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A screenshot of the nexus market mirrors in a camera roll

A cropped image in the phone gallery

Nexus market mirrors, as published on this site

nexusb2l7fmqnefwphyy7m5zjhlkytlbo7qbb5lu5dlczr3azgii2gyd.onion
nexusma2iqgauqqvjcgds4ckv5xbf272tkfagq4epojjhsgleqpwxiqd.onion
nexusabcd6tyfhdwilyitaqiri6tisj2v2hueyjuj6qkvd6azvi5tuqd.onion

Published as supplied. This site does not probe an onion, so nothing here is a claim that a given address opens for you right now.

A screenshot is a picture of what the screen showed at the moment the shutter was pressed. Readers screenshot the addresses panel because the picture keeps the exact pixels of the strings and does not need a paste to preserve them.

What it is

A screenshot is a raster image the operating system saves to the camera roll or a screenshots folder. The image holds the pixels the screen was drawing at the moment of capture. For a page that lists the three onion strings, that means the strings sit inside the image as glyphs.

A camera roll is not a text store. It is an image store. Every string in every screenshot lives as pixels until a tool reads them back out. Some phones do that reading automatically and treat the image as searchable. Some phones do not.

Lifeline

  1. Only on the live page
  2. In the phone gallery
  3. Backed up, shared or deleted

What the image keeps

  • The exact glyphs of the string as the page rendered them, in the font the page used at the size the reader had.
  • The moment of the screenshot, because the phone stamps the file, and the reader can inspect that stamp on the file properties.
  • The full context around the strings, because a screenshot rarely crops to only the string and usually catches a header, a button and a bit of a paragraph.
  • The independence from a live page, because the image survives even if the site the screenshot came from goes offline later.

What the image loses

  • The pastability of the string, because an image does not go into a paste buffer as text. The reader has to type it back or use an OCR feature.
  • The invisibility to a camera roll search, because a phone that indexes images can surface the string on a keyword search.
  • The isolation from cloud sync, because a screenshot usually lands in the same album that syncs to a photo backup service.
  • The neutrality of the file, because a picture of the addresses panel is a picture of the page it came from and reveals which site the reader was on.

What paste cannot do

The tradeoff a screenshot brings is that the string is safe from an autocorrect and unsafe from a paste. To open one of the addresses the reader has to look at the image and type the string, or run the phone OCR and hope that the OCR did not mistake one glyph for another. A capital I in the OCR output when the source glyph was a lowercase L is not visible to a reader who is copying from the OCR result.

A newer phone offers a long press on text inside an image and returns a selection that the reader can copy. That selection is only as accurate as the OCR the phone runs. The reader who trusts it without checking is trusting whatever pattern matching the phone applied.

What the camera roll shares

A camera roll is one of the folders that phones back up first. If the reader has photo backup on, the screenshot is uploaded to whichever service the phone points at. That service is not part of tor. Anyone who reaches into the backup reaches into the image. A reader who does not want that has to either turn backup off, move the screenshot to a folder outside the roll, or not take the screenshot in the first place.

A newer phone offers a hidden album or a locked folder for screenshots. That folder is still on the phone, still on the roll structure, still subject to whatever the phone does with photo backup. A locked folder is a passphrase in front of the picture, not a break from the sync path the roll lives on.

Engagement

1image per screenshot
0characters that go into a paste buffer
4related dossiers on this site
3strings caught in a full panel screenshot

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