It does have a coherent meaning, I think; a "dark web" site is any website that—although fully routable from the public Internet—is impossible to stumble upon accidentally without going through some process that could be considered mens rea for consuming that kind of content.
This is useful because it separates the effect (joining a private club) from the mechanism (downloading Tor, but also things like just signing up for a private forum, etc.)
It also implies something about these sorts of privacy-enhancing technologies: if they become part of the "defaults"—if browsers become able to access Tor sites by default, and Google starts indexing them—then a Tor hidden service will no longer implicitly be part of the "dark web." It'll be part of the regular web—just anonymously so.
- Any part of the internet which isn't indexed by search engines. By this definition, the profiles on a dating site that requires a login are part of the darkweb.
- Any data on the internet not accessible via HTTP/FTP. Copying a file off a server via SCP then becomes a visit to the dark web.
What's most frustrating is when people jump between the definitions mid-discussion.
And the people jumping between the definitions mid-sentence are doing so because they don't understand what they are talking about. And by uttering such sentences, contribute to others misunderstanding too.
That wikipedia article is actually terrible, and so a great example of the confusion.
> refers to any or all network hosts on the Internet that no-one can reach.[1] According to some estimates, only 0.03% of the web is searchable, hence leaving almost 100.00% of all data being dark Internet
Apparently the wikipedia authors think that "network hosts that no-one can reach" is the same thing as "not searchable". I mean, a network host that no-one can reach is obviously not searchable (if really no-one can reach it, is it a 'network host' at all?), but a lot more is too, and of course it depends on what mechanisms you are using to search. Those estimates that "only 0.3% of the web is searchable" are surely not saying that 99.7% of the internet is "network hosts no-one can reach".
The wikipedia article goes on:
> Failures within the allocation of Internet resources due to the Internet's chaotic tendencies of growth and decay are a leading cause of dark address formation. One form of dark address is military sites on the archaic MILNET. These government networks are sometimes as old as the original ARPANET, and have simply not been incorporated into the Internet's evolving architecture.
I am not sure what they are talking about, and introduce a new term without explaining what it means, "dark address", what? If they really don't have routable IP addresses, are they part of 'the internet' at all, let alone 99.7% of the internet?
Hosts 'not incorporated into the internets evolving architecture' seems to be yet another thing again, although perhaps it's a subset of "network hosts that no-one can reach", but is an entirely different thing from Tor hidden services, and probably not a part of "websites not searchable [by Google?]" because they probably aren't "websites" at all, and arguably aren't on "the internet" at all if they were "not incorporated into the Internet's evolving architecture", whatever that means.
Really, the entire wikipedia article makes almost no sense from a technical perspective.
My non-technical friends hear various things about the 'dark net', and conflating different vague definitions, tell me they heard that the vast majority of the internet (nearly 100% according to wikipedia!) actually consists of pedophilia that you need special technical measures to access, or something like that.
Well, I suppose it depends on what you're talking about. If you're talking about Tor hidden services, "Tor hidden services" seems like a pretty good alternative.
Yes, non-technical people don't know what this means, but they can learn. Non-technical people don't know what the "dark web" means either, but it sure sounds mysterious, and has the added danger that they often erroneously think they do, but have no idea what they're talking about.
