Relearning The Internet

Today i decided to relearn about the internet. As a casual surfer, i thought i knew all that there is to know about the internet, but that wasn’t the case. I just believed the internet was just this magical place people went to, in order to do all sorts of things like shopping, streaming videos, reading manhwa and what have you, but there is more. The layer of the internet that i have spent most of time on is something called the surface web. The surface web is this place that you can explore using a search engine like Duckduck Go or visit by pasting in the full hyperlink inside the address bar of your browser. I learned that the surface web goes by other names as well such as Web 2.0 and centralized web. The biggest suprise to me was that the surface web is centralized, meaning that its controlled by big tech companies and the like. Companies control what can be seen on their platforms, who can see it and can do whatever it is they want to do. The technical word to describe this type of control is censorship. Even people that religiously follow and abide by the the rules listed in the terms of service are not spared. The other thing aboout the surface web is that companies make money off people’s data. Their platforms are purposely free and they make money by selling that information to advertisers. The technical or fancy term for this is surveillance capitalism. The surface web is fundamentally and ethically broken because its not built with the end user in mind. There is just so much information about the centralized web, but the initial thing that matters is being aware of the matter. The furthest i went learning about the centralized web end at a great hero by the name, Edward Snowden. T

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• Hosting
• Domain names
• Cloudflare
• Domains: .tech .com .io .org .gov

the other layers of the web are dark, deep and decentralized (aye, alliteration). The dark web is special part of the internet that is not explorable through a search engine or a regular browser. There is this thing called Tor browser, it looks like firefox, but its equipped with privacy hardening. Tor browser is one of the most secure browsers out there. The interesting thing that i learned about tor browser was that most of the links you will most likly visit end in a .onion domain name.

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• Anonymous
• Relay network

The third layer of the internet is called the deep web. I picture the surface web as the sky, dark web as just below the surface of the water and the deep web as the deepest part of the ocean (Mariana Trench). The deep web from what i was learning is a very very special place. It can be accessed with specialized browsers and the sites required some sort of user authentication before you even access anything and the site itself also required further authentication. Top secret is the phrase usually assigned to the dark web

Lastly, the decentralized web, also known as Web 3.0 . The decentralized web from what i have been learning hopes to fix and fundamentally replace the centralized web. The decentralized web is user centric, built on blockchain and or decentralized systems and is incentivized. That was a lot of jargon for me to process, but ultimately user centric means that, you are in control. You own your data, you are in control of it and no one can censor you in any way shape or form. The second part, built on decentralized systems and blockchain means that your data is secured by the finest grade of cryptographic encryption

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• Unstoppable Domains
• Domains:
• IPFS, Hyper Protocol, Gemini, I2P,

Closing Notes

• Privacy Tools