Is there any way you can substantiate any of this? I wouldn't be shocked, but it seems borderline implausible that we'd be getting all this interest in various ways to hack into iPhones physically if you could just dial a number--and I think it also goes without saying that, whether Apple provides official backdoors or no, it has a high interest in ensuring that there aren't any unofficial backdoors for many other reasons (preserving DRM for one example, if you need them to have a selfish motivation).
I'm fascinated by this idea of a deep web only accessible by the cognoscenti. Presumably if a link slips out then the deep web becomes a lot shallower?
Well actually the relatively hard part is hosting a crawler of decent size, and then if you crawl in violation of robots.txt its pretty straight forward to use iptables to ban you, of course you then spend money on hiring a botnet to mask your traffic footprint, except that on that same darknet there might be people who are friends of the owner of that botnet.
Does this not rather beg the question - is there a deep web, and how big (or small) is it. I can easily understand the desire for a coherent group of people putting up vpns etc to keep their world seperate from others - but that implies you join in based on some other criteria, which sounds not very deep web but pretty secret-VPN-we-are-not-telling-you-about-unless-we-cross-your-AS-Number-when-something-is-obvious
It just has that feel of "secret society" to it, which tended just to reflect the informal power structures of the wider world anyway.
No, the "deep web" is real in the sense that there are billions of network addresses that contain content or services which are not accessible through the 'standard' discovery services (Google). In many ways things like Usenet are still part of it as there are netnews groups, and they get used, but there isn't a lot of indexing going on. Further there are at least two 'separated' NNTP type networks that are invitation only.
So it is a "collection" of secret societies, each with their own quirks. As a collection is constitutes a 'web' and perhaps the only commonality is the desire to not be part of the "public" web.
Can confirm this. I interviewed for a UK based competitor who was scared NSO were better. The competitor's supposed capabilities were scary enough for me to bin my phone contract at the time because they had my contact details. The agent was less than honest about the job description as well. Arseholes all around.
Stipulate that somebody has an exploit for libjpeg, and that's probably enough to own a phone by texting them. That said, with a libjpeg exploit, there's a lot more fun one can have.
