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Most of us ordinary internet users browse within the confines of what our search engines and apps display. We rarely stray beyond the neatly groomed pastures of clicky buttons on our phones. What we don’t know is that there’s an entire secret internet beyond our wildest imaginations. What’s more, some people don’t use little clicky buttons to access it.
Some people refer to these parts of the internet as the deep web. That’s certainly one part of it, but the internet gets even deeper and webbier than that. These little-known sectors are dangerous; let this document be your guide to what lurks beyond.
The deep web
The deep web refers to any part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines. You can only get to these sites if you know what you’re looking for, and if you have the credentials to access them.
Anything could be happening on the deep web. Illuminati meetings, top-secret CIA messages, planning surprise birthday parties… even pornography.
But that’s not all.
The dark web
The dark web is like the deep web, but even darker. If you thought the deep web was somethin’, you’re in for a real reckoning here. The dark web isn’t just unindexed by search engines; it’s unindexed by search engines, and evil.
In fact, the dark web is so dark that you can’t even access it in a regular browser. You need to use a dark browser, like Tor. Tor is like Firefox, but it doesn’t even have a light mode. The only color scheme available is dark mode. Let that sink in.
On the dark web, people are known to send drugs, illicit memes, images that violate copyright law… even pornography.
Web 3.0
Web 3.0 is a category of decentralized information channels that run on the “blockchain”. One of these blockchains is known as Bitcoin. Bitcoin is like regular money, but it can only be used in the hackersphere. Bitcoins are so powerful that even ATMs cannot dispense them; in fact, massive server farms run just to contain the awesome power of Bitcoin.
Some people used the Web 3.0 to make a kind of token called NFTs. NFT stands for Nerd Finance Technology. An NFT is like if you made a new version of Bitcoin but there was only one coin and only one person could have it at a time. It is very important to make sure no one else has the coin, so people spend hundreds of dollars on it to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Virtual reality
Virtual reality is a part of the internet that can only be accessed by wearing a special headset, known as a “VR headset”. When you wear this headset, you don’t just experience a fake world. You experience virtual reality—that is, you see the world exactly how a smartphone or a robot would see it. The next time your favorite program has a glitch, you might have a little more empathy for how the computer feels.
Internet of Things
The Internet of Things refers to all the “smart devices” in homes and workplaces that connect to the internet. These devices have their own special internet, and they send messages to each other constantly. Smart devices are in fact so smart these days that few users even understand how they work. No one knows what these devices are up to, much like the fairies and elves of yore. Your refrigerator could be looking at Wikipedia, texts from its thermometer friend, true crime videos… even sexy refrigerator pornography.
The Metaverse
The Metaverse is a segment of virtual reality sponsored by Meta, formerly known as Facebook. Virtual reality lets you experience how a computer sees reality, and the Metaverse is no exception. The Metaverse refers to a small segment of VR that lets you experience how Mark Zuckerberg experiences the world day-to-day. Early users described it as “weird” and “off-putting”.
The sneakernet
As you’re browsing internet sites, a conniving hacker can sneak onto your computer. It must be careful to remain hidden, or your antivirus software may detect it. Then, when you go onto a site the hacker wants to visit, the hacker will disappear from your computer and enter that site. The sneakernet is the secretive group of hackers that do this, like hitchhikers of the internet.
The ethernet
The æther is the region of the sky beyond the clouds—that is, the heavens. Therefore the ethernet is how the faithful communicate with their gods. The upload speed is notoriously slow and unreliable, but the download speed is even worse. Most people will never get a working download connection in their lifetime; the Catholic Pope is said to be one of the few people on earth to have a reliable two-way link.
The deep dark web
That’s right. You thought the deep web was bad, you thought the dark web was bad. Now imagine a web that is deeper and darker than any of those other webs. That’s right… the deep dark web.
The only way to access the deep dark web is to open Tor and start connecting to random IP addresses. IP stands for Internet Program. Most IP address are dead ends or ordinary deep web pages. But on rare occasion, you can stumble into the deep dark web.
Remember that the deep dark web is not for the faint of heart. Deep dark websites could be run by demons, ghosts, or even ghouls. If you stay on these sites too long, your computer could be permanently haunted.
Augmented reality
I’ve described virtual reality. You might have even heard of real reality. But what if there was a reality that was more real than reality? This is augmented reality. Augmented reality is so experimental that it is thought only to exist in government labs. Legends hold that, deep within a Pentagon research center, there exists a microchip that can make your brain’s reality even more real. The scientists who invented it went insane after realizing how much more real reality could be. All of the members of the original team are now in witness protection somewhere. But if you find them, you’ll notice something slightly “off”. They’ve been forever changed, by a chip no more technological in nature than eldritch. Don’t ask them what they saw; they don’t know either.
The spider web
Search engines like Google and AltaVista use computer programs called “spiders” to index all the web pages they can find on the internet. These spiders go to a random web page, follow one of the links they find on the page, and then one of the links they find on that page, and so on. They store all the web pages they find on an index in the search engine’s servers. That index is what the search engine uses to create its search results.
But what happens if you access the spider’s index directly? If you happen to enter the wrong connection on DuckDuckGo’s servers, you could end up inside this “spider web”. Your computer will be doomed to follow an endless series of web links from one spidered page to another, until you turn it off… or until your computer learns to turn you off.
The deeper, darker web
In 2008, on a hobbyist computing forum known as “Jonny’s Teck Tock”, an anonymous user by the name of ~hAnShOtFirSt777~ reported a story about a group of webpages that would later be nicknamed the deeper, darker web. If a user visited any of these webpages, their internet connection would immediately appear to drop. However, in the background, their computer would download thousands of mp3s of the 1983 song “Mr. Roboto” by Styx. In one journal entry recovered from an affected user, they stated their fans were spinning faster than they even though possible, and that their landline phones all started ringing. Each phone played a different song from the Styx Greatest Hits album (1995, A&M Records).
About two hours after this happened, a member of the hacking group Anonymous entered the home. It is unknown why the user’s door was unlocked. Neighbors reported a sound like an extremely load dial-up noise playing. Police investigating found the user dead, computer still on with an unfinished game of Minesweeper open. It is unknown whether anyone completed the game of Minesweeper.
All across the walls were written, in an unidentified fluid, “teabag’d”, “n00b”, “git gud”, and “epic fail”. No one knows why or how the hacking group Anonymous executes these killings, but user ~hAnShOtFirSt777~ reported at least six of them. The forum Jonny’s Teck Tock was soon taken down, with the admin Jonny citing personal reasons. His whereabouts, as with the whereabouts of ~hAnShOtFirSt777~, are unknown. I implore any readers of this post to never, under any circumstances, attempt to visit the deeper, darker web. No matter how tech-savvy you think you are, and no matter what your rank in CS:GO is, you could be the victim of an internet troll gone too far.