A nexus market onion pasted from a chat

A nexus market onion pasted out of a chat client bubble travels through a carrier that is more opinionated than a bookmark and more active than a forum post.

What it is

Pasting a nexus market onion out of a chat means the reader had the string in a chat window on a messenger, selected the run and pasted it into the tor browser. The messenger might be running on the same device as the browser or on a different one, and the message might be end to end encrypted or plain. Either way the chat client is the carrier from the message to the paste.

A chat client is more active than a bookmark and more opinionated than a forum post. It renders the message in a bubble, might auto detect the string as a link, might rewrite the link to route through a preview server, and might collapse anything after a certain length behind a show more affordance. Each of these behaviours is a chance for the paste to lose or add a character.

How chat clients handle a long string

Bubble width

A run of fifty six characters plus the .onion label is long enough to wrap on most chat bubbles. A wrap adds a line break in the display, and some copy behaviours put a matching newline in the paste buffer.

Auto linkifying

Some clients turn any run that ends in a tld into a clickable link. A .onion suffix might be recognised or not, and the tap behaviour can change the string handed to the paste buffer.

Link preview

Some clients fetch a preview for any link in a message. That fetch may route through a preview service in the middle, which then knows the string was sent.

Collapsing

Some clients collapse long messages after a threshold. A collapsed message can be pasted from without the reader ever seeing the full run.

What can slip

• A newline slipped into the copy where the bubble wrapped. The paste buffer holds a two line run and the browser address bar takes only the first line.
• A zero width character inserted around the string by the chat client for its own layout. The character does not display, but it is on the clipboard.
• A tap that opened the message in a preview server rather than copying it. The reader thought they copied the string and got a shortened version of it instead.
• A message that was edited by the sender after the reader saw it. Many clients allow silent edits inside a window that is longer than most readers notice.

Lifeline

What the path keeps, what it drops

The path keeps the string as the sender wrote it, subject to whatever the chat client did to render it. The path drops the context around the message. A sender who wrote a warning in the previous message or the following message can watch the reader paste the string and ignore both, because messages are read one at a time.

The path also drops any authentication. In a group chat the reader might not know which member is the sender, and even in a one to one chat, the account handle is not the person. A chat account handed off to someone else looks like the same conversation from the reader's side. Any string that comes through the account inherits the trust the reader gave the account before it changed hands.

What to check after pasting from a chat

• The paste is a single line. Two lines in the address bar means the chat wrapped the string and the copy took the wrap along with it.
• The run has no non alphanumeric characters other than the single dot before onion. Any punctuation is either markup that came along with the copy or a decoration the sender added.
• The message the string came from has not been edited since it was received. A client that shows an edited tag lets the reader catch this at a glance.
• The account the message came from is the account the reader expected. In a group chat with dozens of members this is worth the extra moment.

Engagement

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