What Is The Dark Web?

What Is The Dark Web?

In the mid 1990s, US military researchers created a technology that allowed intelligence operatives to exchange information completely anonymously. They called it ‘Tor’, which stands for ‘The Onion Router’.

As part of their strategy for secrecy, they released Tor into the public domain for anyone to use. Their reasoning was simple: the more people using the system, the harder it would be to separate the government’s own messages from the general noise. You can’t be anonymous on your own.

Tor spread widely and today, is a critical part of the so-called ‘dark web’: a network of untraceable online activity and hidden websites, of which Tor hosts approximately 30,000. And that anonymity has attracted a huge range of people; all who want to keep their activities hidden.

Who uses the dark web, and why?

There are many legitimate uses for the dark web- but it also enables online criminal activity.

Good or bad: The expert view

 Despite the benefits that online anonymity can bring, would we better off without it?

Bruce Schneier, computer security expert

“Internet anonymity is vital for people living in countries where you can be arrested, tortured, and killed for the things you do online. This is why the US government was instrumental in developing the technology, and why the US State Department continued to fund Tor over the years.”

Troels Oerting, former cyber-crime chief

“The Tor network hides criminals. I know it was not the intention, but that’s the outcome and this [was] my job, to tell society what the trade-off is here. By having no possibility to penetrate it, criminals can continue their crimes on a global network. It’s very, very difficult for the police to penetrate, so it’s risk-free crime.”

Jake Applebaum, The Tor Project

“There is often asserted certain narratives about anonymity and, of course, one of the narratives is that anonymity creates crime. So you hear about things like the Silk Road [a dark web marketplace that sold drugs and guns] and you hear, ‘Oh, it’s terrible, someone can do something illegal on the internet’. Well, welcome to the internet. It is a reflection of human society, where there is sometimes illegal behaviour.”

Dr. Joss Wright, Internet researcher

“We should not shy away from the negative uses of Tor any more than we should ignore its benefits. Preventing individuals from communicating without being tracked, watched, logged, and profiled, however, would be a huge blow to our society.”

UK government concerns

In 2014, David Cameron announced plans for GCHQ to work alongside America’s National Crime Agency in order to attack the dark web and route out criminal activity. He said, “The dark net is the next side of the problem, where paedophiles and perverts are sharing images, not using the normal parts of the internet that we all use.”

The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology

In a recent report on the dark net and anonymity, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology claimed “there is widespread agreement that banning online anonymity systems altogether is not seen as an acceptable policy option in the UK. Even if it were, there would be technical challenges. For example, when the Chinese government attempted to block access to Tor, Tor Project Inc. introduced secret entrance nodes to the Tor Network, called ‘bridges’, which are very difficult to block.
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How Does Google Track Live Traffic?

Google offers real-time traffic updates in its Maps application. Have you ever thought how Google tracks live traffic?

Getting a Google Maps traffic update before leaving for work is not a big deal for you, but have you ever wondered how Google tracks live traffic. There is no rocket science behind this, but Google has to do a lot of hard work, just to serve you the real-time traffic updates in your area.

Google gathers GPS data it receives from smartphones and uses it to analyse their speed and location. Google has assigned different colors for different traffic congestion levels, like red is for heavy traffic. So, if more smartphones are there at one place (obviously on the road), the color of the maps overlay changes to red. Google’s intelligent algorithms exclude vehicles like Postal Vans, as they take more frequent stops and may alter the traffic data.

Google also crowdsources location data from telecom companies. These telcos monitor user location data by a method called Trilateration, in which the distance of a user measured between two or three surrounding telecom towers is used to analyse the speed and location of the user.

“When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions”.Google

The minds behind the working of Google Traffic are ZipDash, a traffic analysis company that Google bought in 2004. Google added ZipDash’s technology to Google Maps and started providing live traffic updates.

Also read: How To Save Google Maps for Offline Use

Apart from the goodies offered by Google Traffic, it has also been a topic of concern as it affects the privacy of the user by sending user’s location to google servers. Google is fully determined to protect the privacy of the user and has acknowledged this. 

“We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going”.Google

After tracking and analyzing the location data for a particular trip, Google permanently deletes it from its servers. Google also offers an Opt-out option, in which if a user is concerned about his privacy, he can stop his location tracking by Google Maps servers. Google stated:

“Once you disable or opt out of My Location, Maps will not continue to send radio information back to Google servers to determine your handset’s approximate location”.

So, wherever you’re, next time when you’ll use Google maps for live traffic updates, you’ll praise Google’s efforts for the accuracy and speed they provide while tracking the live traffic for you. Google has played a major role in making our lives simpler. One can’t imagine internet without Google. In fact, Google is the internet for most of us.

To know more about live traffic on Google Maps, watch this PCMag Video:

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CO2 pumped out of tailpipes in NYC could eventually be sucked up by an air capture plant in the desert in Australia or North Africa.

Carbon Engineering, a Canadian startup, is designing massive walls of fans that could go anywhere in the world to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into products like fuel.

Because carbon dioxide is everywhere, the air capture plants could go anywhere to help reduce global concentrations. "A direct air capture plant can be built wherever land is cheap and there is a demand for the CO2 produced," says Geoff Holmes, Carbon Engineering’s business development manager.

While trees naturally do the same thing as the company's machines, planting enough trees to deal with the world's carbon problems would take at least 1,000 times more land—and the trees would have to live in areas that might be needed for agriculture.

CO2 pumped out of tailpipes in NYC could eventually be sucked up by an air capture plant in the desert in Australia or North Africa.

These Enormous Fans Suck CO2 Out Of The Air And Turn It Into Fuel

Carbon Engineering has one idea for taking dangerous greenhouse gas emissions out of the air. It sounds like it's from a cartoon, but it's real life.

CO2 pumped out of tailpipes in New York City traffic could eventually be sucked up by an air capture plant in the desert in Australia or North Africa.

Carbon Engineering, a Canadian startup, is designing massive walls of fans that suck carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into things we need—like more fuel.

Because carbon dioxide is everywhere, the air capture plants could be built anywhere in the world and still help reduce global concentrations. "A direct air capture plant can be built wherever land is cheap and there is a demand for the CO2 produced," says Geoff Holmes, Carbon Engineering’s business development manager.

While trees naturally do the same thing as the company's machines, planting enough trees to deal with the world's carbon problems would take at least 1,000 times more land—and the trees would have to live in areas that might be needed for agriculture. The smog-sucking machines are more efficient and can go in deserts.

The technology works by pulling air over a special carbon-absorbing liquid that traps CO2 and turns it into a salt. While it's not quite as easy as trapping carbon directly at a source like the smokestack on a coal power plant—where concentrations are far higher—it's possible (though less efficient). And it's important, because most emissions come from moving sources like cars.

"Only about 40% of our total emissions come from large flue stacks, and the other 60% results from what we call 'diffuse and mobile' sources that can be difficult to tackle at source," says Holmes. "Capturing them back from the atmosphere may be a key way to help manage these diffuse emissions."

The captured CO2 can be stored underground, used in the oil industry to make something called "low carbon crude," or turned into low-carbon synthetic fuels that can replace something like jet fuel.

"These fuels have the same chemical make-up as fossil fuels, but are sourced from air and sunlight rather than from crude oil," says Holmes. "Air capture plus fuel synthesis is potentially one of the few truly scalable ways to power transportation in a way that’s carbon-neutral."

At its pilot plant in Canada, Carbon Engineering is getting ready to run their machine continuously for the first time, and we'll see if this seemingly crazy idea will actually work. "This will prove that CE’s carbon capture technology is now ready to build and operate at a large industrial scale," he says. After the pilot finishes, the company plans to build a first-of-its-kind commercial plant in 2017 or 2018. The plant will produce 10,000 barrels of synthetic fuel in a year.

It's the kind of engineering that could be necessary if the world is going to attempt to avoid catastrophic climate change; even if humans somehow instantly stopped using fossil fuels now, we'd be unlikely to stay under the two-degree limit for global warming that climate scientists say is needed.

But it's also not the only answer. "No one single technology or approach is 'enough' to help avoid climate change; we need every option we’ve got, and more," says Holmes. "Air capture has the potential to be a big help in cutting emissions that are difficult and costly to reduce at source, and that will add to the momentum that’s building in other sectors of the clean-tech industry. The moment you start cutting emissions is the moment you start reducing risk of future dangerous climate change."

[All Images: via Carbon Engineering]

Freevolt Creates ‘Free Perpetual Power’ Out of Thin Air

 Drayson Technologies has created world’s first commercially available technology Freevolt, that could create useful perpetual power out of Radio Frequency waves from the surroundings.

Isn’t this the dream! Getting everything for free. Well, now we might have something like that in reality as well. With this latest development, you can power your low energy electronic devices for free and for a very very long time.

Freevolt is the technology that could absorb energy from the radio waves and convert it into useful and long lasting powering source. And since we are not going to run out of these electromagnetic radiations anytime soon, this technology might just be a brilliant piece of innovation.

Now, this is not the first attempt at creating a technology of such sort but efforts had been going on since many years on this front. Interestingly, there is an app that helps you see all the wireless signals flying around you.

The product of the Drayson Technologies, however, is the first commercially available technology of such kind that aims to cut out our energy dependence on the conventional sources. The Freevolt system has a multi-band antenna that extracts energy from the surrounding within 0.5- 5 Ghz range and transmits it through an “ultra-efficient” rectifier which converts this RF energy into usable DC energy. The DC energy is stored in a power management module for later use.

The available Freevolt system can produce about 100 μW in a location flooded with RF energy. Now, this energy might sound too low for your regular electronics, but it can power the sensor based system of your home, like a smoke alarm or a low power security cam.

But, this is just a start. If we are able to harvest the energy from the electromagnetic spectrum, with the ever advancing technology, it shouldn’t be a problem to amplify it to create a substantial power system.

Drayson is now working on flexible models of Freevolt to widen  scope beyond sensors and for that the company is sharing its patents and ready to offer technical assistance to its takers. Drayson has also developed CleanSpace, an air pollution monitor that exclusively works on Freevolt.

CleanSpace keeps tabs on the air quality specifically carbon monoxide and feedbacks the data to your smartphone via Bluetooth. The app gives you points in the form of CleanMiles feature that encourages users to develop a healthy lifestyle by walking and cycling. To appreciate your efforts towards reducing pollution, Drayson allows you to exchange these earned CleanMiles for gifts by its partners like Amazon.

The CleanSpace Tag, however, is available in the UK for now through a crowdfunding campaign. You can get your own Freevolt system with CleanSpace for £55.

As for our opinion, the technology seems quite promising and if escalated to bigger proportions, it could somewhat be an immediate solution.

How This Person Bought “Google.com” from Google For One Minute

 This article is about an ex-Googler who owned Google.com domain for a minute. Read his amazing story and share it

Sanmay Ved, an ex-Googler having a great corporate experience, was lucky enough to buy Google.com, but just for a minute. Yesterday, he shared this amazing story on LinkedIn Pulse and I wished to share it with our fossBytes readers.

This incident happened at 1:20 AM Eastern Time on Tuesday, September 29. Sanmay was on the Google Domains interface and he searched Google.com, just like that. Surprisingly, Google.com was available for buying.

Take a look at the screenshot below:

Out of the curiosity, he added the google.com domain to the cart and proceeded ahead to complete the transaction. He successfully completed the transaction and he bought the most-trafficked domain in the world only for $12.

He writes that as he completed the purchase, he received two emails from Google. The purchased google.com domain also appeared in his Google Domains order history. Moreover, his Google Webmaster Tools was automatically updated with webmaster details of Google.com. Thus, the ownership of Google.com was transferred to him.

After this, he started getting notifications related to Google.com domain in his inbox. He also got some internal emails that he reported to Google’s security team.

However, after a minute, his Google.com order was canceled and he got another email. “So for one minute I had access,” Ved said. “At least I can now say I’m the man who owned Google.com for a minute.”

After cancelation, his order history page was updated with a new message that said someone else registered the domain before the order was completed. He searched again for Google.com and it showed unavailable, of course.

Ved doesn’t know how this happened and why he was able to buy Google.comfor a minute. A Google spokesperson said they are looking into the matter, but they aren’t currently noticing anything unusual.

He writes: “I have reported the incident to Google Security. Google has reverted back, and has acknowledged the incident.”

Did you find this story interesting? Tell us your views in the comments below.

Also read: 12 Surprising Facts About Google That You Don’t Know