Cisco makes up term 'dark web,' fights it with appliance In the absence of proper categorization, egregious websites rule the internet, free to terrorize the hapless workers of web 2.0 with wanton non-productivity. Or at least that's how Cisco paints the landscape of a so-called "dark web," a term the networking giant has coined for an estimated 80 per cent of the internet that's …
Funny, I remember the term "Dark Web" being used back in 2007 to mean those areas of the Web that have no direct links but instead were generated dynamically via databases and such based on user input/query, and thus could not be (easily) indexed by search engines.
Apparently, it now means something else according to Cisco.
"But we're cool, right Cisco? Totally a productive website."
Barracuda firewall is used where I work as an IT instructor. There I am rowing away for hours on end like a galley slave on a ship and the reward for my efforts to train the masses is blocking El Reg, just at the moment I would like to make a point about current events in IT as related to the lecture by referring to an article I just read on El Reg from home.
Even though the good ship's purpose is to provide education to future IT professionals, the people with power over the content filters block what I consider to be a valuable and up to date resource for current events in the IT field.
If knowledge is power, why is it that the powerful often fear and misunderstand knowledge?
Good luck and $DEITY speed to the good ship El Reg, and all who sail on her.
as the title says.
I'm assuming the thing worked by some kind of automated process (keyword, links analysis..), as human reviewing of their so called dark web is clearly beyond the capacity of any company.
Even if it works most of the time, if a significant amount of the mismatches actually block people out from relevant pages, the damage is potentially much larger than the gain in productivity.
E.g. if i implement a (non-trivial) algorithm in a software but am denied access to a site with information on it, the cost of that is quite unquantifiable. If that information was just a pointer to a more efficient implementation, maybe the cost is zero except we could have annoyed the user less by less waiting time, or the competitor could use that alternative and outperform us. If the site was about a significant flaw in the method, it could cause us very direct financial damage if wrong results are presented to the user.
Probably 90% of what the filter responds to is actually utter dross. Not hard, as that holds for all of the interweb. Nevertheless actually useful information is found quite often off large/established sites where it is most likely mixed with content on other topics (pets,children, other weird hobbies of the site author...). Err yes, there actually are blog-like sites which are not completely braindead.
/Considered the Big Brother icon. But BB knows what you are supposed to see. Whereas this new fangled filter thing clearly can't know.
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