So we're gonna talk about the difference between the web, the internet, the dark web, and the deep web
but in order to talk about all of these things and figure out why they're different
we need to start with the basics of the web and the internet
because most people confuse those as well as confusing the deep web and the dark web and how they're different
and we're just gonna try and figure all that out today - how they're separate
so we'll start off with the internet
what is the internet versus the web?
The internet is the physical connection of all the computers that are joined together across the world
that's probably the easiest way of looking at it.
it started off with ARPANET in the late 60s
which was, uh, research agencies getting together to connect their computers from a long distance
and this is when computers were huge things in massive rooms
not little things we have in our office
and then that graduated to the NSFNET, which was the National Science Foundation net
which was, uh, all the universities connecting together into a, kind of, bigger network
and then that eventually, in the start of the 90s became the internet, where they connected more broadly to commercial networks as well as research networks
and when you connect to the internet from your home, on your computer
your computer simply connects to the internet and becomes one of the many computers on the internet
so what I have here is a picture of several computers joined together in a network
so the computers are circles, and the network is the lines between them
which is nice, and then when you're at home and you turn on your computer
and it connects to Virgin Media or whoever
you simply crop up on the internet and then it connects you to one of the computers and suddenly you're part of the whole big internet
Now, every computer on the internet has what's called an IP address
and it's just an address which is unique to that computer on the internet
and so even when your computer connects to it, you get your own IP address
and if you want to know what that is, you can just go to Google, type in "IP address", and Google helpfully tells you "your IP address is this"
[offscreen] I was just imagining about a thousand people doing that right now in another tab while we're-
All the computers just have this unique address, and it's like a sort code for a bank, as in every branch of a bank has a unique sort code
and when you are sending money there it goes to that, uh, address based on that sort code
and so every computer has this IP address on the internet and it allows computers to know which exact computer they're talking to
when they're asking for information.
So, what is the web?
The web is, uh, the software that runs on the physical internet
so it's a software layer essentially, that is a way of, uh, sharing information across all those different computers
The web is just one type of software on the internet
other types of software include email exchange, uh, file transfer protocols, where you can send files to other computers rather than download webpages from them
so it's just a type of software that runs on the physical internet
and that's an important difference that we're get to when we get to dark web and deep web
So, how do you view the web? You have something like Chrome or Safari, and these are web browsers
and they just know how to talk to the web
to ask for pages and to get things
And so we have these browsers on our computers in order to view or access the web
[offscreen] We also have a lot of apps these days, are they just using the same sort of technology?
Yes, yeah, so, um, when your phone connects to the internet over 4G or 3G or via wifi
it's again - it gets its own IP address and apps are just sending information across that physical network
not necessarily using web software, but using similar communications to how web software communicates with each other
these are down at the protocol levels and the ports that they're connecting over
There's two key bits of the web which make it work, two bits of the software
one is URLs - unique resource locators - and these are nice easy ways for you and me to say which website we want to get to
or which webpage we want to see.
And so this bit of software that helps the web work
is essentially a long list of, uh, if you want to go to nottingham.ac.uk
you ask the server and the server says "oh, I know which physical computer that's stored on - it's stored on 128.243.80.167"
[offscreen] so, you're reading that?
[laughs] I am, just from down here
And so actually, in your web browser, you can either type in nottingham.ac.uk and go to the website
or you can, uh, type in 1., uh, 128.243.80.167
and it will show you the same webpage, cause the webpage is stored on that physical computer
and so that's how it knows which computers on the internet to ask for which webpage you want to see
the next bit you then need is an http server - a hypertext transfer protocol server
got that right, hopefully
and this is just the software that runs on those physical computers that says "oh, you want that page. Sure, here you go, I'll give it to you"
so the nottingham.ac.uk server has an http server on it which says "here you go, here's the page you wanted"
and sends it to the person who's looking
and so when you type in http://www.nottingham.ac.uk, you're basically saying "I want to use the hypertext transfer protocol to look at the worldwide web part of nottingham.ac.uk"
however, you could use different protocols to look at different parts of nottingham, like the file transfer bit
One nice way of looking at the web is that it's a whole lot of information pages
all of which say "ooh, look, there's some interesting information on that page over there"
and so you click on the link, which is the unique resource locator, or the URL
and it sends you over to that page, and it goes "oh, I know another interesting page you might want to look at. Go look at this one"
and you click on it, it goes over there and that's what hypertext is
it's just text with links in it - makes it hypertext
[offscreen] So that's when we all get stuck down the rabbit hole, yeah?
Yeah, you follow links forever, and so they're, the thing they say about Wikipedia is that you're suddenly viewing
an endless number of links, all of which are very interesting and following each other forever and ever and ever
and suddenly, five hours later, you realize you haven't had any dinner yet and it's bedtime
[offscreen] And you haven't found out the thing you went on for in the first place
No, not at all [laughs]
There's four nice examples of what makes the deep web different from the web
one is that stuff behind passwords - so any place that you go, where you have to type in a password is a place that Google can't go
cause it doesn't have your password, so it can't look at your bank information, uh, it can't look at your profile... [fades out]