![]() ![]() By this yardstick, some 3.58 billion people, or 48% of the global population, were online by the end of 2017. It means people are not assumed to use the internet simply because they live in a town with an internet cable or near a wifi tower. One metric popular with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a UN body, counts being online as having used the internet in the past three months. Illicit marketplaces on the dark web trade everything from drugs, guns and counterfeit money to hackers, hitmen and child pornography. While the dark web has plenty of legitimate uses, not least to preserve the anonymity of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, a substantial portion is driven by criminal activity. To access the dark web, you need special software such as Tor (The Onion Router), a tool originally created by the US navy for intelligence agents online. These include pages held behind passwords – the kind found on the office intranet, for example, and pages no one links to, since Google and others build their search indexes by following links from one web page to another.īuried in the deep web is the dark web, a bunch of sites with addresses that hide them from view. Under the surface is the deep web: a mass of pages that are not indexed. Standard web browsers trawl the surface web, the pages that are most visible. Think of the web as having three layers: surface, deep and dark. While the search index is massive, it contains only a fraction of what is on the web.įar more, perhaps 95%, is unindexed and so invisible to standard browsers. Google the word “puppies” and your browser will display web pages the search engine has found in the hundreds of billions that has logged in its search index. What is the dark web?Ī search of the web does not search all of it. The rise of apps means that for many people, being on the internet today is less about browsing the open web than getting more focused information: news, messages, weather forecasts, videos and the like. The top 0.1% of websites (roughly 5m) attract more than half of the world’s web traffic.Īmong them are Google, YouTube, Facebook, the Chinese site Baidu, Instagram, Yahoo, Twitter, the Russian social network VK.com, Wikipedia, Amazon and a smattering of porn sites. There are nearly 2bn websites in existence but most are hardly visited. Google handles more than 40,000 searches per second, and has 60% of the global browser market through Chrome. That information, be it text, music, photos or videos or whatever, is written on web pages served up by a web browser. The web is a way to view and share information over the internet. That’s the output of 10 Hinkley Point B nuclear power stations. In 2016, the US government’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that American data centres – facilities where computers store, process and share information – might need 73bn kWh of energy in 2020. ![]() The study’s author, Anders Andrae, said the coming “tsunami of data” was to blame. The Chinese telecoms firm Huawei estimates that the information and communications technology (ICT) industry could use 20% of the world’s electricity and release more than 5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025. Last year, the chief of the British defence staff, Sir Stuart Peach, warned that Russia could pose a threat to international commerce and the internet if it chose to destroy marine cables. In 2008, damage to two marine cables near the Egyptian port of Alexandria affected tens of millions of internet users in Africa, India, Pakistan and the Middle East. ![]() Major cables serve a staggering number of people. World wired web Photograph: TeleGeography/The cables range from the 80-mile Dublin to Anglesey connection to the 12,000-mile Asia-America Gateway, which links California to Singapore, Hong Kong and other places in Asia. Most are bundles of hair-thin fibre optics that carry data at the speed of light. About 300 submarine cables, the deep-sea variant only as thick as a garden hose, underpin the modern internet. Hundreds of thousands of miles of cables criss-cross countries, and more are laid along sea floors to connect islands and continents. That’s equivalent to 40,000 two-hour standard definition movies per second. One measure is the amount of information that courses through it: about five exabytes a day. It is that infrastructure that lets you order the weekly shop, share your life on Facebook, stream Outcast on Netflix, email your aunt in Wollongong and search the web for the world’s tiniest cat. The result is a mass of cables, computers, data centres, routers, servers, repeaters, satellites and wifi towers that allows digital information to travel around the world. The internet is the wider network that allows computer networks around the world run by companies, governments, universities and other organisations to talk to one another. ![]()
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