The Deep Web is shrinking.

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While Tor remains something of an internet boogeyman — a misunderstood service most people think is only useful for hiring hitmen or buying drugs using cryptocurrencies — we found that many Tor sites (called onions) lie somewhere between tame and useless. New research suggests what the few extant onions that remain are headed towards extinction...

A report yesterday by Onionscan — a series of probes into the health of the Tor network — queried a database of 30,000 Tor sites, doing so over several days as onions tend to have much less reliable uptime than websites on the "clearnet" you're reading this on now. The report found about 4400 were online — just under 15 per cent. It's impossible to claim these findings are ironclad, but they're at least indicative of a larger downward trend.

Why is Tor shrinking in the first place? Adoption has always been slow due to users' perception of dark web criminality and because Tor has a slightly higher learning curve than, say, Chrome. But the recent reduction in onions can be pegged to the disappearance of two major services: The site hosting service Freedom Hosting II and the email client SIGAINT.

If maintaining anonymity using Tor is hard for some, hosting a proper site on the dark web is beyond most peoples' technical abilities. "The skills required to run a Tor hidden service make offloading that work to a 3rd party tempting," the report cautions. "However as seen with Freedom Hosting, and the other leaks we have demonstrated, this relationships (sic) creates additional security risks - and may in the end completely compromise any anonymity or privacy." Amid allegations of hosting child pornography, FH2 was hacked in late January. When the service shuttered, 10,000 sites went down with it.

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