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In the late 1990s, two research organizations in the US Department of Defense drove efforts to develop an anonymized and encrypted network that would protect the sensitive communications of US spies. This secret network would not be known or accessible to ordinary internet surfers. And while the original clandestine intention was never fully realized, some of the researchers saw a different value proposition at hand—launching a nonprofit focused on anonymity for human rights and privacy activists.

Enter the Tor network, short for “The Onion Router,” given the many layers of encryption that guard passing information. Tor lives on the fringe of the internet and serves as the underlying technology of the dark web—a collection of hidden sites inaccessible via a regular browser and not indexed by search engines such as Google. The Tor browser—a free download—is all you need to unlock this hidden corner of the web where privacy is paramount. Radical anonymity, however, casts a long shadow.

The truth about the dark web is that in addition to offering extreme privacy and protection from the surveillance of authoritarian governments, it facilitates a growing underground marketplace that sophisticated criminals use to traffic drugs, stolen identities, child pornography, and other illicit products and services. And with untraceable cryptocurrency as the primary means of payment, close cooperation between law enforcement, financial institutions, and regulators around the world is required to tighten the screws on nefarious activity.

The gray areas

Today, over 65,000 unique URLs ending with .onion exist on the Tor network. A 2018 study by computer security firm Hyperion Gray catalogued about 10 percent of these sites and found that the most prevalent functions facilitate communication via forums, chat rooms, and file and image hosts, as well as commerce via marketplaces. These functional roles, particularly related to communication, support many uses that are considered legal and legitimate in free societies. Furthermore, a 2016 study by research firm Terbium Labs analyzing 400 randomly selected .onion sites suggests that over half of all domains on the dark web are in fact legal.

For individuals living under oppressive regimes that block large parts of the internet or punish political dissent, the dark web is a lifeline that provides access to information and protection from persecution. In freer societies, it can be a critical whistle-blowing and communication tool that shields people from retribution or judgment in the workplace or community. Alternatively, it can simply deliver privacy and anonymity for those wary of how corporations and governments are tracking, using, and potentially monetizing their data. Today, many organizations maintain a hidden website on Tor, including nearly every major newspaper, Facebook, and even the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This is because a Tor website demonstrates a (sometimes symbolic) commitment to privacy. The New York Times and the CIA, for example, are both hoping to facilitate communication with virtual walk-ins who can provide sensitive information.

On the flip side, the same privacy and anonymity that deliver protection from tyrants and targeted advertisements also make the dark web a springboard for crime. Some of the more prevalent illicit activities include arms trafficking, drug dealing, and the sharing of exploitative content—often involving children—such as pornography and images of violence and other types of abuse. Websites support the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other extremist groups.

The pairing of dark web services with cryptocurrencies has led to expectations of a boom in crime. A decade ago, an unknown cryptography expert (with particular expertise in cracking passwords) who used the alias Satoshi Nakamoto developed the world’s first currency and payment network not controlled by a national government: Bitcoin. Originally a niche medium of exchange for the technology community, Bitcoin emerged in 2011 as the currency of choice for drug dealers conducting transactions on a dark-web site known as the Silk Road. Over the past five years, the combination of an encrypted network hidden from most of the world and a transactional currency that is nearly untrackable by law enforcement officials resulted in a small, but significant, marketplace of illicit vendors selling illegal wares.

Of the close to 200 domains catalogued as illegal by Terbium Labs, more than 75 percent appear to be marketplaces. Many of these are fueled by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, such as Monero. Recreational and pharmaceutical drugs are the most popular products, followed by stolen and counterfeit documents such as identities, credit cards, and bank credentials. Some sites offer hacking and technological crime services, including malware, distributed denial of service attacks, and hacking for hire. A good number offer a mix of these and other products, including pornography and counterfeit goods.

Although the serious nature and rapid growth of illicit transactions on the dark web should concern governments and global financial institutions, the overall portion of worldwide commerce transacted on the dark web is minuscule compared with global illicit commerce. A recent report by a leading crypto-payment analytic firm, Chainalysis, shows that Bitcoin transactions on the dark web grew from approximately $250 million in 2012 to $872 million in 2018. The firm projected that Bitcoin transactions on the dark web will reach more than $1 billion in 2019. If correct, it would represent a record-setting level of illegal transactions in this arena. The report also noted that the proportion of Bitcoin transactions tied to illicit deals has declined by 6 percent since 2012 and now accounts for less than 1 percent of all Bitcoin activity. Even more broadly, the United Nations estimates that the amount of money laundered globally in one year is 2 to 5 percent of global GDP—between $1.6 trillion and $4 trillion.

Even though the total economic volume of illicit dark web activity remains relatively small, many of the most corrosive threats to society today operate in the shadows of the Tor network and thus merit the attention of international regulators, financial institutions, and law enforcement agencies.

Policing the shadows

Protecting political dissidents, privacy advocates, and whistle-blowers should not come at the expense of empowering child abusers, arms traffickers, and drug lords. Therein lies the challenge for regulators and law enforcement agencies: to devise approaches that walk the fine line of protecting liberal principles in an age of information control while identifying and eradicating the most insidious activities on the dark web. Over the past several years, the international community has made significant progress addressing these challenges by improving information sharing, sharpening law enforcement’s technical capabilities to take down major illicit marketplaces, and regulating the transfer of cryptocurrency transactions.

Addressing the most nefarious activities on the dark web starts with improved information sharing among law enforcement agencies and financial institutions. The global nature of the dark web makes international cooperation imperative. During 2018–19, Interpol and the European Union brought together law enforcement agencies from 19 countries to identify 247 high-value targets and shared the type of operational intelligence necessary for enforcement. The results are promising: just this year, efforts allowed members of the group to make arrests and shut down 50 illicit dark-web sites, including Wall Street Market and Valhalla, two of the largest drug markets.

The growth of illegal dark web transactions has also spurred many governments around the world to disrupt criminal activities by improving the capabilities of domestic law enforcement agencies such as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). For example, the FBI has reportedly conducted operations that allow it to “de-anonymize” Tor servers. The FBI does this by establishing nodes in the network that allow the agency to see the identities and locations of some illegal Tor-based webpages. The first significant action was the FBI’s takedown of the “Silk Road 2.0” website, the leading illicit dark web marketplace in 2014. The investigation revealed that, during its two and a half years in operation, the site had been used by several thousand drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services to well over 100,000 buyers. The site was used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars from these unlawful transactions. All told, the site had generated sales totaling more than 9.5 million in Bitcoin valued, at the time, at approximately $1.2 billion. AlphaBay and Hansa market, two of the biggest successors of Silk Road, were shut down in 2017.

Dark web enforcement capabilities have continued to grow, including a recent Dutch operation to hijack a leading dark web merchant, anonymously run it for a month, and then use the information collected to disrupt dozens of other dark web merchants.

Need for new regulations

In addition to conducting disruption operations, governments and international institutions are attempting to directly regulate the cryptocurrencies that are fueling dark web marketplaces. In June 2019, for example, the Financial Action Task Force issued guidance that urges companies processing cryptocurrency transfers to identify both the sender and receiver of fund transfers. The guidance follows the recommendation of the 2018 G20 Summit, in which leaders asked international regulatory agencies to consider policy responses for crypto assets, particularly related to know your customer, anti–money laundering, and countering the financing of terrorism. The start-up ecosystem of exchanges, wallets, and other crypto payment facilitators is far from having the necessary infrastructure to adopt such financial-sector-like standards, but supervisors need to begin laying the groundwork for enhanced scrutiny. The impending launch of Libra, Facebook’s cryptocurrency, will only make this a more pressing concern as the barriers to adopting virtual assets are lowered for Facebook’s nearly 2 billion-plus users.

A fine line

Authoritarian regimes will continue efforts to block access to the dark web and the threats to legitimacy that it poses by enabling dissidents and activists. Faced with this threat, the natural reflex of liberal civil societies will be to advocate that Tor remain unmonitored and unpoliced to protect free expression and privacy. The reality of the dark web is much more complicated, requiring a nuanced approach from supervisors and law enforcement agencies to thwart activities that are considered illegal and immoral in free societies, all the while protecting the very real benefits of an anonymized network.

Facebook says that it won’t send Mark Zuckerberg to the UK to appear before a Parliamentary committee that threatened to force him to testify the next time he entered the country if he wouldn’t come willingly. In a letter, Facebook’s head of public policy, Rebecca Stimson, wrote that Zuckerberg “has no plans to meet with the committee or travel to the UK at the present time.” She also sent her letter three days after the deadline Facebook was given to respond.

While Zuckerberg appeared before US Congress and has plans to meet with EU lawmakers, he declined to meet with the UK’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Instead, Facebook sent Mike Schroepfer, its chief technical officer, to answer their questions. But the committee was unhappy with his answers — often, with the lack of them — if not also the snub. And so it sent Facebook a followup letter on May 1st saying that it would like Zuckerberg to appear to provide satisfactory responses.

“We hope that he will respond positively to our request, but if not the committee will resolve to issue a formal summons for him to appear when he is next in the UK,” committee chairman Damian Collins wrote at the time.

In a statement today, Collins said he is “disappointed” with Facebook’s response and lack of transparency. But he seems to be backing off of the summons threat and offers to accept testimony from Zuckerberg through a video call.

Still, by declining to appear, Zuckerberg risks being forced to testify the next time he has a connecting flight through Heathrow and potentially facing arrest if he doesn’t go along. And at a bare minimum, he’s guaranteed to have further pissed off UK lawmakers.

Facebook essentially says that it sees the request to see Zuckerberg as unreasonable. In her letter, Stimson writes that “Facebook has now held lengthy meetings or evidence sessions around the world.” That included providing written answers and five hours of testimony from a senior official to the UK committee. “We are disappointed after providing a very significant amount of information ... that the committee declared our response insufficient.”

Stimson’s letter also includes about 17 pages of answers to questions that Schroepfer didn’t give responses to during his testimony last month. One answer reveals that Facebook’s Like button, which sends data back to Facebook even if it isn’t clicked, is present on 8.4 million websites. Facebook’s tracking pixel, which also monitors users, is installed on 2.2 million websites.

Collins says these answers still aren’t good enough. “Given that these were follow up questions to questions Mr. Schroepfer previously failed to answer, we expected both detail and data, and in a number of cases got excuses,” he writes.

Facebook may want to avoid putting Zuckerberg in front of the UK’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee for a number of reasons. Aside from prolonging the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the committee has also shown itself to be substantially more technologically savvy than many lawmakers elsewhere and has thrown much tougher questions as the company.

The committee plans to follow up with Facebook to “address significant gaps” in the company’s answers as it continues to investigate its data privacy practices, as well as issues around propaganda, election ads, and content moderation.

Stephen Hawking’s biggest accomplishment shone through both his physics work and his outreach to the public, bridging gaps between things that once seemed incompatible. Whether he was demonstrating that black holes did indeed radiate material or that popular culture could embrace the mysteries of the Universe, he had a way of making seemingly impossible things connect.

Before Hawking, black holes were considered the Universe’s most mysterious garbage collectors. It was once believed that nothing could escape the immense gravitational pull of one of these objects; they’re so dense that they even pull in light. But Hawking found that, in fact, something does escape a black hole: radiation. Thanks to his work, we now know that black holes aren’t even totally black. (They actually have a faint glow about them from the small amount of energy they radiate.) The equation Hawking came up with to explain how this phenomenon works became his most notable achievement, one that’s named for him: Hawking radiation. “He came up with the idea that black holes have a temperature,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tells The Verge.

Though his work upended what was thought to be a fundamental truth of black holes, Hawking radiation actually did some reconciliation. His work connected two conflicting concepts in theoretical physics: quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. “Those are the two pillars on which physics now rests, but they’re really quite incompatible to one another,” Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at UC Berkely who was once a student of Hawking’s, tells The Verge.

Quantum mechanics is all about how the Universe works at the smallest level — how teeny particles like electrons and positrons move and connect. If you want to know how atoms stick together, for instance, quantum mechanics has your back. On the other side of the scale is general relativity, which explains how gravity works. It’s the idea that large objects of the Universe — like planets, stars, and galaxies — actually bend the space and time around them. And that dictates how these objects interact with one another in space.

The two theories are both strong, backed up by lots of science and observation. But they seem to be in conflict, never truly fitting no matter how hard people try. And that’s a problem for physicists because they’re all about simplicity. “We want to be able to describe more and more phenomena with fewer fundamental ingredients,” Bousso says.

But Hawking found a way to bring big and small together. He looked at what happens around a really massive object — one with lots of gravity — on a very small scale. Specifically, he analyzed how particles are interacting at the edge of a black hole, known as the event horizon. This boundary is often referred to as the “point of no return.” Once you cross this line, you’re going into the black hole no matter what — unless you’ve figured out a way to travel faster than the speed of light. (Spoiler: you can’t.)

Here’s where we get small: according to quantum mechanics, the vacuum of space isn’t really empty. Instead, virtual particles are popping in and out of existence in the vacuum all the time. These particles pop up tangled together as opposite pairs: one particle with positive energy and one negative, a yin and a yang. What happens to one affects the other. Typically, the pair will come together quickly and cancel each other out. But if they form on the event horizon, that’s not what happens. Things start to get weird.A particle pair that straddles the event horizon will be wrenched apart. The black hole sucks in the one particle with negative energy while the positive particle is flung away from the black hole. That escaping particle becomes the Hawking radiation, heated up by its escape. The doomed particle becomes part of the black hole. But since it has negative energy, it actually makes the black hole slightly smaller.If you left a black hole alone, this process would go on for billions and billions of years. Eventually, the black hole would waste away — and then, because black holes are weird, explode. How big is the explosion? “Fairly small by astronomical standards,” Hawking wrote. But it’s still pretty damn big: about the size of 1 million one-megaton hydrogen bombs.Of course, many black holes are usually surrounded by material that is constantly falling into them. But Hawking showed it was theoretically possible for a black hole to disappear over time in the right conditions. “Black holes won’t last forever,” says McDowell. “Long after all the other stars have died out, the black holes will be glowing and eventually blow up.”

This idea upended physics when it was published in 1974. But it also solved a huge puzzle: if nothing ever escapes from a black hole, that means they’re the Universe’s clean-up crew, eating material that never comes back. But that just didn’t make sense with other physics. There’s a law of thermodynamics that says that the randomness and chaos of a system — known as entropy — cannot decrease over time; our messy Universe can’t get cleaner. So how was it possible that black holes were vacuuming up the trash? Hawking’s discovery demonstrated that black holes don’t violate that law of thermodynamics: by emitting radiation, they are also keeping things chaotic. “[He] wasn’t trying to address this puzzle with thermodynamics. It just turned out to be exactly what was needed,” says Ted Jacobson, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland.

Hawking radiation didn’t completely solve everything, though. (What does?) It provided an important first step in bridging quantum mechanics and gravity. There are still a lot of things about big and small physics that have yet to be reconciled. Hawking radiation was just one way the ideas could work together.

Hawking radiation opened up some major questions, too. In quantum physics, a particle recipe — the orientation, mass, spin, and other traits of particles — is called information. That information sticks around. When you burn a piece of paper, for instance, the information of what was in that paper is contained in fire, smoke, and ash. If you wanted, you could put the paper back together because you had all the information from it. But Hawking radiation introduced a new conundrum: if black holes are losing mass, where does all their information go?

A black hole’s information is slowly disappearing when it wastes away — and that’s just not supposed to happen! The radiation that the black hole emits doesn’t actually contain information from the black hole, so it seems like all the details are disappearing along the way. “The information should not be completely lost, but in this process, it would be,” Katie Mack, a theoretical astrophysicist at North Carolina State University who is working on a book about the end of the Universe, tells The Verge. It’s called the black hole information paradox, and people have come up with tentative solutions for it, including Hawking himself. But it’s still not completely solved.

Still, what Hawking did was to take a huge step toward a unified theory of physics — a theory of everything, as the recent movie based on his life is titled. We still aren’t totally to that point, but Hawking started building the bridge. And he continued to work on that bridge up until he died. “He gave us problems to work on and directions to go with them... If we solve those problems, we’ll have a better understanding of which fundamental laws truly govern reality,” says Mack.

Hawking’s knack for connection extended beyond just physics. Black holes seem abstract, but he found ways to bring them to everyone. He made people excited about what’s out there. He was media savvy, appearing on The Simpsons, Star Trek, and more. He also wrote popular books about his work. So, in the same way that he connected the big and the small, he also brought people into the cosmological fold, inspiring new generations of scientists to continue learning more about the weirdness of space.

Microsoft shipped its first video game in 1981, appropriately named Microsoft Adventure. It was an MS-DOS game that booted directly from a floppy disk, and set the stage for Microsoft’s adventures in gaming. A lot has changed over the past 37 years, and when you think of Microsoft’s efforts in gaming these days you’ll immediately think of Xbox. It’s fair to say a lot is about to change over the next few decades too, and Microsoft is getting ready. Today, the software giant is unveiling a new gaming cloud division that’s ready for a future where consoles and gaming itself are very different to today.

Microsoft has been building up to this move for a while. The company has been mysteriously acquiring gaming-related companies over the past few years. From Havok in 2015, Simplygon in 2017, to PlayFab earlier this year, you’ve probably never heard of any of them, but they’re important for Microsoft’s bold cloud gaming ambitions. While these acquisitions have been taking place, Microsoft has been reshuffling its gaming teams as the company prepares to launch its own cloud gaming services. Phil Spencer is now Microsoft’s head of gaming, and reports directly to CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft’s new gaming cloud division is headed up by Kareem Choudhry, a 20-year Microsoft veteran that has worked on Outlook, DirectX, and Xbox engineering.

“Phil really wanted a dedicated team focused exclusively on the gaming cloud, says Choudhry, in an interview with The Verge. “Those were conversations that started happening last summer, and we really started creating the structure of the organization at the end of last year.” The new division is designed to entice developers and game publishers to use Microsoft’s cloud services. Ubisoft has been using Microsoft’s Azure cloud services across PC, Xbox, and PS4 with Rainbow Six: Siege recently, and even the mobile game Black Desert uses Azure virtual machines and databases. Microsoft wants more and more game developers to use its cloud, especially as games become more connected across devices for their multiplayer experiences.

“Phil really wanted a dedicated team focused exclusively on the gaming cloud, says Choudhry, in an interview with The Verge. “Those were conversations that started happening last summer, and we really started creating the structure of the organization at the end of last year.” The new division is designed to entice developers and game publishers to use Microsoft’s cloud services. Ubisoft has been using Microsoft’s Azure cloud services across PC, Xbox, and PS4 with Rainbow Six: Siege recently, and even the mobile game Black Desert uses Azure virtual machines and databases. Microsoft wants more and more game developers to use its cloud, especially as games become more connected across devices for their multiplayer experiences.

“We believe there is going to be 2 billion gamers in the world, and our goal is to reach every one of them,” explains Choudhry. Part of the way Microsoft will get there with its new gaming cloud focus is with subscription services. Xbox Game Pass has been available over the past year, and recently Microsoft decided all of its first-party games would come to the subscription service at launch. Sea of Thieves is the first big title, but future Haloand Gears of War games will also be available. “We’re really pleased with the success that’s happening [with Game Pass],” says Choudhry. “We continue to believe in user choice, and we also believe there’s room in the industry for a gaming subscription and that’s what we’re going to build.”

A “Netflix for video games” would be an important service for any company with cloud gaming aspirations, but it’s going to be a difficult task for Microsoft on rival platforms like the PlayStation 4 or Nintendo’s Switch. Despite the challenge, Choudhry hints that Microsoft could achieve this by streaming games to devices. “We’re looking at ways to make that content available to anyone no matter what device they’re on,” says Choudhry.

It feels like every couple of years a new service springs to life, promising game streaming from powerful servers. Sony acquired streaming games service OnLive only to shut it down, and previously acquired Gaikai which eventually became part of its PlayStation Now game streaming service. Sony discontinued game streaming to the PlayStation 3, PS Vista, PlayStation TV, and smart TVs and Blu-ray players last year, deciding to focus on PS4 and Windows PCs instead. Game streaming is a challenging service to get right, and even Nvidia is trying its hand for PC games.

Microsoft has teased Xbox game streaming within three years, and it’s clearly going to be big part of the new cloud gaming division. “We’re spending a lot of time thinking about that space,” explains Choudhry. He says a “bunch of things” need to come together, including making a business model that’s attractive to third parties. “What we’re doing with game pass and creating a subscription-based product, where over half the content is third-party content. I would say we’re getting started from a subscription product perspective.”

Microsoft’s new cloud gaming division is only just getting started on a number of these efforts, and the real test will be whether developers and game publishers are interested in using the company’s tools, distribution methods, and ultimately a game streaming service. Reaching 2 billion gamers is an ambitious target even for a new Microsoft that’s focusing aggressively on the cloud.