Some "Darknet" or "Deepnet" portals (as of Spring 2015)

     NOTE: In each case, I urge you go inspect the home page of the site without clicking on any of its links.  In some cases, I have offered brief descriptions without links because the sites are just too dangerous.  You may learn much by examining how these sites present themselves to you, but if you click on links, you open yourself to potential investigation by the FBI or DHS, and your computer may be infected with malware or hijacked by a "botnet."  Some links will lead you to sites dangerous to your computer, or even your life.  Each of these sites are the equivalent of a real, lawless pirate outpost that any computer linked to the Internet can access.  When we get to print and manuscript text production, we will encounter "outlaw" text productions that would have been considered similarly dangerous to their cultures and political authorities.  These are "our pirates" and "our thugs"--please beware and limit your curiosity to what you can learn from the home pages.  In any event, never allow "notifications" from any site of this type and always use the Goucher VPN client when searching to disguise your IP address and, hence, your actual location on Earth.  These people have been known to make house calls.

4chan (Warning: splash page usually contains some pornographic images.  If this attracts rather than alarms you, remember that sites track their visitors and can visit you unasked.  DuckDuckGo might be a good browser to use if you want to make an impartial research visit.  4chan is an aggregator web site that facilitates sharing of copyrighted content--also the probable meeting ground of the Lulzsec and Anonymous hackers)

8chan (An aggregator web site founded by Frederick Brennan after he believed 4chan's management was too intrusive/restrictive.  I did not forget to hyperlink it.  Participants have been involved in child pornography and neo-Nazi organizing, including the 2017 Charlottesville "Unite the Right" riot.  Since 2015, Google has banned it as a direct search result, and law enforcement authorities from a number of countries, including the U.S., have been monitoring its content, invstigating individual post authors and commentors, and filing subpoenas for evidence from the servers.  Please do not go anywhere near this site, although reading about it in reliable sources might help you develop a paper on Darknet activities and the future of digital text.)

"Annonews" (The PR site of the Anonymous hacker group) <<As of 6/1/15 this site was offline, probably taken down by DHS or some other government agency.>>

WikiLeaks (The activist site promoting libertarian and leftist causes using leaked government documents, etc.)

"Selected Papers in Anonymity" (A library of technical and other papers by theorists and technicians promoting "network and information freedom," anonymous communication and evasion of governmental observation, etc.

Deep.Dot.Net (Recently [spring 2019] seized by the FBI, this site used to aggregate news about Darknet sites, along with some independently produced Darknet news covering "LE" [Law Enforcement] activity, recent events, and lore.  The site's Darknet Dictionary used to help translate some of the in-group slang you may encounter.  You can access another, relatively up-to-date Darknet dictionary at DarknetMarkets.org.)

        If you have sampled even a few of these links, you probably have gathered that the Darknet is a very unstable place.  Sites rarely last more than a few years before disappearing.  Site operators often are criminals by almost any nation's definition, so they have little to lose if they should decide to defraud their "customers," and such scams often form part of the lexicon that Darknet denizens communicate with (e.g., "4/20" or "April 20 sale," now commonly alluding to a famous scam committed by "Tony76.").  The frequency with which Darknet jargon refers approvingly to fraud and deception should tell you a great deal about its content and authors.