Ahmia

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Ahmia is a clearnet search engine for Tor's onion services created by Juha Nurmi in 2014.[1] Ahmia is accessible through both its clearweb website and its onion service version. It is one of the primary tools used by Tor users to discover and access onion websites.[2]

Overview

Developed during the 2014 Google Summer of Code by Juha Nurmi with support from the Tor Project,[3] the open source.[4] Ahmia indexes onion websites on the Tor network.[5] The search engine is open-source: the crawler component is based on Scrapy,[6] the index component is built with Elasticsearch,[7] and the website component is developed with Django.[8]

Ahmia has a strict policy of filtering child sexual abuse material, and since October 2023, Ahmia has expanded its filter to include all sexually related searches, citing widespread distribution and search of child sexual abuse on Tor as the reason.[9] In a study in Scientific Reports explained the filtering policies for Ahmia and its role in combating the distribution of illicit content on the Tor network. The paper also acknowledged the contributions of the first author, Juha Nurmi, the creator of Ahmia as he expanded filtering policies in November 2023. According to the scientific publication, the decision to broaden content filtering was the result of the research findings, which showed that 11 percent of search sessions sought child sexual abuse material on Tor and that around one-fifth of onion websites hosted such unlawful content.[10]

The service partners with GlobaLeaks's submissions and Tor2web statistics for hidden service discovery[11] and as of July 2015 has indexed about 5000 sites.[12] Ahmia is also affiliated with Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Rights, an organization that promotes transparency and freedom-enabling technologies.[13]

In July 2015 the site published a list of hundreds of fraudulent clones of web pages (including such sites as DuckDuckGo, as well a dark web page).[14][15] According to Nurmi, "someone runs a fake site on a similar address to the original one and tries to fool people with that" with the intent of scamming people (e.g. gathering bitcoin money by spoofing bitcoin addresses).[16]

See also

Note: This topic belongs to "Internet " portal

References

  1. ↑ Nurmi, Juha. "About Ahmia". Ahmia. https://ahmia.fi/about/. 
  2. ↑ Winter, Philipp; Edmundson, Anne; Roberts, Laura M.; Dutkowska-Żuk, Agnieszka; Chetty, Marshini; Feamster, Nick (2018). "How do Tor users interact with onion services?". 27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 18). https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity18/sec18-winter.pdf. Retrieved 6 January 2025. 
  3. ↑ "Tor ♥ Ahmia Project: Supporting Google Summer of Code 2014". Tor Project. https://blog.torproject.org/tor-heart-ahmia-project/. 
  4. ↑ Greif, Björn (14 July 2015). "Gefälschte .onion-Websites spähen Tor-Nutzer aus". ZDNet. http://www.zdnet.de/88240605/gefaelschte-onion-websites-spaehen-tor-nutzer-aus/. 
  5. ↑ "Google Can't Search the Deep Web, So How Do Deep Web Search Engines Work?: Networks Course blog for INFO 2040/CS 2850/Econ 2040/SOC 2090". https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2017/10/18/google-cant-search-the-deep-web-so-how-do-deep-web-search-engines-work/. 
  6. ↑ "Ahmia Crawler: Open-source crawler for Ahmia search engine". GitHub. https://github.com/ahmia/ahmia-crawler. 
  7. ↑ "Ahmia Index: Elasticsearch-based indexing component for Ahmia search engine". GitHub. https://github.com/ahmia/ahmia-index. 
  8. ↑ "Ahmia Site: Open-source website component for Ahmia search engine". GitHub. https://github.com/ahmia/ahmia-site. 
  9. ↑ Nurmi, Juha. "Ahmia Legal Disclaimer". Ahmia. https://ahmia.fi/legal/. 
  10. ↑ Nurmi, Juha; Paju, Arttu; Brumley, Billy Bob; Insoll, Tegan; Ovaska, Anna K.; Soloveva, Valeriia; Vaaranen-Valkonen, Nina; Aaltonen, Mikko et al. (2024-04-03). "Investigating child sexual abuse material availability, searches, and users on the anonymous Tor network for a public health intervention strategy". Scientific Reports 14: 7849. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-58346-7. PMID 38570603. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-58346-7. Retrieved 2025-01-06. 
  11. ↑ "About us". https://ahmia.fi/about/. 
  12. ↑ Leyden, John (7 Jul 2015). "Heart of Darkness: Mass of clone scam sites appear". The Register. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/07/dark_web_cloned_site_scam_resurgence/. 
  13. ↑ "The new search engines shining a light on the Deep Web". 2014-09-28. https://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/10376/how-to-search-deep-web-tor/. 
  14. ↑ MacGregor, Alice (1 July 2015). "Hundreds of Dark Web mirror sites 'booby-trapping' Tor users". http://thestack.com/hundreds-dark-web-mirror-booby-trap-tor-010715. 
  15. ↑ Marwan, Peter (14 July 2015). "Anonymität von TOR-Nutzern durch Fake-Websites gefährdet". ITespresso. http://www.itespresso.de/2015/07/14/anonymitaet-von-tor-nutzern-durch-fake-websites-gefaehrdet/. 
  16. ↑ Weissman, Cale Guthrie (July 2, 2015). "Someone is creating fake websites on the dark web to try to lure in and hack people". https://www.businessinsider.com/hundreds-of-spoofed-websites-show-up-on-the-dark-web-2015-7. 




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