
struggle. The online world is increasingly converging with the
physical world. Apps annotate the space around us, revealing places
to eat and people to meet. We can look into the past with apps that
overlay history on what we see; or the future. Through our screens,
we can see the flow of city traffic, or the positions of stars
behind a cloudy sky - and those screens may soon be perched on our
noses: before our very eyes.
Technology may soon let us see almost anything we can imagine.
Whether we will depends on whether we fulfil the decades-old promise
of the internet - to make the world more visible, not less so.
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