Darknets

In the beginning there was UseNet. (Okay... not the beginning, technically speaking, but close enough for our purposes.) Then along came a little spider, then a gopher and finally Mosaic to push it over into the 'net that you now use every day.

If, however, you were around for the heyday of UseNet in the first half of the 90s, you'll remember that there were many other things on UseNet which apparently didn't make it onto the Web and the Internet. Nefarious things. Things you shouldn't be poking around in and of which your mother and certainly your shrink would not approve. These things could be found in deeply-nested groups, always camouflaged, and often encrypted across multiple message threads. Communications you were never meant to read, ads for items you're not supposed to own, instructions for things you aren't supposed to build, images which sane people don't want to view, etc. It wasn't obvious; you had to set out to find such things. You weren't going to stumble across them on your way to alt.tv.brady-bunch. But if you really, really wanted something, you could eventually find it on or through UseNet.

So when the Web began to evolve into the Internet and UseNet became the ghost town it is today, that stuff just went away, right? Oh, puhLEEZ! This is people we're talking about. Ugly, vicious, mean-spirited, greedy, selfish people. They didn't go away, they just hid deeper in the shadows.

In Darknets.

Swim at your own risk. I ventured into some of the darker corners of UseNet, many years agone. As for the Darknets... I'll stay in the kiddie pool, thanks. Dealing with evil people in any manner other than shooting them tends to make me nauseous.