The cautious approach with a second machine
The strongest cautious approach I take to nexus market is to keep the visits on a machine that does nothing else. It works up to a point, and past that point I have to be honest.
The three addresses
Nexus Market publishes these three onion addresses. Present as supplied, in no order, with no ranking. This site does not probe them and shows no uptime figure.
nexusb2l7fmqnefwphyy7m5zjhlkytlbo7qbb5lu5dlczr3azgii2gyd.onion
nexusma2iqgauqqvjcgds4ckv5xbf272tkfagq4epojjhsgleqpwxiqd.onion
nexusabcd6tyfhdwilyitaqiri6tisj2v2hueyjuj6qkvd6azvi5tuqd.onion
What the second machine is
The second machine is a laptop I do not use for anything except this. No email is logged in on it. No cloud storage is signed in. No messenger apps. The browser is Tor Browser and the file manager is empty. When it is closed it goes on a shelf.
The point of a second machine is not that it is more secure than the first one. It is that it is separate. The whole family of accidents that involves accidentally posting a screenshot to a work chat, or dragging a saved file into the wrong window, or clicking a suggested link from a synced browser history, is gone at once. A cautious approach that removes a family of accidents is a cautious approach worth the trouble.
The second machine does not have to be new. It has to be clean and it has to stay clean.
The setup I did once and never touch
I put the operating system on it and I made one account with a name that does not name me. I installed Tor Browser from its own site over Tor Browser, since the first Tor Browser is running on the machine I bought it up on. I did not install anything else. No text editor, no image tool, no note taking app.
The machine has no accounts signed in and no accounts to sign in. That means it cannot sync a bookmark to a phone. It cannot suggest an address I visited to my other machine. It cannot show up in a device list on a service I use daily.
A cautious approach with a second machine is boring to set up on purpose. The boring is the point.
What I actually do when I sit at it
I open the machine. I open Tor Browser. I open this site in one tab and the market in another, and I compare the three addresses at the top of this article with the address I am about to paste. I paste, I visit, I do the small piece of work I came to do, and I close the browser.
The rhythm is deliberately slow because there is nothing else on the machine to hurry me. There are no notifications. There is no chat window drawing my eye. There is nothing on the desktop.
When I am done I close the lid and put the machine on the shelf. It stays there until the next time I use it. There is no in-between state.
Where the split stops working
The split works if I actually keep it. The moment I let the second machine drift into a general machine, all the safety of the separation goes away and I am left with a slightly worse laptop.
The temptations are small and continuous. Signing in to a music service for background noise. Installing a text editor to write down something I want to remember. Copying a file across using a cloud folder. Each one is a small dilution. Three of them, and the machine is a general laptop.
A cautious approach with a second machine has to include a rule that says no. I write it on the lid of the laptop where I can see it every time I open it. Only Tor Browser. Nothing else, ever.
What the machine does not solve
A second machine does not change what the market can see about my session. If I am logged into an account the market knows the account is being used. The machine does not know the account and does not care. The account exists on the market side.
A second machine does not change what the network sees either. The network sees a machine on the local network using Tor. It does not see less because the machine is dedicated.
What the machine does is contain the accidents that come from combining lives on one screen. It is a hardware version of what people call a threat model, done with a shelf and a laptop rather than with software.
The addresses, in the same place they always are
The three nexus market addresses at the top of this article are the same three that live on every other article on this site. Having a second machine does not change which addresses I use. The addresses are what the market publishes, regardless of what I am reading them on.
The one thing the second machine changes about the addresses is that I read them from this site every time, on Tor Browser, on that machine, and I do not save them anywhere on the machine. The address lives on the internet, not on the machine. Every visit starts from this site.
Small habits that keep the split honest
- The machine is on a shelf, not on the desk, so opening it is a choice each time.
- The machine has no personal name on the operating system account, no personal photo as a wallpaper, no personal anything.
- Nothing installs on the machine that did not come with the operating system or with Tor Browser. No exceptions for one useful tool, because that is how machines drift into being general.
- The machine is not connected to a printer, or a phone, or a smart speaker, or anything else that would relay information off it.
Why any of this is a cautious approach and not overkill
It is overkill for a reader who visits once. It is not overkill for a reader who visits regularly. The scale at which a second machine starts to earn its shelf space is the scale at which a slip on the main machine would be genuinely painful, and only that reader can tell where that line is.
The cautious approach with a second machine is not about turning market visits into a ceremony. It is about giving the visits a place of their own so that the rest of my life is a different place. That is the same reason people have desks. It just happens that this desk is a whole laptop.
The helper approach at one desk with two readers, reading over somebody's shoulder on their machine
What this article is not. This is not a claim that a second machine gives me anonymity. It is a description of a habit that removes one whole family of accidents.