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The Research Pirates of the Dark Web

theatlantic.com

41–46 of 46 posts

Re: The Research Pirates of the Dark Web

#41
post #5

> the dark web, a part of the Internet often associated with drugs, weapons, and child porn. Indeed, due to journalists perpetuating that meme on and on again. Thanks for strengthening the bad image, Atlantic.

To be fair that is exactly how the Internet itself was treated by the media in the 90s.

Re: The Research Pirates of the Dark Web

#42

Has anyone successfully found something useful which they couldn't find elsewhere using this tool? I tried it on a few things yesterday and was disappointed.

Yes, I can read IEEE Annals of the History of Computer papers with it! Subscriptions are extremely expensive plus I despise the IEEE enough for previous conduct that I'd rather not pay them.

Re: The Research Pirates of the Dark Web

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, they do have a thriving market for PayPal accounts and money laundering. DEAR NSA: THE FACT THAT I RESEARCHED THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU GET TO KICK MY DOOR DOWN NOW. THANK YOU.

You are aware that the NSA doesn't kick down anyone's door, and that any SIGINT intercepts are accompanied with a message that they can't be used in criminal prosecution, right?

Well they don't kick down doors, but they have picked plenty of locks. You probably don't need to worry about the Special Collection Service [0] though, unless you live in some kind of communications facility. The NSA's crypto programs are well known, but one area that gets very little attention is the part of the agency full of military personnel on loan from their parent services. Those people don't spend their day analyzing cryptographic functions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Collection_Service

Re: The Research Pirates of the Dark Web

#44
post #37

I find the way TOR is used lacking. I really would like to have .Onion resolution across my whole system (in my case, I extensively use Linux). So, Here's a way to do just that: I use a significant amount of HiddenServices to communicate back and forth with my machines. My eventual goal was to be able to process data from different geographical areas and have them inserted into MQTT via Node-Red. Until now, it was al…

Thank you, an interesting approach.

Re: The Research Pirates of the Dark Web

#45

Why are the academics forced to publish their papers through these paywalls? Hosting a PDF on the university website seems cheeper than going through these publishers. Are these university imposed rules? Are they forced to go through these publishers if they want their paper peer reviewed and published in journals?

To put it short: Academic "weight" works much like google - the more citations paper has, the higher it is ranked. Of course a citation from local university journal (probably every university has at least one) is worth much, much less than a citation from Nature. It is calculated from Impact Factor, that is in turn calculated from number of citations. Sort of a closed loop. This would not be too much of a problem if…

yep, "Impact Factor" (IF) is the term, and (just to clarify) it encourages but does not force. there are open access journals like PLoS w/ significant IF, albeit not comparable to Nature.

since the link below was written, PLoS has become not only open access for articles but also open access for the data those articles are based on. imo, open access to data (w/ privacy measures, of course, for human subjects) is of the same order of importance as access to articles.

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/06/20/the-rise-and-f...

Re: The Research Pirates of the Dark Web

#46
post #31
post #5

> the dark web, a part of the Internet often associated with drugs, weapons, and child porn. Indeed, due to journalists perpetuating that meme on and on again. Thanks for strengthening the bad image, Atlantic.

"The researchers, who have been studying and writing about encryption policy, sniffed around with a Tor browser and found 1,547 out of 5,205 total websites live on the dark web engaging in illegal activity." It is one of the most common ways for distributing those three things, so yes, that "meme" is correct. http://www.networkworld.com/article/3031661/internet/drugs-g...

So far there have been no signs of large scale arms or drug trafficking activity on these websites though.
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