BE group read: CH 2

Mon Nov 8 20:17:28 UTC 2021

Long time lurker, first time poster. De-lurking to add some historical
context / data / timeline here -

1999 - napster launched, peer-to-peer file sharing for the masses

2000 - MS antitrust ruling
        - dot com crash

2001 - Napster shut down via lawsuit
        - bittorrent alpha
        - WTC attacks

2002 - Tor alpha release (Naval Research Laboratory grant)

2005 - DHT bolted on to bittorrent (distributed hash table), enabling
tracker-less sharing.

2008 - initial bitcoin paper / DLT (distributed ledger)

2011 - Silk Road launches, a modern "dark web" marketplace

2013 - Bleeding Edge published
        - Founder of Silk Road arrested

For a graphical but unhinged vizualization of all this I did for a
stream a while back see also
https://nfultz.github.io/murderboard/wpc-murderboard.htm - although
that one reaches back to the 70s.

The "deep web" around 2000 was mostly usenet, listservs (like this
one!), anonymous chat rooms (IRC networks, Instant Messengers) and
peer-to-peer networks like napster. "The Scene"[1] was a web series
about movie pirates that captures the vibe pretty well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMPbibf1txd_qKTuvv3mjWQ

But it *also* was used to refer to web pages, systems and data that
were not publicly scrapeable -  library catalogs, the PACER database,
private forums, most academic journals, systems like that.

In the following decade, a series of networking software innovations
developed (bittorrent, tor, bitcoin) enabled fully-online black
markets like the Silk Road that is the modern "dark web" for illicit
materials. There is definitely some historical strangeness, the same
tech is also being sponsored by the DoD eg to protect Chinese
activists, and the people writing the software were mostly third-wave
California-Ideology libertarians.

To answer your specific questions:

> Are there servers that are just private storage or are all servers required to register or have some trackable identity?

There is a spectrum, servers may or may not have a unique IP address
or domain name registered, and may be connected from countries that
track things closely (eg China, Russia) or may be in countries that
don't (also Russia for other things) or may be routed through other
local networks.

> What exactly does it mean to be indexed?  How hidden can information be.

In practice, it means Google has made a copy of your web page and
could include it in its search results. In 2000, there were many other
competing search engines, though, and they would compete on who had
the most "complete" or "up to date" index.

Some people go to quite elaborate lengths to hide their information
from indexes.

> There are drug and contraband dealers who use the deep web. This and any other illicit use of the deep web is often called the dark web. Is access by word of mouth? what keeps them from being busted?

Some dark web areas use word-of-mouth to keep their communities closed
off, others are there to be found if you look in the right places.
Nothing really stops the dealers from getting busted per se, other
than limited government resources, and there have been many high level
busts over the years. The 4chan busts in the late 2000s were pretty
memorable.

> are transactons possible here without known addresses? suggested articles?

For Bitcoin, you do need known addresses to make transactions, and all
transactions are on a public ledger, but the ownership of specific
addresses can be pretty obscured - kinda like Swiss bank accounts.

I would avoid reading any popular press about bitcoin at all unless
the author makes specific disclosures about what they are holding; too
much speculation, hype and fraud to easily get a clear picture. David
Gerard is a good writer, if a bit cynical.

> Are there search engines like deep archer that can find and make acessible the deep web.

Sorta - https://www.shodan.io/ is one example, but there are several.
The subscription databases tend to have a lot more data. However, this
is not particularly different or more alarming than dialing up
Experian and pulling someone's credit file, though.

> Has getting this access always been the essence of hacking?

Hacker culture is pretty mainstream now. But wikipedia has an ok
writeup -  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture - I like the
below explanation -

> A solution or feat has "hack value" if it is done in a way that has finesse, cleverness or brilliance, which makes creativity an essential part of the meaning. For example, picking a difficult lock has hack value; smashing it does not. As another example, proving Fermat's Last Theorem by linking together most of modern mathematics has hack value; solving a combinatorial problem by exhaustively trying all possibilities does not. Hacking is not using process of elimination to find a solution; it's the process of finding a clever solution to a problem.

> It seems that P is suggesting digital tech opens new ways to hide money transactions etc. Has anyone tried to estimate the tax losses etc? Any thoughts on how much of this is going on?

I think P is suggesting that also, and it felt that way at the time,
but I don't necessarily agree now - it is more like the difference
between cable TV and satellite - same thing but delivered differently.
Crypto currencies *are* commonly used for fraud and money laundering,
but only because suitcases full of cash are less convenient for doing
business, but nested shell corporations can do some of the same
tricks.

> Does anyone have more intelligent questions about this. I read the wikipedia article on this topic  last time we read BE and not much stuck.  I Will re-read more on the topic but it’s definitely not my natural terrain. Pretty ok at photo editing and paint programs but that only as it relates to my own art processes and website.

Most of the technical wikipedia articles are well written enough on
their own, but they probably aren't going to paint a connected picture
of how many things were changing at once. For the specific early 2000s
time frame, I'm paying special attention to landlines / cell phones,
for example, as I'm rereading.

To really get a feel of what it was like then, you can watch videos
from DefCon or HOPE, some are on archive.org.
http://web.textfiles.com/ has a lot of primary materials also.

Note that Pynchon was writing BE while these technologies are
developing (and he probably had been following it since the 80s,
really), but he set the novel in 2000 when they really were still
"Bleeding Edge" - it did represent an inflection point of sorts - some
people my age talk about 1999/2000, the same way baby boomers talked
about 1967 when I was a teen in the 90s - look at how it's portrayed
in Forrest Gump, for example.

[2] https://nfultz.github.io/murderboard/wpc-murderboard.htm

On Mon, Nov 8, 2021 at 9:43 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
> Maxine suggests that the information Reg needs about hashslingerz would normally be easy to get to with Nexis Lexis, HotBot….
>
> R “What I’m really looking for,” solemn more than impatient, “probably won’t be anyplace any search engine can get to.”
> M “Because . . . what you’re looking for . . .”
>  R  “Just normal company records—daybooks, ledgers, logs, tax sheets. But try to have a look, and that’s when it gets weird, everything stashed away far far beyond the reach of LexisNexis.”
>
> Here we get our first indication that there is a web that is not avilable to the public, except with special procedures and passwords , the deep web . This deep web operates in the novel in 2 ways, as the reality of a secret communication and infomation storage system and IMO as  a kind of digital subconscious where new forms  and arenas of consciousness are emerging, a telling reflection of our desires and hidden doings.
>
> Practically  It brings up questions out of my depth. I have a general idea of the the deepweb but plenty that I don’t understand at all. I assume it means code stored on servers as opposed to computers. So I will try to ask some questions and hope there are p-listers who understand this stuff better than I do and might be wiling to offer or direct us to good info.
>
> Are there servers that are just private storage or are all servers required to register
> or have some trackable identity? What exactly does it mean to be indexed? How hidden can information be.
> There are drug and contraband dealers who use the deep web. This and any other illicit use of the deep web is often called the dark web. Is access by word of mouth? what keeps them from being busted? are transactons possible here without known addresses? suggested articles?
> on stored in the Deep Web be?  Are there search engines like deep archer that can find and make acessible the deep web. Has getting this access always been the essence of hacking?
> It seems that P is suggesting digital tech opens new ways to hide money transactions etc. Has anyone tried to estimate the tax losses etc? Any thoughts on how much of this is going on?
> Does anyone have more intelligent questions about this. I read the wikipedia article on this topic  last time we read BE and not much stuck.  I Will re-read more on the topic  but it’s definitely not my natural terrain. Pretty ok at photo editing and paint programs but that only as it relates to my own art processes and website.
>
>  Some expertise in this area of the functioning of the Deep web/Dark Web would definitely add to understading BE.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l