Basics: The Internet vs The World Wide Web
The path to becoming a hacker starts with the basics. You can't ignore them. Like the Internet.
Few understand the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web, and what types of it exist. Let's freshen up our memory.
The Internet - The Physical Infrastructure
The Internet is what roads are for our daily transport: The physical infrastructure for all our traffic.
All of the communication that takes places nowadays relies on it.
The World Wide Web - The Information on the Internet
The World Wide Web (WWW or the Web) is the information space, accessible via the Internet.
It relies on the infrastructure of the Internet to provide people with access to information. One can see it as a layer that runs on top of the Internet and uses the HTTP protocol to communicate information to people on it.
While we are used to accessing it via a browser, it can be accessed via a large variety of software.
However, the Web can be further segmented into two parts:
1. Surface Web - The Visible Web
The Surface Web makes up roughly ~5% of the Web. Think of it as the Web that is accessible for search engines.
2. Deep Web - The Invisible Web
The Deep Web makes up roughly 95% of the Web. Why so much? Because a big part of the Web is, on purpose, not visible to everyone. Think of your Facebook stream. Only you can access it, thus, it falls into this category.
The Deep Web is made up of:
- Not indexed sites
- Dynamic content, such as searches
- Password-protected sites