Thanks, I did know pretty much all that and fairly regularly use the TOR Browser (so I guess I've been on that list for some time!), but it's a very useful post as a primer for those who don't know what this stuff is all about. My advice to anyone would be to download the TOR Browser (you can keep it and run it from a USB stick - no need to install it) and have a look around. Searching isn't great, as the search engines are no where near as effective as those on the internet, but Not Evil seems to work reasonably well, I've found.
I'd certainly agree that most of what I've seen on the "dark web" has been legal, but probably not available in many countries around the world, due to net censorship. Some is borderline legal, depending on your jurisdiction, and then some (only really a minority of the content) is very definitely not legal, pretty much anywhere.
My brief experience of browsing around the dark web has been that the stuff it seems renowned for, child pornography, just isn't really there,or if it is, then it's not easy to stumble across, as I've never seen a hint of it there, or any other pornography for that matter. I'd say there's far, far more pornography on the ordinary internet than there is on the dark web, and the dark web is more about masses of data and information that isn't readily accessible any where on the internet.
There's a lot of nerdy technical stuff there, whistle-blowing stuff, a fair few conspiracy-theory type groups, a fair few hacker groups and bit of rather nasty stuff, like the places selling any drug you can imagine, stolen credit cards, bank account details, guns etc. Even this isn't all bad though, as there are some substances that are not legally available in the UK, but are relatively harmless, and they seem easy enough to buy anonymously there.
Back on the subject of a VPN, thanks very much indeed for that link. Apart from the advice there, the comparison spreadsheet (link here to .ods version:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...ort?format=ods) is particularly useful, as I can rank my needs against the offering of each VPN provider pretty accurately, without having to wade through masses of stuff on loads of different web site.