So, do you remember back at the beginning when we made the comparison between the world wide web and the real world? Well apart from the whole everyday/hidden dichotomy which they share, there are also some specifics that the internet and our lives have in common. Like the ability to buy drugs, weapons, and other illegal goods - so long as you know the right place to look and can cover your tracks. In real life we imagine, based on numerous crime thrillers and Grand Theft Autos, this usually amounts to knowing someone who knows someone who will get you in on a (often literal) underground black market. On the internet, you'll want to head into the Deep Web. What sounds like an invention of Rafael Moreu - that's the writer of the hilariously out-of-touch nineties film Hackers, which has about as much in common with is subject matter as you do with a breeze - is actually a totally real, legit thing that has been getting a lot of press recently thanks to the existence of the Silk Road. This site, only accessible through the Deep Web, allows people to procure goods and services like illegal substances, guns and ammunition, and even things like hit men and child pornography. It's pretty grim and, whilst the original incarnation has all but disappeared (along with millions of dollars in bitcoins) it still exists somewhere out there. The Silk Road and the Deep Web have had their existences betrayed by countless news sources as they became more of a big deal, but it's still relatively rare that your average person has ever ventured into it. What sounds like a crummy cyberpunk creation is an honest-to-goodness thing, an entire network of websites hidden from regular search engines and impossible to access unless you're using a special browser like Tor, which masks all of your history and location data. The Deep Web is the motherload of hidden, secret websites; in 2001 it was estimated to have a "surface area" several orders of magnitude larger than the surface Web. Yikes. Some of those are the sorts of sites we've been going over here, and some of those are the weird, illicit Silk Road stuff that people expressly don't want you to find. We're not willing to dip our toes into such waters, so we'll leave that up to you...
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
