The Dark Web

#6

In order to give context to this post, let me explain who I am and why the fuck I am bothering sharing this information. 22 year old male, just finished my masters at university. I was about 12 when I was given permission to start using my dad's spare laptop, since his work gave him a new one every couple of years and he thought I could use the experience of getting used to tech early on. When I got into high school I got word from a group of stoners (why the fuck they were talking about it, hell if I know) that people were accessing restricted parts of the internet which held everyones information. I went ahead and did some more digging online and found out about the dark web (what most of you know as the deep web), finding proxy sites as well as hacks that you could use via command prompts to mask your IP address and basically walk through a lot of locked doors. I spent the better part of my late-teens doing this kind of stuff online, using a few online forums like RadDot (most of the time) to talk with people who were basically doing the same shit as me. I didn't have many friends offline, so yeah, online was the place for me and I got pretty good at blending in.

I had 3 aliases which I used, but only a close online friend of mine knew that they were all me. Nathan was my main link to the dark web, since he somehow spent more time on it than I did, even when the only thing I did other than ghosting with him was playing Halo with him on my friends list. What I liked about him is that neither of us mentioned our last names or any real information, even though we both could have looked it up at any time and found pretty much whatever we wanted about the other person. That being said, I trusted Nathan more than almost anyone and he knows more about this story than I'll be willing to admit on here.

During uni I roomed with a local dealer who, unknown to the education board that expelled him, worked for me. It was fucking easy to order narcotics online like MDMA and X if you knew where to look; I even had them shipped to my dorm room's local PO box at one time without anyone being any the fucking wiser. I'd get the drugs online, my former friend would then use his "real life" connections to sell them since I didn't really have any of my own. This was around the time I felt that I held all the cards and no one could touch me if they couldn't track my IP.

I was in the second year of my Biomed course when I got into the stupid shit. Scumbag pieces of shit would be sharing snuff videos online that would make even the most messed up pornography you've laid eyes upon look like fucking whitebread. This was why I only used links that I either found myself or more often the ones that Nathan gave me. We would spend days, literally days, just marvelling at all of the crazy shit which people could get away with. Yeah, the government had shut down the main sites like Silk Road and MadOnion but those are like the only ones that idiots online seem to ever take notice of. Other hackers would message me on forums asking for sites to get weed and other drugs from, which was as simple as pointing in a fucking direction. The university "claimed" to monitor internet traffic to stop people from doing freaky shit online after they heard people were hacking student accounts and ruining online schedules, but I guarantee you that they did absolutely nothing to people who were actually doing it. -- Note: I'm not confessing to having done these acts, I just know exactly which individuals did. --

By third year I had made enough money to have a long-screen setup of my own which made decrypting site details a lot quicker for me (since I could actually read >200 bars without having to scroll through the tab) and I actually had gotten pretty good at it. I had be delving around some messed up sites, and to be honest I'd even talked in chat rooms to some of the admins in charge of them. You'd be surprised how normal a child pornography site owner would seem if you didn't know that he also had a day job.

I got more curious though. Fucking stupid of me. After nearly 10 years of seemlessly making my way around the dark web (deep web is more of a "pleb" term if you're talking with more experienced users, even today), I joined Nathan as well as a few others in a chat room just fucking about and sharing some screwed up sites. Might sound weird, but for me its a pretty everyday thing to do. Nathan and another friend were talking about some site that noone had managed to get past the encryption to apart from one other person whos even more of a no-life than me. The rest of us are pretty sure he's autistic or some shit because the site he shared with us was arguably the most vile thing I've ever laid eyes upon. For those of you still with me, this is why I'm posting this here. This site is the most cancerous and revolting sector from the darkest part of the dark web. It is a scar that I bear to this day and it is one that I will never, EVER forget. I'll warn readers again, this is not for the faint-hearted and something that even the most emotionally-numb people will not be able to deal with.