An Up-To-Date Layman's Guide To Accessing The Deep Web

If you binge-watched the second season of House of Cards, along with a reported 15% of Netflix's 44 million subscribers, you may be newly interested in the Deep Web. Slate has done a good job of describing what the Deep Web is and isn't, but they don't tell you how to get there.

How To Access The Deep Web

First: the hot sheets. Subreddit forums for DeepWeb, onions, and Tor are the way to go in terms of gathering a backgrounder for entry points into DarkNet. Unsurprisingly though, much of the information currently on the surface Internet about the actual underbelly of the web is outdated. Ever since Silk Road's takedown last year, the Under-web has been changing.
To get into the Deep Web these days, you first have to download the Tor add-on for Firefox. By downloading the Tor Browser Bundle from the Tor Project you are securing your anonymity to browse, which is the main draw for using Tor. Once you have downloaded the browser bundle, Tor builds a circuit of encrypted connections through a randomized relay. In layman's terms that means that your online activity is covered as Tor randomly pings your IP address from one place to the other, making whatever you do less traceable.

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Multiple Redditors urge reading the Tor Project's warning page, where they discourage torrent file sharing and downloading while using Tor. The idea is to follow protocol maintaining your anonymity while browsing, chatting, or navigating. This obviously includes giving away your personal information like email addresses, phone numbers, names, time zones, or home addresses in any context.

The newest iteration of the Tor browser, Tor 4.0, was released in October 2014. It contains a variety of product tweaks designed primarily to enable use behind China's massive Internet firewall.
Other precautions include placing duct tape on your webcam, enabling your computer's firewall, and turning off cookies and JavaScript. Again, here is where you want to be completely free of an identity, so treading cautiously is key. The NSA and other government outlets peruse the Dark Web and onion sites frequently using cross-reference tools, malware, and remote administration tools to de-anonymize users engaging in illegal activity.
While the Deep Web houses the retail of weapons, drugs, and illicit erotica, there are also useful tools for journalists, researchers, or thrill seekers. It's also worth noting that mere access through Tor is not illegal but can arouse suspicion with the law. Illegal transactions usually begin on the Deep Web but those transactions quite often head elsewhere for retail, private dialoguing, or in-person meetups; that's how most people get caught by law enforcement officials.
For mobile users, several browsers exist which purport to—more or less—allow Tor to be used on an Android or iOS device. These browsers include OrWeb, Anonymous Browser Connect Tor, the mobile Firefox add-on, Onion Browser, and Red Onion. However, it is important to note that security concerns have been raised for all of these browsers and that anonymous browsing cannot be 100% guaranteed for any of these.

Where To Go Once You're On The Inside

After reading up on the material, downloading Tor, and logging out of every other application, you can finally open Tor's Browser Bundle to begin secure navigation. Network navigation is slow once you are inside because of the running relay, so expect pages to load at a snail's pace.
The most common suggestion on Reddit is to start at the "Hidden Wiki." The Hidden Wiki has a similar interface as Wikipedia and lists by category different sites to access depending on your interest. Categories include: Introduction Points, News/History, Commercial Services, Forums/Boards/Chans, and H/P/A/W/V/C (Hack, Phreak, Anarchy, Warez, Virus, Crack) just to name a few. Under each of these headings are multiple sites with an onion address and a brief description of what you will find there.
Many of the listed sites on the Hidden Wiki though have been taken down. Deep Web Tor, Tor Jump, Tor Answers, and Tor.info were all busts. When the feds took down Silk Road, many other sites also fell victim and/or are currently down for maintenance. Still, gun, drug, and child porn marketplaces operate even though they are on much smaller scales and with a fraction of the reach than that of Silk Road or Atlantis, another drug-peddling site.
Some pages are less nefarious, but arouse your curiosity nonetheless. StaTors.Net is the Twitter for Tor users and Hell Online is the antisocial network with 369 members and 15 different groups. Torchan resembles Reddit, though you need to enter the username and password torchan2 for access, and is still up and running. But recent activity except in Request and Random rooms has all but stopped.

In the Random room a user asked for a new link to Silk Road and the responses were limited. Another user posting an image of a child fully clothed featuring bare feet pleading for a site featuring underage bare feet. An Anonymous user responded: "Someone please give this guy a link, this poor guy has been looking/asking for over a month now."
One popular chat service is OnionChat, an anonymous Tor-based real-time chat room quasi-affiliated with the Onions subreddit. The project's code is available on GitHub as well.
The DeepWeb Link Directory in the site OnionDir had some promising hyperlinks and some not-so-promising ones like the now defunct Deep Web Radio and a blog claiming to be a Deep Web blog but was actually just stories dedicated to spanking.

The New Yorker Strongbox is a secure transmission for writers and editors where I was given the code name: riddle yeah abreacts murgeoning. Through a given codename you can submit a message and/or file to the New Yorker's editorial staff. Mike Tigas, a news application developer for ProPublica, has a functioning blog in the Deep Web but has not posted anything new for some time, which was true for many other blogs as well