Gadgetory

although you may think of people using the dark web for buying and selling shady wares as a recent phenomenon it actually has its roots all the way back to the very genesis of the Internet in fact during the early 1970s a group of students from Stanford used the Department of Defense designed ARPANET the predecessor to the Internet to sell some marijuana to other students at MIT it's actually believed that this was the first ever instance of someone buying something online way before Jeff Bezos sold his first book so it turns out that the idea of a cyber Underground is as old as the internet itself and as the world became more interconnected the first day DeHaven started to appear in the 1980s down in the Caribbean the idea here was to house information in countries that had looser loss surrounding privacy kind of like tax haven countries with looser laws about how much the government can skim off the top of your paycheck but data havens were still an imperfect solution for those seeking them out as most countries still had restrictions on common uses for these services such as gambling plus housing information and services anywhere that was subject to one jurisdictions laws wasn't enough for some freedom-loving netizens so a more decentralized solution called free net was launched in the year 2000 a dark network designed to provide anonymity over encrypted peer-to-peer connections without relying on a central repository of information because it's not connected to the World Wide Web it remains a rather a niche service but it's still around if you're curious but this doesn't mean that everyone just kind of gave up on housing tons of sensitive information and trying to make a buck off it probably the best-known example of this is Haven Co also formed in the year 2000 by some libertarian minded folks that wanted to put information out of the reaches of any government the plan was to host servers on Sealand a self-proclaimed country off the coast of the United Kingdom that has a colorful history of its own it's actually an old air-defense platform left over from World War 2 that was seized by Roy Bates a pirate radio broadcaster who took it by force from other pirate radio broadcasters he declared his little patch of concrete in the middle of the ocean as its own country and the UK's own courts even ruled at one point that it was outside of British territory so the UK government just kind of gave up on trying to take it back naturally a rogue state run by descendants of a pirate would seem like a good place to host a darknet the plan was for havenco to attach servers to the concrete pillars that held up Ceylon and fill them with nitrogen to discourage interlopers not to mention the fact that Ceylon was already difficult for outsiders to access and easy to defend unless someone tried to invade with like actual warships and bombers unfortunately for Haven code they couldn't end up getting a reliable connection and were stuck with a satellite link that wasn't much faster than a dial-up modem plus it turned out that no matter what kind of content you needed to host you could find some country to do it in meaning that just wasn't much interest in havenco services outside of a few gambling sites to make matters worse Heavin CO and sealands government got into a spat involving copyright infringement as the seal and royal family didn't want to anger their close neighbors the UK too much so havenco eventually shut down but the dark web has ended up thriving without Zealand's help in 2002 around the same time that seal and decided to buy out Haven Co the Tor network first came online you can learn much more boat or up here but it's another decentralized network ironically first developed by the US government to protect dissidents and is now used for all sorts of purposes and bitcoins launched in 2009 helped the darknet grow even more since now there's pseudo anonymous ways to transact shady business and enable the founding of whole marketplaces but if you're interested just make sure you don't get into the business of buying and selling the wrong stuff you should stick with the right stuff like fresh books fresh books cloud accounting solution is great and works anywhere with a fresh ebooks mobile app you can create professional-looking invoices on-the-go or snap pictures of your receipts so you don't lose them stay on top of important conversations that never miss an update see when a client has view their invoice or when an invoice has become overdue start your 30-day free trial right now at fresh books comm forward slash tech quickie so thanks for watching guys if you like this video give it a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe to the channel and hit us up in the comments with your own suggestions for what videos we should do next