There are more and more darknet users in Russia. And in the spring of 2019, there was a sudden jump of 30%. At the same time, growth is only on weekdays, and on weekends it is falling all the time. Crazy swing with a break for the New Year. It’s the same in Belarus. And in Kazakhstan.
Even the developers don’t know what it is. But most likely, joint state experiments. An attempt to deanonymize users. In Russia, even a special research institute belonging to the police was connected and a tender was announced. However, they could not reveal the users. The network architecture does not allow it. So several million rubles went nowhere.
The work, however, continues.
To catch users of the darknet, the state creates a bunch of fake nodes in the hope that the signal was randomly distributed to them. A special Nautilus program works for this. As you understand, the probability of success is negligible, less than hundredths of a percent.
An important point. Participants of the Tor network can be used to disseminate information under the jurisdiction. Russian mathematician Dmitry Bogatov almost went to prison under the article “terrorism”. He owned the Tor exit node (this is not prohibited) and was not associated with any crime. But the authorities considered that it was he who published the call for the violent overthrow of the system on the system administrators forum, because the signal of the sender of the text was distributed to his node. Bogatov was acquitted, but he spent several months in jail while lawyers explained to the judge how the Tor network works and what public IP addresses are. At some point, it turned out that during the publication of that message, Bogatov went out for bread and was filmed by the store’s video camera. That’s what saved me. And not that the court figured out how Tor works.