Secrets of the darknet: from nude celebrities to beheading videos

The internet's grim underbelly caters for every niche belief and warped obsession - and it's remodelling reality accordingly

By iceweasel

Opinion • September 2014 • Views: 4,456

[…] This is the real way that the internet is changing society. Where 20 years ago, those people would have struggled to find each other, now they are only a keyboard and screen away. That’s not to deny the benefits of more internet access and the education it brings. But the deeper changes will play out long after this week’s events have been forgotten.

theguardian.com

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3 comments

Click My Icon To Watch This Short French Film. Sep 5, 2014 • 3:29:11pm

It’s only when you see all of these doors, each leading somewhere strange yet populated, that you realise what the internet is doing to us: creating a world of niches, of people’s peculiarly interlocking obsessions.
Did I say people? I meant men. It’s pretty much always men. The twin elements of obsessive involvement - something men tend to be more easily drawn into than women - and animal lust drives a lot of what you see.

I wonder why it is mostly men?

steve_davis Sep 6, 2014 • 7:46:52am

I thought most of the dark net was concerned with kiddie porn.

Norbrook Sep 6, 2014 • 10:18:58am

(sigh) It’s not new. It wasn’t even “20 years ago.” I’ve been around the Internet for a long time, and “back in the day” there was (still is, really) something called USENET. A look through the listing of groups would show you quite a number of them devoted to nude celebrities, various fetishes, hacking, viruses, pirated software/media, etc., etc., etc. There were even ways and tools to post anonymously, with one of the more famous ones anon.penet.fi for newsgroups, “mixmaster” for e-mail, and so on. I remember quite a bit of outrage about that, as well as some of the more graphic web sites. In fact, the way I heard of one was from a news story which thoughtfully provided the web address.

Every few years something like this happens, and the news media suddenly discovers that it exists … again.

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