New to Darknet? The 10 Minutes Before Your First Order

You have seen the word "darknet" in a headline and you are about to type an address into a browser you downloaded an hour ago. Take ten minutes. The word in the news and the network the Tor browser walks through are the same thing. The news uses it as a label for a place that is hard to see and hard to reach. The Tor browser uses it as the actual network it routes through. Once you understand the address in front of you, the rest is habit, not mystery.

What .onion actually is

An .onion address is a location inside the Tor network, not a website on the open internet. When your traffic goes to one, it does not travel in a straight line. It passes through three relay nodes in the network, each one peeling off a layer of encryption, which is where the name comes from. The address bar showing a .onion string means you are inside that network, talking to a service that exists only there. A normal domain like a company name followed by .com is on the open internet. A .onion is on the other side of the relays, and the two do not mix.

What your exit node can and cannot see

Here is the part people get wrong. When you are on a .onion site, the last relay in your circuit, the exit node, does not see the contents of what you are reading. The traffic is encrypted all the way to the .onion service, so the exit node only knows you are connecting to something, not what you are looking at. That is the whole point of the address ending in .onion.

The moment you leave a .onion site and open a normal one, the protection flips. For a plain website, the exit node sees the full request and the full page, because the traffic has to come out of the network in the clear to reach the open internet. So the rule is simple: while you are inside a .onion, you are covered. The instant you open a regular site through Tor, you are as exposed as any normal browser on that exit node. Do not log into your regular accounts through the Tor browser. Keep the two lives separate, because the exit node is the one place they can meet.

Three habits that keep you whole

None of these is hard, and all of them pay off the first time a mistake would have cost you.

• Use a password for Tor that you use nowhere else. The moment a site you log into through Tor shares a password with a site on the open internet, a breach on one side can open the other. A separate password means a leak stays a leak in one place.
• Do not carry tabs over from your normal browser. If you open Tor and then drag a tab or a session from your everyday browser into it, you have just connected your two networks through one window. Start Tor fresh, paste the address, and leave the other browser alone.
• Read the address before you type anything into a page. A single wrong character in a .onion opens a different site, and that site will happily take your password. Glance at the address bar, confirm it is the string you pasted, and only then enter credentials.

Why addresses die

An .onion address stops working for a few reasons, and none of them means the site is gone for good. The service may move to a new address, the server behind it may go down, or a copycat may take the old string and put its own page behind it. That last one is the sneaky one, because the address still loads, it just loads the wrong thing. This is why addresses are checked, not memorized. You do not store a .onion in your head and trust it next month. You compare the string you are about to use against the current one, character by character, and you confirm the site that loads is the one you expect before you give it anything. A remembered address is a guess. A compared address is a fact.

Where to start with Nexus

If you want to put this into practice, the first visit page walks through installing the browser, pasting the address, and waiting out the loader, in that order. The address to start with is nexusb2l7njnf2i5dm3ushgrwayuicpofzcs4bkknpzfdwwbwbgqwtyd.onion, and it starts with nexus and runs 56 characters before the .onion, which is the shape to check for. Paste it, wait for the dark screen with the red bars, and let it finish. That is the whole first step.

Ten minutes, and you are not guessing anymore.