Kyle Terry: Going dark on the net

For some, curios­i­ty is as much a hob­by as an instinct.

Fol­low­ing a ques­tion down a rab­bit hole can lead the inves­ti­ga­tor into some unsa­vory ter­ri­to­ry, and it can make one won­der whether they should have asked it in the first place.

TEDx speak­er Kyle Ter­ry, a soft­ware engi­neer, likes hav­ing a place where he can chase curios­i­ty guilt-free, and he’ll be shar­ing it with TEDX atten­dees in his talk Explor­ing the Dark­nets.

“We should be allowed to be curi­ous about some­thing and go do research on it with­out feel­ing guilty,” Ter­ry said.

Dark­nets are fre­quent­ly described as the “hid­den inter­net.” It’s com­prised of the sites and pages that don’t show up on Google search­es and most often make head­lines for all the wrong rea­sons.

“The biggest chal­lenge for the dark­net is con­tent. When­ev­er it’s in the head­lines it’s for things like pornog­ra­phy or drug or guns,” Ter­ry said.

One of the more recent devel­op­ments was the shut­ting down of a site called The Silk Road, where trans­ac­tions for things like drugs and firearms pro­lif­er­at­ed. But, Ter­ry has been look­ing specif­i­cal­ly at the more advan­ta­geous aspect of what the dark­net pro­vides: anonymi­ty.

“The dark­net was used dur­ing the Arab Spring to orga­nize protests, it’s been used to share infor­ma­tion in Chi­na. In Iran, the inter­net is heav­i­ly cen­sored and mon­i­tored. TOR has been key to keep­ing users anony­mous so that the gov­ern­ment there can’t iden­ti­fy indi­vid­ual tar­gets,” Ter­ry said.

TOR is a soft­ware bun­dle that encrypts and redi­rects traf­fic between an end user and its des­ti­na­tion for the spe­cif­ic pur­pose of keep­ing the user anony­mous.

Fig­ur­ing out a way to fun­nel the ben­e­fi­cial aspects away from the unsa­vory con­tent remains a chal­lenge, but Ter­ry feels that more users would have such an effect.

“A lot of peo­ple think that edu­ca­tion is kind of the answer, but I think it’s ease of use. Peo­ple will encrypt things if it’s easy and they won’t if it’s not. TOR has the right mod­el with a soft­ware bun­dle, it’s now a mat­ter of get­ting more peo­ple to use it,” he said.

If you think you’re ready to get start­ed, Ter­ry will be point­ing peo­ple in the right direc­tions dur­ing his talk. Buy your tick­ets here.