Links and addresses

Almost every bad afternoon on this market starts at the address bar. Not with a clever attack. With an address that used to work, or one that came from a page nobody thought about twice.

The five entries in this section deal with what people believe about a wethenorth market link before they ever load one. The beliefs are all reasonable. They are borrowed from the ordinary web, where a domain is rented, renewed and defended by a company with a legal department. None of that applies to a 56 character onion address, and the difference shows up in ways that feel like bad luck rather than a different set of rules.

Read them in any order. The short version of each is in the table, and the full entry explains the mechanism underneath.

What the section does not do

It does not tell you that any address is up. This board runs no checks of any kind, and a claim about reachability would be stale before you read it. The three addresses this site carries are on the addresses page, written out once, with nothing said about their condition.

• The address will keep working Why a wethenorth mirror set changes without anyone announcing it.
• The search result is the link What ranking actually measures, and what it cannot measure.
• The newest link is the safest Why freshness is the weakest signal available to you.
• One wrong character would be obvious How base32 hides a substitution in plain sight.
• A bookmark is a safe copy The saved link that quietly stopped being the right one.

The pattern behind all five

Every one of these failures happens in the same two minutes. Something you have used before stops responding, you are mildly annoyed, and you go looking. That short window is when a bad address gets accepted, because the checks people rely on are all effortful and the state of mind is the opposite of patient.

Which is why the practical answer is never a better check performed under pressure. It is a stored set and a named source, both prepared on a calm evening when nothing was broken. Preparation is the only defence that still works when you are irritated, and irritation is the reliable ingredient in every story that ends badly.

What a published address can and cannot prove

• It cannot prove ownership. No page can, including this one. A string on a page is a claim by whoever runs the page.
• It cannot prove reachability. Even a genuine check would describe a different machine on a different circuit at an earlier moment.
• It can be checked against other independent sources, which is worth something when the sources really are independent.
• It can be settled outright by a signature, verified against a key you already held. That is the only method on this list that ends the question.

So why publish a set at all. Because the alternative is worse. People will look either way, and a page that explains what its own list does not prove is more use than one that presents an address with a confident tone and no caveats. This board carries three addresses on the addresses page and tells you plainly what carrying them establishes, which is very little.

Reading order if you only want one

Take a wrong character would be obvious. It is the entry with the sharpest practical consequence, because it explains why copying rather than typing is not fussiness. Everything else in this section changes how you think. That one changes what your hands do.

If you want the reasoning behind how these entries are written rather than the entries themselves, how this is written covers it in one page.