Extremists will be caught in hidden forums

[Объединенное Детективное Бюро]

American researchers have introduced a program that can index hidden sites. The developers believe that with its help they can find extremist forums on the Web. Scientists from Arizona State University in Tucson, USA, have created a program that can penetrate the closed corners of the Internet. In general, modern search engines use robotic programs to search for sites (they are also called “web spiders”). Robots bypass pages of sites and enter information about them into the search engine database. Sites that want to save incognito do not allow robots to themselves. One way to hide from a search engine is to not allow traffic from IP addresses belonging to large search engines. Invisible sites can be the refuge of extremists, said Hsinchun Chen, director of the artificial intelligence lab at Arizona State University. On these resources, extremists can exchange the most radical ideas and go unpunished. Therefore, researchers believe that such sites pose a threat to public safety. The program developed at the University tricks hidden sites in several ways at once. Firstly, it constantly changes the IP address of the computer on which it is running. Secondly, it disguises its presence on the site as traffic generated by its visitors. NewScientist reports that the program can even try to register on the forum on its own - in the event that only authorized users have access to the posts. The list of resources that the program should visit is made up by the developers themselves. In one of the hidden forums, the program indexed over 29 thousand posts in 39 minutes. The link is not valid

 

[Матушкин Андрей Николаевич]

Thank!