Terms, in plain language

Plain-language definitions for the terms that come up around Anubis Market and Tor. Short on purpose.

.onion address

The URL of a hidden service. 56 base32 characters plus the .onion suffix, resolvable only by a browser that runs Tor.

Hidden service

A website that lives inside the Tor network. The visitor and the site each keep their location from the other.

Tor

The anonymity network. Your traffic crosses at least three relays before it reaches its destination, and each relay sees only one short hop.

Circuit

The chain of relays your connection travels through. It changes on its own, and you can force a new one from the browser.

Relay

A node in the Tor network that forwards traffic one hop at a time. Your entry and exit relays are the only ones that see the ends of your path.

Bridge

A relay that is not published in the public list. Used when your network blocks or throttles the known Tor relays.

Mirror

On this site, one of several equal .onion addresses for the same market. Not a copy of the site, and not a fallback of lower quality.

Escrow

The market holding your payment until you confirm the order. Released to the vendor on your confirmation, or argued over in a dispute.

Dispute

A formal complaint on an order. Both sides put their case in writing inside the market, and the market decides.

PGP

Public key encryption. Your public key goes in your profile, your private key stays with you, and a message encrypted to the public key can only be read with the private one.

Base32

The encoding used in v3 onion addresses: lowercase a to z plus the digits 2 to 7. No 0, 1, 8, or 9, and no uppercase.

Clearnet

The ordinary internet, as opposed to the darknet. This site is clearnet. The market is not.