Reference shelf

Why a reference section on a site this small

Most of the confusion around onion addresses is vocabulary rather than technology. People use link, url, address, mirror and domain as though they were interchangeable, and in ordinary web usage they nearly are. Here they are not, and the differences change what you can reasonably conclude from a page that offers you one.

A mirror on the ordinary web is a second server holding a copy of the same content. That is not what the word means when somebody publishes a TorZon mirror list. What is being published is a second address, and whether it leads to the same place is a question about who holds the key behind it, not about anything you can see in the string.

The same goes for the word link. A link on the web is a pointer that a browser can resolve through a chain of registrars and name servers, any of which can be persuaded to point somewhere else. An onion address resolves through none of that. It is the key, encoded. That single difference is responsible for most of what makes these addresses behave strangely compared with what people expect.

The three words that cause the most trouble

Verified, official and working. Each of them appears constantly beside onion addresses and each of them is doing far less work than a reader assumes.

Verified usually means a checksum parsed, which is arithmetic that every valid address passes including a forged one. Official is a claim about publication history and cannot be established from a string at all. Working is a claim about one machine at one moment, and it is stale by the time the page has finished loading.

None of the three is dishonest by nature. They become dishonest when a page performs a real check, such as counting characters, and then lets the credibility of that check spill onto a claim the check never touched. Watching for that move is the single most useful habit this shelf can teach.

What this shelf will not do

It will not tell you which address to use, because that would require measurement this site does not perform. It will not tell you that any address is current, safe or genuine. It will not rank the twelve.

What it will do is define terms precisely enough that you can tell when somebody else is being vague. A page that says a link is verified without saying what was verified, against what, and when, has said nothing. Once the vocabulary is clear that becomes obvious rather than reassuring.

The definitions here are also the ones used everywhere else on the site. When a record page reports a shared prefix or names the middle of a string, it means what the glossary says it means, and nothing is redefined quietly from one page to the next.