My site is hosted on the surface web. This is all good and fine because its easier to share my website when needed. Its also the web that everyone uses, so it is just natural that if you want your website to be accessible, you host in within the http protocol.

I cannot ignore that there is cool, awesome stuff hidden within the deep internet. A lot of this stuff is meant to be hidden which makes it all the more fascinating to find. You can find tax and legal documents with google dorking if you use specific queries. Possibly admin panels aswell. Maybe even classified government documents? And if a page isn't linked, well, you cant find it at all with search engines. If you want to play around with searching for hidden data linked to by sites, here is a tool I found just recently last week: https://github.com/blacklanternsecurity/bbot. It scans all open ports and routes on the site and generates a graph. Really cool stuff!

Its really good to want to search for things. It seems that search-engines have made things too convenient. Our browser is simply a means to an end, its a necessity we use to access the few websites we require every day. What we've lost in its stead is the feeling of a interconnected internet. No more do we have to enter webrings or webtaxis and hop through several links to find the page we want. No more saving links to a text file on your harddrive. For the most part, there is no journey or effort to get to where we want!

Alternative Internet Protocols

So..., lets go back to the old internet! Non-standard internet protocols like Gopher, Gemini, Finger attempt to replicate what the internet was like before modern SEO practices. Oftentimes, these protocols are very simple. They only support forms, buttons and raw text.

A while ago, me and my team made a Gemini web-browser in Electron for Deerhacks (Blogpost Here). It was a very simple project it was only working around with plaintext files. It is not at all done, but I used this aswell as Castor to browse the Gemini and Gopher Internet.

And of course, Lynx supports all these protocols out of the box! Heres a pic:

Cool Pages

Search engines

Well, these are more-like page-aggregators, since setting up a search engine yourself is so costly.

• gopher://gopher.quux.org
• gopher://sdf.org:70

Pages

• gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/ralfwause/ - Sysadmin going insane

  • gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/ralfwause/greatreset.txt - Story about the GREAT RESET!

• gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/slugmax/ - Rampant Blogger

  • gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/slugmax/docs/books - A collection of books from slugmax

• gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/bottles/forum/ - Gopher Live Forumn

• gopher://dataswamp.org:70/1/~solene - Huge amount of linux/OSS tutorials. Lots of useless tutorials tho...

• gopher://tilde.pink:70/1/~bencollver/dir - Google Maps lmao

• gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/ - Gemini Wikipedia

• gemini://cdg.thegonz.net/ - Gemini Search Engine (Very rudimentary)

• gemini://lab6.com/ - Site that is all PDFs (PDFs are better!)

• gemini://brainsocks.xyz/ - Some 3d Models

Side-note: Apparently, gopher is really good for ecalating SSRF attacks, and a whole security tool has been made to abuse this tech: https://github.com/tarunkant/Gopherus