Concerning the "other-not-illegal", if the website was none of the other labels AND not illegal, it was usually tagged as "other-not-illegal". For instance, personal websites are tagged as "legitimate" and a Tor Wiki is tagged as "other-not-illegal" and "wiki". General information about Tor, websites allowing to do some calculation online (tools to hash things, calculator, ..) or online games (without money involved) are labelled as "other-not-illegal".
Anything related to finance - even if it can be legal - is not labelled as "other-not-illegal", for example.
CIRCL is the Computer Emergency Response Team of Luxembourg. They ̶a̶r̶e̶ work very closely with the law.
It wasn't obvious to me from the article how or if this dataset is statistically significant in some way in regards to total tor traffic?
I believe the tor project publishes anonymized data sets of tor usage, and if I recall correctly the web site handling the most traffic over tor is Facebook.
[0] https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.ht... [1] https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth-flags.html
Plus on Tor you actually own your domain rather than lease it on the whim of some company easily pressured by political and social winds.
As long as you keep the private keys private you get traffic to that public key and "own" the domain.
It's a double-edged sword in a way -- more people using the project for doing non-illegal things means perhaps the moniker "Dark" could be replaced with a less hostile word (Private? ...no...)[1].
Bad, in that, it speaks a bit to users making inconvenient choices because they perceive their privacy is threatened enough to warrant it.
I was glad to see that they scrubbed the content -- would have been one scary tarball to download, otherwise, and very illegal for them to post considering some of those categories. It makes me wonder how they avoided running afoul of the law just collecting/viewing it for the purpose of scrubbing it, but IANAL. It'd keep me from being involved on any project like that, though!
[0] I'm eye-balling the counts for a few categories in addition to the obvious "other-not-illegal", so it's probably not 100%, and I'm assuming US law (specifically WRT speech)
[1] I get "Dark" is meant as "invisible" and it's perhaps even a more accurate description since it's not completely "invisible" unless you take additional steps (and the software contains no known flaws), but sufficiently invisible for most adversaries. However, it's spoken in the same breath as "drug/theft markets" and is used more like "dark alley". Not sure there's a better term and I'm probably bike-shedding, anyway.