The Secret Internet and the ins and outs of Tor software.

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Also known as the dark internet, greynet, secret internet, the guardian, deep web, lost net, dark address, darknet distributed file sharing, etc. Have you heard of this part of the internet? I had heard things and being such a curious person I started doing some research. I heard that there was a site called Silk Roads where a person could go online and order drugs. A birthday card would arrive in a few days with an pouch of dope in it. What !? Does it really exist? I wondered and here is what I have learned: It's also called Tor software and is said to have been pioneered in 2002 by the US Navy to protect government communications. It was soon adopted by techies around the world. It is supposedly a space where web users can surf with complete anonymity. With both extremist materials and pornographic and other such "harmful" information becoming pushed deeper and deeper could they be going to a proxy that will obscure both users and their sites? This because the government is ordering major websites to block this harmful type of content. Between 2011 and 2012 Tor, which is short for The Onion Router, claims that the number of users of its free software had doubled and that it is popular among the underground. It seems this system has a wide range of services to offer among them with seemingly complex and varied illegal purposes. It works by sending web traffic over a series of nodes- or onion routes – adding layers of encryption coding at various stages resulting in online users and browsers, along with the people hosting the websites it features, being untraceable by the authorities. Is this true and surely the authorities will find some way to get through, right? Read on. It is the most popular anonymous internet communication system to date. A NATO analysis in July 2015 said "the use of anonymous technologies such as Tor will continue to thrive. Despite the attention that Tor has received worldwide, the technical and legal questions surrounding it remain relatively unexplored." Is Tor safe? As of October 2015 they are saying that Tor can be attacked by finding vulnerable software on Tor user's computers. One was by targeting the Firefox web browser used by Tor. This gave the infiltrators access to target's computers which included the access to keystrokes, files and all online activity. But then you come up against the Life Hacker tutorial that is entitled 'How can I stay anonymous with Tor?'. It tells you how you can navigate the onion networks and be more secured. But the CEO of Errata Security published a report telling how the NSA(National Security) is still able to crack 76% of the network traffic on Tor. So, it was cool to find out about this but now it is basically the same as any other software. It can be hacked so it isn't that anonymous, secure, secret or crafty. Your opinions please.