Okay first of all, you can browse the dark web with an iPhone these days. You don’t need Tails or a VPN or anything crazy. Just download the Tor Browser from the App Store.

Second of all, you should know what the three kinds of webs are. The dark web is basically just a bunch of .onion domains. Then there’s the deep web, which is the parts of the web you can’t access (intranets and such). The clear web is… well… this.

All the TOR browser does is accesses the dark web over TOR, which means The Onion Router. And it parses .onion links, and it operates as a kind of VPN. There are two parts to it, .onion sites and TOR, the VPN thing. They go together.

A LOT of sites have Dark web (or .onion) sites. Proton Mail, New York Times, Google, and more. They do this so journalists and people in contested/war torn areas can anonymously access services. You shouldn’t be using TOR because it has limited bandwidth and some people need it. That said, thousands of people explore the dark web. Most of them leave unsatisfied.

If you want to have a look, look for the Hidden Wiki. It’s kind of a jumping off point. There will be a few .onion sites that claim to be “The” hidden wiki. They’re all basically valid.

The hidden wiki is really just a bunch of links. Some of them are legit and these links should always work. If they say a link goes to a site where you can buy drugs, children, or murder, don’t just click on it. Chances are good the link will be dead. If the link isn’t dead, chances are good it’s a scam. If it’s not a scam, chances are good it’s an FBI honeypot. If it’s not a honeypot, you might have found illegal content. Then it sucks to be you (unless you’re into that shit). But at that point it’s probably a honeypot. Which means the FBI will come and talk to you about what you were looking for.

TL;DR: Very fucking carefully… and you can do it with an iPhone (or anything else really)

Generally with TOR or a Tails live CD.

I personally don’t find anything of value there. There is porn, legal and illegal kinds, drug stores, credit card stores, there is even a Turkish database of all their citizens from a couple years ago.

Some small communities 4chan style.

There are a lot of scam sites too, either run by feds or just regular scammers.

It is. I was curious many years ago, and downloaded a TOR browser to see what it was all about.

It’s not as easy as Googling what ever your looking for. Or, at least not when I tried. You pretty much had to know where to start and follow links like breadcrumbs to see where they would take you.

I did find some stuff, most of it was harmless privacy obsessed blogs but I did find some clearly illegal sites.

It really was a pain to navigate, and more of a waste of time than anything, since I wasn’t looking to accomplish any “dark” goals.

I guess those that NEED to access the dark web, will learn how to do what they need, but 99% of people will never have reason to bother.

1. Get a VPN and connect to it. Make sure it’s a good one that auto reconnects if the connection drops.

2. Download the TOR browser and probably read some guides about how to configure it for maximum privacy.

3. Get completely lost once you’re connected trying to figure out how to actually find and navigate the dark web. Usually involves finding a dark web search engine.

4. Be careful where your keystrokes lead you. They call it dark for a reason.

Most of my time on the dark web is unfortunately accessing corporate intranets, so probably just turn on your work computer.

Someone else explained Tor already.

As for what can be found there: obviously it’s possible to put any data whatsoever on the dark web. But the main reason why people would put anything there is that they would get in legal trouble if they did it on the clearnet (= the ordinary, non-dark-web Internet). So if you’re not attempting to do illegal things, you probably won’t get much value out of it.

In addition to TOR there’s also i2p

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P

I’ve never used it so idk what’s on it.