The main goal of the Tor network is to offer anonymity to anyone browsing the Web. The primary tool to achieve this is the well-known Tor Browser Bundle, based on Firefox, which you can download for free from its official website. However, within the Tor network there are other portals and domains that offer all sorts of services and information. The Tor2Web portal acts as a simple proxy for those sites, intended for anyone who wants to... "browse the Dark Web," so to speak.
The Dark Web and Its Darker Corners
Dark Web, Darknet, Onionland. Abandon all hope, you who wish to walk those corridors. Installing the Tor Browser Bundle is relatively easy, and with that we already gain a lot of anonymity (though deep down we know it's not perfect). But there's much more in the Tor network, so much that it makes the spam in our inbox pale. Let the Sildenafil pills and the Nigerian millionaires step aside. Buying, selling, and tutorials on making drugs, arms trading, cloned credit cards, stolen Bitcoins, forbidden books... to begin with. How much of that is real and how much is fake? I have no idea, and I assume most of our readers don't either, but if curiosity is too great, there is a keyhole through which you can look: Tor2Web.
Tor2Web: A Lightweight Gateway
A simple proxy, a gateway. Personally, Tor2Web is a "digital prop plane" we can board to very lightly visit those portals that end in .onion. If you want to avoid visiting Tor2Web every time you decide to check a portal, all you have to do is add '.to' to the address, so it becomes '.onion.to'. If visits to Tor2Web become too frequent, I must warn that it's the wrong way. Tor2Web offers no anonymity or privacy whatsoever. None. We can all board that plane... but everyone can see the plane once it's in the air.
The service works very well with those .onion portals known for their stability, such as the DuckDuckGo search engine. If the .onion address returns an error message, it's most likely no longer available (or it appears at a specific time). I repeat: To surpass Tor2Web's offering, you need the Tor Browser. Onionland veterans even recommend extreme options like abandoning Windows and installing Tor directly on Linux (the Tails distro comes to mind). Either way, tread carefully.
