I don't even know anymore. If the 'Library' still exists, that was pretty neat. Had a lot of 'underground' PDFs and guides and so on, although like 75% were available on TPB or elsewhere anyway.
Most of the darknet markets that I thought were cool are gone. Hydra, Evolution, Bluesky, and obviously Silk Road. The only 'old' one still around is Agora. There's a huge list here you could check out:
https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetmarkets/wiki/superlist Not saying you should buy anything, but just browsing is neat.
Most of the older sites are long gone. The image/text hosting sites are gone. The 'social network' clones died long ago -- most popular was a Twitter clone, but it fell off the face of the Earth, seemingly. Everything interesting seems to have died off and not been replaced (the
FBI busting Freedom Hosting finished off hundreds of smaller sites entirely), although I haven't really kept up with some of the newer goings on.
The Hidden Wiki is still a good starting point. As long as you avoid the CP section(s) (seriously), it has a good list of current links. There's also
http://ahmia.fi/search/ which seems to work pretty well.
I almost guarantee you won't find anything interesting, though. If it's legal, even borderline/grey-area legal, it'll be somewhere on the 'normal' Internet anyway. Motherless/Heavy-R/*chans, TPB/$someTorrentSite, etc., have everything legal you'll expect to find on a Tor site.
I2P and
Freenet have some more interesting things peppered about. More fun, too, because Tor is too mainstream now anyway. :^)
(Edited 26 seconds later.)
@previous (Catherine !TGirlYJKXM)
The Browser Bundle is all you need, but make sure to enable NoScript (it's not enabled by default because it "breaks functionality", but it ought to be). Just because. And yes, expect .onion sites go down all the time. Plenty are down more than they're up. There are a few versions of the Hidden Wiki, btw, so try a few different links to the Hidden Wiki, and see if their content is at all different.
@583,450 (Catherine !TGirlYJKXM)
Recent events have forced me to write this. Please read and spread it everywhere on and off the Internet.
A short summary of the "Domain Name System" (DNS)
The Domain Name System is the part of the Internet which maps human-friendly addresses (such as
www.example.com) to the "scary" and/or difficult-to-remember "IP addresses" that are actually used "under the hood" (such as "1.2.3.4"). There are many technical details which we will skip here. The important thing to note is that for this to work, everyone must agree to use the same, global system. Otherwise, some Internet users would get a completely different Web site when they try to go to Google.com because it may be mapped to different IP addresses in different parts of the Internet. This would defeat the whole purpose of a global network. There are in fact alternative "DNS roots", but they are used by almost nobody.
ICANN is the organization in charge of all this. Previously, it was InterNIC (whose Web site is still used by ICANN for information and more). They have assigned operation of each "TLD" (Top-Level Domain), such as .com, to a specific company. In the case of .com, VeriSign (previously United States Department of Defense). These don't actually handle registrations, however, but have outsourced this to third-party, for-profit companies. This is where the problems begin.
What's so bad about this?
In order to register, transfer, modify or generally "keep" a .com domain name, you must use an accredited "registrar". An accredited .com "registrar" is simply any company from anywhere in the world that has paid a large amount of cash to ICANN. You need much more than half a million USD, ensuring that only large companies with a "maximum profits at any cost" attitude are able to get a license, making it impossible for "free speech" people to get to handle domains. (There are many companies that appear to be registrars but which are just useless middlemen (resellers) of "real" (accredited) registrars. These obviously depend entirely on their parent companies and are thus pointless.)
It is impossible to register/transfer/handle a domain "directly", regardless of the amount of money you are willing to pay. If you want to create a "private" registrar just for your own domains, you must found a company and then pay the same fee as every registrar has to. I'm not yet sure about whether or not you are required to offer registration to others, but considering how much it costs, you'd have to be a multi-millionaire to afford that kind of setup.
These companies want to maximize their profits, at any cost. One customer, assuming he only has one domain, gives the company a few bucks a year in income. How many hours of support/abuse department time does that pay for? 0.00001 hours? I'm sure that you understand my point. If people were to, say, bombard the company with abuse reports (fake or not) about a given domain, what do you think they will do? They will drop it. They have no interest whatsoever in wasting time looking up facts and setting up necessary filters to block further abuse reports once they have verified that the claims are inaccurate, writing internal notes as necessary. They want to do as little as possible. They want as little trouble as possible. Given the choice between dealing with lots of angry people on a continual basis and perhaps get bad PR for the company, and standing up to defend a perfectly legal but "controversial" domain, in my experience, every company does the same thing; they force you to "move" the domain (which only exists as an abstract database record in the Internet's root DNS servers with some minimal contact and nameserver data attached to it).
What happened to AnonTalk's .com?
The domain was registered at 2008-02-05 using GoDaddy, since I had been using them for years without any problems and because they are both big and cheap. After a number of months, they told me they had no choice but to force me to transfer it away. They removed the whois privacy service and gave me X hours to find a new registrar. Details can be found at the list of unserious fraud/scam companies and services.
From that point, I tried a number of registrars that looked like they would not touch the domain, each proving me wrong, often changing the nameservers to their "parked" ones, removing whois privacy immediately and so on. I soon stopped using whois privacy and used external DNS hosting (the actual Web server has always been hosted privately), making sure that the registrar only kept the database record live in the Internet's root DNS servers, which, in my mind, would eliminate or at least minimize the risk of getting it fiddled with. I was wrong.
Again and again, the same pattern was repeated. As soon as the domain was transferred to a new registrar, that company got flooded with fake abuse reports and they dropped the domain. When it finally came to EuroDNS, they proved to be the worst, most incompetent scumbags of them all and SET FOR DELETION and DENIED ALL ACCESS to it, IGNORING ALL E-MAILS for the entire "redemptionPeriod" and "pendingDelete" phases, until it was deleted and immediately re-registered by a malicious troll via a backorder service, who now redirects it to various illegal anti-AT troll pages. Not very surprisingly, the new registrar has so far not cooperated.
During this whole process, ICANN and VeriSign have completely refused to help, consistently, claiming that they "can't do anything" (which is so obviously complete bullshit that having to type it out feels like an absurd waste of time). Years of hard work including link building, SEO, bookmarks and branding, all down the drain. It was registered until 2018 (thus many years from expiring) and I never triggered or gave consent to any kind of deletion. The domain has been illegally stolen and nobody can doubt for one second that the ICANN rules (and in fact their whole role as an "authority") have been violated to such a degree, with them exhibiting a complete indifference toward this serious issue, that they should immediately lose control over the Domain Name System.
We are now forced to use a different primary domain, a plain IP address and various proxy/mirror hostnames instead of the original domain/brand for this 100% legal board, which is absurd. Essentially the same thing happened with our TLS certificate, although that was a far less serious issue by comparison.
Why should I care?
You should care because this, while unlikely, could happen to you or a site that you like. If a few screenshots of perfectly legal discussions without any links can make an ICANN accredited registrar hi-jack and delete a domain and cause many weeks of total downtime (and eventually the permanent loss of it) while ignoring all e-mails, in direct violation of the licensing guidelines, in theory, in a fair world, Google.com, YouTube.com or Facebook.com would be gone very quickly, if all customers were treated equally. Those sites include huge amounts of "offensive" and downright illegal material (I could easily find tons within minutes). However, that will never happen, because certain sites are favored by these companies. The same ones who mess with AT's domain have and continue to provide domain services (including whois privacy, mind you) for actual illegal sites, ignoring me when I ask them about this. Hopefully, my point couldn't be made clearer.
You should care because the entire God damn Domain Name System is rotten and corrupt to the core. You should care because currently, criminals such as EuroDNS apparently get away with stealing and deleting 100% legal and valid domains of 100% legal Web sites. You should care because your domains aren't safe unless you operate your own registrar.
Is there anything that I can do to help?
Yes. Please share the address to this page everywhere on the Internet. Spread the word. Don't passively accept the disgusting censorship that goes on out there. Thank you for your support.
Currently, the recommended address is:
http://www.anontalk.se/The_rotten_and_corrupt_Domain_Name_System
You can spread this via AddThis.com (if their domain has not yet been stolen).
I'm watching videos about people exploring the Deep Web and one guy found this forum.
He's apparently really easily swayed because half of the sites seem like normal conspiracy shit you'd find on the regular web.
But then he came across a "Cruel Onion Forums" so I went to see if I can get the Tor link, but instead the forum was the first fucking result on Google and I didn't even need to load up Tor to view it. Why?
http://cruel2ijkqggizy5.onion.city/forum/
And this feels like I was browsing fucking AnonTalk.