Stuff You Should Know - How the Deep Web Works

Episode Date: January 23, 2014

Perhaps you didn't realize that when you search the web you're only skimming the surface. In fact, the types of web pages that turn up in your search engine results represent only a mere fraction of the total web. Immerse yourself in the Deep web and its dark corners in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

attention bachelor nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all and now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new iHeart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen

crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to stuff you should know from how stuff works.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Hi. Howdy. And that makes this stuff you should know. That's right. Mine is Jerry, but with Noel. That's right. We lose a Jerry, gain a Noel. One step forward and another step forward. Oh man. For a Jerry, you've just been wailing on her. Well, I'm not going to say two steps back

with Noel sitting five feet away. But it could be one and one. One step forward with Noel, one step back for not having Jerry. You're saying it's a step forward not having Jerry and a step forward having Noel. I'm just trying to make everyone like me. I'm doing a poor job of it. You do a great job. Everybody loves the Chuck. Not everybody. Who doesn't? I have some mortal enemies. Mortal enemies? Yeah, they want to kill me. They're trying to kill you. Well, Chuck, I will tell you what. If they did want to kill you and wanted to hire a hitman, the deep web is a good place to start looking. Yep. Quite a segue. It's been a while. I teed that one up. You did unintentionally. Unintentionally. I spotted it and went after it. Yeah. This is

about both the deep and dark web, which are two different things. The dark web is part of the deep web. Thank you. But the deep web isn't necessarily dark. All dark. Right. Yeah, that's very well put. The dark web is the nefarious things that go on in the deep web. Not necessarily nefarious, but the purposefully hidden stuff. Yeah, that's true, because there are some good things on the dark web. I totally misspoke. Yeah. Well, you know what? I think that it's great that you confess to it. Yep. You feel better. I do. Man, this is a really upfront kind of episode, isn't it? It's a very honest. We're bearing it all in 2014. Going on. So do you have a fancy intro story? No, you think I would. All right. My intro gets buried later on. It's a great intro,

but it just, I'll use it as the intro. Okay, go ahead. Okay. Chuck. Yes. Have you heard of our favorite band, Iron Maiden? Yeah, sure. So Iron Maiden is arguably the most awesome band of all time. Oh, dude. I'm not a huge fan. But you wouldn't be like, I hate Iron Maiden. They suck. Of course not. No, because they'd make you crazy. That's right. Iron Maiden's been around for a while. They're pretty smart. They know what they're doing. And recently, they figured out a way to maximize their touring dollars by flying their own plane. They, well, Bruce Dickinson always did. Yeah. He was, he's a certified pilot. It's got to be efficient. I would imagine. Plus fun, unless Bruce was partying too hard and then they got to fly to the next city that night. Oh, he

wouldn't do that. I hope not. No. Because that's, that's dangerous. Yeah. I mean, driving drunk is bad enough, but flying drunk, I can only imagine. Sure. And it's probably not just drunk. You know what I'm saying? No, no, no. He's, he's straight. Straight. Yeah. Has he always been? I don't know. I can't verify that. Well, anyway, Bruce and the boys figured out that a good way to figure out where to tour, where to decide to tour would be to figure out where their music was getting pirated the most. That sounds reasonable. It does sound reasonable. It's, it, it provides you with evidence of an established fan base and a fan base that is unwilling to pay for your record, but would probably pay to see you live. How does that reason?

Well, they like your music, but they don't want to pay for your CD. So why would they go see you live and pay? Because it's different. Like seeing a live show is way different than buying a CD. You can't, you can't get a live show. You could get a video of a live show. It's still not the same experience. A live show is a live show. Plus everybody always knows that anybody involved in the, or entrenched in the old guard music industry does any band, doesn't make any money on their records and make it on touring. So going to see a band live also is kind of a true act of fandom because you're really, you're contributing directly to your band that you like, you know? So what they did was they hired a company to look at BitTorrent sites and find

the regions where their music was most pirated and they created a tour map from it and went and played those regions. Did you, do you have the number one Iron Maiden pirated region? No. Okay. But we're going to say Rio. All right. They're huge in South America. That's, that's my guess. We'll look it up afterward. I guess Rio. And so they were like, we're going to start our tour in Rio. Yeah. And it wasn't just that, that one place, but it was basically a tour that was built on the areas where their music was most pirated. It was a stroke of genius, but they couldn't have done it without harvesting the deep web because BitTorrent sites, when you search BitTorrent, it doesn't, the average search engine doesn't respond with a list of BitTorrent

activity. It'll just send you to a BitTorrent site, which means that those pages of BitTorrent activity, which are web pages, they do exist. They're part of what's called the deep web. That's right. The surface web, as we know it in search engines that we all use, like Google and Bing, supposedly only have access to about 0.03% of what is truly on the worldwide web. That's like scary and weird and thrilling all at the same time. Right. 0.03%. Yeah. And anything else that's buried is the deep web. And it's not necessarily, the deep web is not when you're purposely trying to hide things. It just may not be catalogued and indexed. It may be behind a password. Sure. Maybe one of those timed sites that don't let you access

data after a certain amount of time could be anything with a captcha involved, anything that's not hyperlinked. There's lots of reasons that something could find itself buried in the deep web. Right. And you make a good point to separate the deep web and the dark web. So let me give you an example of deep web. Okay. Aside from those BitTorrent sites, there's this company called BrightPlanet and they provide deep web harvesting. And they had this primer on what is the deep web. One of the examples they use was if you look up government grants on a traditional search engine, it will probably provide you with www.grants.gov as one of the first returns. Straight up. When you go on to grants.gov, you can then search and find pages of all these different

government grants. You can search by keyword. You can browse. Yeah. But those pages aren't going to come up on your normal Google search. Right. You have to go to the site, which means that those pages of the actual grants are part of the deep web. Yeah. Your bank account, your checking account online, if you have mobile banking or online banking, it has a web page all to its own right now. And if I searched Chuck Bryant's checking account, it would not come back. I would not get that because it's behind a password. It's a website page. It's a web page, but it's password encrypted. Yeah. Therefore, it's part of the deep web. Twitter, until it index tweets, used to be you couldn't

search tweets, individual tweets. Now you can. So that made them formerly a part of the deep web, actual tweets. Yeah. Or every company on the planet has some sort of internal employee pages like internal.discovery that only we can access. And you can't Google search any of that stuff. Right. Or somebody could conceivably access it. Maybe it depends on the page, but you have to know the exact URL. Right. So the idea is if it's blind, if search engines are blind to it, it's part of the deep web. If search engines can index it and bring it back as return results, search results, it's part of the surface web. Yeah. Because that's all a search engine is doing. They are, we might should do a full podcast on search engines at some point. Sure. But the

general thing is there is an index of data and they use spiders or crawlers, because it is a web, to crawl around and locate domain names and hyperlinks and basically index all that and what they think will be most helpful to what you're looking for. Right. So Chuck Bryant's bank account. Yeah. There are some web pages out there that contain information related to that keyword search. Yes. So a search engine will keep an index with that keyword search with the URLs, the locations, the page content, some of the page content, the meta tags or the metadata and other very brief sketch information about those pages associated with the keyword for an index, which means that when you type in Chuck Bryant's bank account. You got to quit saying that. Sorry.

Thought about it as I was saying at the last time. Yeah. But when you type in birds of paradise. Bank account. Bank account. It will, the search engine goes and accesses the index. Yeah. It doesn't have to go all the way across every page on the web that it can find. It just goes to its indices and that's how search results are returned so quickly. It's not going across the internet. It's already got the spider crawlers, the bots doing that constantly. The search engine is just going to the indexes that the bots have created from their searches. Yeah. And it is super shallow. I mean, we said.03%. We do our whole job as researching online, mainly. And we run into this all the time where you feel like you're getting a very slim portion of what you're trying to find

out. Right. Because so many of the best medical journals and things like this don't just pop up as, you know, it's more likely to be some headline from scenen.com and not like a Harvard medical journal paper that could really help you out. Yeah. And I mean, like you can get deeper and deeper with your keyword skills and your search skills. Oh, sure. But for the most part that, yeah, the first returns, the first results, depending on what you search for, are going to be, like you said, superficial. Yeah. But even if you're super, a super sleuth, a Google master, like we all think we are, I mean, how much can that be bumping it up?.1? Yeah. Well, a lot of the problem too, though, Chuck, is that so much of science is behind a paywall. Yeah. Yeah. A really, really,

really expensive paywalls, too, which is like, here's the first eight lines of this awesome medical research paper. Exactly. If you want it. Yeah. Give us $1,200. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a problem in and of itself, not necessarily related to this. But with current search engine technology, you have, like you said, a superficial result from a query. Yeah. On the other end of the spectrum, and this is kind of what search engines are dealing with now, the deeper you go into the deep web, again, the surface web is.03% of all of the web pages on the entire internet. Yeah. So the further you go into it, the more data you have, and you eventually can run into the problem of what's called big data. Yeah. Which not capitalized B or D, which refers to companies

like Google that can dig and harvest and maintain a large amount of data. Yeah. It's basically data that's so much and so unwieldy, you can't even process and search it. It's not even helpful. Right. Yeah. It's like a really bad internet search. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. So the current state of search engine design or creation is balancing that, figuring out how to get less superficial without running into the big data problem of incoherent data due to just massive amounts of returns. Yeah. And you might think that these search engines do a great job, because, oh, I can always find out what I need, but you don't know what you're missing. You know? Right. So it's sort of not even correct to say that. I always find out what I need,

because you may not even know you need it, because it's hidden. That's true. And I mean, you're missing quite a bit. Like, okay, there's apparently 550 million registered domains on the internet. Yeah. And that's, I looked up like just in 2012, I think they're only like 250 or something. I mean, it seems like it's doubled in the last couple of years. Right. So there's 550 million domains, for example. Yeah. A lot of them are garbage. Yes. But howstuffworks.com is one domain. And I asked Tracy Wilson, who's the site director, and runs Stuff You Missed in History class. Yeah. It's one of the co-hosts. How many pages there are, how stuff works? She said, roughly at least 50,000. So one domain out of 550 million has 50,000 pages itself, right?

So you kind of get an idea of the scope. Sure. The deep web is anywhere from 400 to 500 times bigger than the surface web. And like you said, you don't know what you're missing, because you don't know what's out there, because your search returns aren't bringing you back anything. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of important stuff out there. We talked about medical papers. Apparently, there's engineering databases, financial information, a lot of things that could really help research, but you just can't find it. Right. Unpublished blog posts. Sure. Just basically anything that a person creates on the internet. Yeah. If a page is created, it's part of the deep web. Yeah. Unless you take this stuff down,

it's living there forever just gathering dust. Exactly. So, and it's not just necessarily engineering databases or medical information. Right. There's also a lot of shady stuff too. The dark web. That's the dark web. Yeah. The dark web is when these sites intentionally reroute you. Well, we'll get to how they do it. But basically, it's an intentional anonymity. It's not, oh, it just happens to be buried on the deep web because it's not indexed. It is purposely hidden from the surface web, so people can't track the person searching for something or the end website, I guess. Those are all just private, essentially. Right. And privacy advocates are way into it. You're not necessarily a child pornographer, although there is a lot of that

kind of stuff on the dark web. There's also a lot of good that happens on the dark web. Yeah. The anonymity and privacy and the desire for it isn't in and of itself proof of wrong doing. Of course not. No, which is frequently pointed out as that, but incorrectly. Yeah, you're like, I don't want to say in my business people like, well, what are you doing? Right, exactly. Nothing. Yeah. I just don't want them in my business. Precisely. Yeah. That's an answer that's good enough. That answer is good enough. Yeah. And for a lot of people, they say, well, then I need to go to the dark web to maintain anonymity or to hire a hit man. Right. To kill Chuck Bryant. That you could do. That's crazy. You could do. There was a site for a while.

I don't know if you'd heard of it or not. It's called Silk Road. Yeah. Which got shut down. And I tease Chuck. I know you've heard of it. It's like the most famous dark website of all time. Yeah. The feds busted Ross Ulbricht, who may or may not be Dread Pirate Roberts. Yeah. Which was the online name that they said, he's the guy running this. And he is now saying, ah, actually, that's not me. But all those bitcoins are mine. Yeah. So you can't seize those bitcoins. And they're, it's in courts now, they're trying to determine whether or not it counts as something that you can seize as an asset from a criminal. And they're saying that this is literally a case that no court has ever heard before. Yeah. They, it's never been questioned whether you

could seize cryptocurrency. Yeah. And you should listen to our podcast on bitcoins, by the way, from not too many months ago. That's a good one. But is essentially just, yeah, encrypted digital currency. And they have a really, really fascinating circumstantial case against Ulbricht, not just for operating the Silk Road site. Yeah. That's where you could buy drugs and things, by the way. Right. Which being the operator of that in and of itself shouldn't be a crime. I'm sure that they would have prosecuted them for that if they'd been able to get their hands on them for just that. Yeah. But apparently they also have them for at least two hired contract killings. One, he, he, um, I guess hired an undercover cop. Yeah. To do it. And the guy went

to the person who he was taking the hit out on and said, this guy's trying to kill you. I need you to cooperate. And I'm going to take pictures of you dead and send them to this guy. And Ulbricht apparently gave him like 40 grand upfront and another 40 after he saw the photos. Yeah. In bitcoins? No, I think in cash. Oh, okay. Although no, it would have been in bitcoins. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. So who knows? It could have been two bitcoins at the time or 5,000. Well, Silk Road 2.0 launched in November. Is it out now? It's out. And there are other copycatters like the black market reloaded. Which they went down for a little while after Silk Road went down, but then it went back up, I think. Yeah. Like, I don't know, man. I hate to say you shouldn't try and fight crime, but

you're not going to stop this stuff when one, you know, you cut off the head of one and another grows right out of it in its place, you know? It's true. If the, the structure that's allowing for the anonymity can remain intact. Which is the dark web. Right. But it's not just the dark web. It's like how you traverse the dark web, like using Tor. Yeah. I guess we haven't explained. The Onion Router, T-O-R, is what it's called. And it is software that you use to access the deep web and the dark web if you choose to. And it searches for these anonymous sites for you like a search engine. But instead of.com or.org or.net, they end in.onion. Right. The idea that Onion has many layers. Yeah. And that's, that's how you access it through Tor. You have

to buy it and install it on your computer. Right. Well, you can get it for free. Is it free? Yeah. Firefox had something that, it was basically a Tor bundle. It was the most popular one. You could download it for free. But it's not a web browser itself. It's like an add-on to a web browser that allows anonymity. And it does two things. One, it bounces your trail all over the world from server to server. So it makes you and your activity extraordinarily difficult to track. Yeah. It's not just like this computer went to this site. Right. It's like, yeah. That's that whole Onion thing. There's so many layers. It's like we can't, we don't know who this is or where they're, where they are or what they're doing or anything like that. Right. We just know right now

that this particular person happens to be it. There's a user on Silk Road, but we don't know who it is or anything. You can't track them because they're using Tor. The other thing is you can't get into dot Onion domain sites, dark web sites, unless you're using Tor. Right. Like they won't let you in unless you're an anonymous user. Yeah. So Tor has this kind of twofold thing, but there was recently a breach in it. And it turned out the FBI was using malware to break through the anonymity of Tor users. Oh, yeah. And yeah, and found out a lot of people on some sites that are, that were hosted by something called freedom hosting, which apparently had a horrible reputation for being the repository on the web, on the dark

web for child pornography. Right. And knowingly, like basically just not doing anything about it. Yeah. So the FBI had a, they hacked the freedom hosting servers and inserted this malware. So if you went to a freedom hosting site, any of them, not just necessarily a child pornography, but any site hosted by freedom hosting, which is like say go daddy for the dark web. Right. You would get this malware package that exploited a keyhole in Firefox's Tor bundle. It went into your computer said, Hey, give me your Mac address, which is basically like your computer hardware, like serial numbers, your computers and your computers alone's tracking number. Yeah. And then also tell me where the computer is. And it sent it back to a server,

a mystery server in McLean, Virginia. And finally, after like a month, the FBI was like, Yeah, that was us. We got, we have everybody who went on that site's name and address and everything on them. So that sent a huge ripple in Firefox. Yeah. Fixed this loophole, but it's on a huge ripple through, you know, the dark web, deep web community, saying like, Whoa, whoa, we were anonymous before, but you know, now it's, it's been shown definitively that the feds can find out who we are. So the anonymity is reduced if not taken away. Yeah, which defeats the whole purpose. Yeah. So if you don't have that, then you can keep lopping the heads off of these things and they're not going to grow back because people are afraid, people will be afraid because they won't feel

like they're anonymous any longer. Well, Tor has a sort of an ironic background, which we will get to right after this message break. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope, but I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all, and now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody care for me. What does Chris Harrison

have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this, and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we're back and we left you with the nugget that Tor has an interesting background, and the background of Tor is actually the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in 2003 launched this program for political dissidents and whistleblowers so they can get their message out without fear of reprisal. Right, and this is still a use of Tor. Like the New York Times, WikiLeaks, some other news agencies have Tor sites that if you want to go and contact the New York Times or WikiLeaks anonymously, like you can go to their Tor, their onion site and upload documents or say, hey, I have some information I want to share. And you can do it anonymously.

So the government though is basically law enforcement is trying to track down criminals using the software that the government created to begin with. So it's an interesting loop. But like we said, it's not all badness. If you live in a country where bad things are going on and you don't feel safe getting on the regular web as a political dissident, you can do so on the dark web. It offers a virtual meeting place for sometimes people are trying to combat these oppressive regimes in their countries and they can't just hop on Facebook and organize a meeting because they'll get smacked down. Right. If you're a person who values privacy for whatever reason or no reason at all, the deep web and the dark web offer file sharing services.

Email is a big one too. Like I know I can't remember the name of the one Edward Snowden's been using, but I think it got shut down. Like just the whole company shut down. Sorry, you're out of business now because you're helping Edward Snowden. But there are other email services. Basically everything you have on the web, if you want to do it anonymously, you have to go to a company that operates on the dark web that uses Tor to route its information or your information. The University of Luxembourg did a study where they tried to rank the most commonly accessed stuff on the dark web. And sadly, what they did find a lot of things like child pornography, there were also a lot of sites and chat rooms for human rights and freedom

of information. And just people that don't want to type in a search for how to grow marijuana. And then the next time they go to their Gmail account, there are a bunch of ads for grow lights. Yeah. And you're going, huh, how'd that happen? Well, it happened because you're searching the surface web with an IP that can be traced back to you. And not even illegal activities like that. You want to research a Fitbit bracelet, and then you go and they say, hey, Chuck, are you fat? You want to lose weight? Well, why else you want a Fitbit? All right, huh? Why would you want a Fitbit? Answer. It's definitely creepy. There's the Big Brother effect, I think. Everyone feels it. There's the existence of the deep web, not necessarily the dark web, but just the deep web.

All of those pages of information that are out there, some companies have figured out how to exploit it, or the fact that search engines, normal search engines aren't doing a good job of looking into the deep web. That company Bright Planet, I mentioned, they have a deep web harvester, which is basically a proprietary search engine algorithm that goes into websites and gets everything. Like it's not, it doesn't form an index. It grabs every bit of text off of every site associated with a URL. It sounds like big data. It is. Yeah. But they're doing it for companies like Big Pharma or Big Government. Yeah. And saying like, oh, you want to know what your competitor's up to? Well, here's every letter of every word, of every strip of text on your competitor's website,

including all internal stuff, everything. Wow. Please give us $10 million for that search. There's also this site called Vocative, which uses something like Bright Planet's deep web harvesting, but it does it for journalism purposes. It's basically, rather than searching using Google, if you were I would, for a story idea, they're searching using a deep web harvester to find all this other information that we wouldn't be able to find because we don't know how to search the deep web and writing stories like that. And there's some pretty interesting stuff that that site's put together already. I bet. Well, when you think about it, if you're only getting, if you think the internet is cool and you're only getting 0.03% of it.

Yeah. Yeah. Not bad. And you know, this is the web's, the surface web is getting deeper. The deep web is getting deeper. Search engines are searching deeper. It's, it's all like, and they're trying to anonymize more effectively. So it's, it's like this cyber war is going on. Oh, yes. You know, that was another good one we did. What do we do? Cyber war? One on cyber war. Yeah. Yeah. I knew I'd heard that before. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you

this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this. And I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day, truly every day of my life. I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your

Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there you go. I would have to say that this is one of those episodes where we did it, but it is not done. No. No. Sometimes we do them and it's like, that's it. There's nothing more to say about this topic. Yeah, I'm interested to see what happens with Ulbricht for sure. This can be a pretty monit landmark case. If you want to know more about the Deep Web, you can type Deep Web into the search engine and how stuff works. It'll bring back superficial results, only how stuff works stuff, but it's pretty good. So you'll be happy. And since I said search bar, that means

it's time for listener mail. All right, Josh, I'm going to call this birthday shout out that we rarely do. Okay. Hey, guys, I'm a long time listener, shamelessly writing to ask for a huge favor. Here's the sitch. I first became aware of your podcast when my last girlfriend, Natalie, David, introduced me to it when we started dating. And I've heard a thank for getting me hooked as we spent a lot of time listening to your show and learning together. As huge supporters of your podcast, we were compelled last year to make the trip up from Virginia to New York when you were putting on your trivia night. And Natalie is the one who gave us the Mike's on pants off t-shirts. Oh, okay. Yeah. And David, her boyfriend, they were super cool, super nice. They sat at

the table right near us. So I, you know, got to know him a little bit. And he says anyhow, here's where the favor comes in. She moved to Shanghai, China to teach and she's teaching little kids English. That's nice. And sadly, they, you know, separated when she moved over there, which to me are always like the saddest breakups. Right. Like there's nothing wrong. No, just moving to China. Sure. So they just thought it was probably the thing to do, but they, because I inquired back to David, emailed him about this and it's like, oh, no, you guys broke up and said, yeah, but we still really support each other and care about each other. And hopefully our paths will cross again one day. So anyway, Natalie, David is in China.

And because of this distance, I was at a loss when considering what to get her. He made a donation to cooperative for education in her name. And I know you guys like to read those names of people who contribute, but in this case, I was hoping you would just do a little something more special by wishing her a happy birthday. So on January 26th, which I think should be very soon, Natalie, happy birthday. Yeah, happy birthday. We remember you. I wear that shirt all the time. My wife thinks it's funny. And I hope you're doing well in China. And then don't give up on David. Oh, well, just cause he's here in the stupid United States. Her new Chinese boyfriend is like, what that guy just said? She's like, nothing. Wait, rewind that.

So anyway, I hope you're doing well over there in China. And thanks again for all the support. And I hope you guys hope your paths cross again one day. That was very nice. And that is from David Austin Burry. If you have a special request for Chuck or me or us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com. And you can, as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. month and provides unlimited 24 seven access trylinda.com free for seven days by visiting

lynda.com slash sysk. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts on the podcast. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show. Hey, dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

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