Access The Dark Web With Your Mac
The Dark Web, a place you have probably heard about but didn’t really understand
That's ok I will explain the Dark Web a little before I show you how you can access it via your Mac.
The Dark Web is a part of the Internet that does not get indexed by Google or any other search engine on the Internet. The normal things you hear about the Dark Web are normally the bad things ie. selling of drugs, guns, credit cards and hiring hitmen etc. This is all true, a study was done by Kings College London in 2015 and found some staggering results!
Over just five weeks of scraping the Dark Web they found that 57 percent of 2,723 live Dark Web sites they had scraped hosted illicit material. You can see the paper here.
But not all of the Dark Web is bad, it does have a legitimate side, such as been able to join social media accounts like Facebook for Tor or joining a forum for a specific interest etc and still be anonymous.
Everything you do on the DarkWeb is totally anonymous and not tracked by any search engine or website.
So as I will be showing you how to access this dark place I do recommend that you tread carefully and be very cautious of what you are clicking and entering into!
Ok now we know what the Dark Web is and how it can be a rather daunting place, let's get what we need to access the Tor network.
First, we need to download a browser which is designed to access the Tor network. The browser is called Tor Browser and can be downloaded on the below link…
The Tor browser works by routing your webpage requests through a series of proxy servers which are hosted by volunteers around the world, this is how you stay anonymous as your IP address is pinged around so may different web servers making it untraceable.
There is an excellent video explaining in detail how this actually works by the Computer Science Department of the University of Nottingham here.
Ok back to setting up our Tor Browser on your Mac, hopefully, you have now downloaded the install file and installed Tor Browser into your Mac Applications folder:
You can now run the Tor Broswer and you should see the below window appear:
Click the Connect button to start the browser:
You're now connected to the Tor network, all your web traffic is now redirected through the Tor network.
Note — When loading webpages, they can take a while as you are bouncing from many web servers as mentioned above.
Now on the normal web, you will be used to using web URL’s such as www.google.com, the Dark Web uses a random string of letters and numbers with .onion at the end. The address for sites on the dark web are impossible to remember, this also makes it hard to find sites which are of any use.
So to find what you want on the Dark Web you can use .onion search engines, below I have added a .onion address to a search engine called Torch. I suggest using this to search for sites whilst on the Dark Web.
Address: http://xmh57jrzrnw6insl.onion/
Paste the above link into your Tor Browser you should see the below page load:
I suggest that you have Torch as your Home page, to do this press Command + ,buttons on your keyboard this will open up the Preferences tab and click Home from the left-hand sidebar menu.
Click the dropdown box named Homepage and new windows and select Custom URLs, paste in the Torch .onion from above:
Also, there is a Hidden Wiki list of .onions which has a description of what the site contains, this is handy so you know you're not just clicking into something illicit.
The link is below to the Hidden Wiki (this is a normal Web URL)
So it’s that easy to get on the Dark Web using your Mac, it's also the same for Windows and Linux.
Please tread carefully whilst using the Dark Web as I have mentioned above its really easy to stumble into something weird or even illegal!
I hope you found this article useful, be sure to read more articles by me here.
Also, follow me on Twitter @BIG_PESH
Happy Dark Webbing!
