Access
Ordering a privacy service while leaving behind a DNS request for nodecove.net is a contradiction. The site, your customer account, and the payment page therefore also answer to a .onion address on the Tor network: no domain name to resolve, no certificate to obtain, and no way for your internet provider to learn which site you are visiting.
Everything you need fits in one sentence: install the Tor browser, open the address below, and the whole journey, reading, ordering, paying, customer account, stays inside Tor from start to finish.
To copy down once and for all
The first is enough to do everything. The second is the payment address: you don't need to enter it, the site takes you there automatically if you arrived via Tor. It is written here so you can check, when paying, that the address shown is indeed ours.
The site, ordering, and your account
The exact equivalent of nodecove.net. Same pages, same customer account, same prices.
oceua7oi6w5stswrniost7cxtljqthrl3frpu5ajntk7l3rqopn4ovyd.onionPayment
Our payment page, the equivalent of pay.nodecove.net, on our own server. The site sends you there on its own; this address is here for comparison.
orldysdvjzlzbcwd3yrsaq426nuuyfgqguw7ki6y5e5atvlysox3giyd.onionThese links will not open in an ordinary browser
A .onion address does not exist in the domain name system: no ordinary browser knows where to look for it, and that's precisely the point. Copy it into the Tor browser, or into a browser configured to go through Tor. If you're already using the Tor browser on nodecove.net, it will offer to switch to the .onion address on its own: we announce it in our responses, so you don't have to copy anything.
Write it down somewhere other than on this site
The day nodecove.net gets blocked where you are, you would no longer be able to read this page to get the address. Keep it in your notes, or in the delivery email for your tunnel: we write it there for this reason. Our announcements also go out through a SimpleX channel, which likewise does not depend on our domain name.
The real difference
This isn't just one more convenience: these are three places, outside of us, where your visit used to leave something behind.
· No more DNS request at your provider
Opening nodecove.net starts by asking a name server: usually your internet provider's, where that domain is. This question is asked in plain text in most configurations, and it is kept on their end. A .onion address is not resolved: it is found inside the Tor network, and no one outside learns the name you were looking for.
· No more site name visible in the connection
Even over HTTPS, establishing the connection announces the requested site's name in plain text, except in configurations that are still uncommon. Your internet provider, the administrator of the network you're on, or the access point operator therefore know that you're visiting our site, without seeing its content. In Tor, they see a connection to Tor, and nothing of our name.
· No more certificate authority to take on faith
On the ordinary web, you verify that you're really talking to our server by trusting an outside certificate authority, which issued our certificate and could issue another one to someone else. A .onion address is the service's public key: those fifty-six characters are the key's fingerprint. If the address is right, the service at the other end is ours, with no intermediary to trust. That is why we invite you to compare the address shown with the one on this page.
And a fourth consequence, which is not a trace
A block by domain name or by address, at the level of a country, an operator, or a corporate network, does not reach the .onion service, which cannot be joined by either route. For us, it is also a service entrance that stays open the day our domain name is taken away.
The trickiest point
It is at the moment of payment that a journey through Tor usually breaks down: the site redirects the visitor to the plain-text domain of its payment processor, and the exit from Tor happens exactly at the instant the order becomes identifiable. With us, an order arriving via the .onion address gets its payment page on the .onion address of our own payment server.
The payment link follows the path you arrived by. The site looks at how you came in, and nothing else: arriving via .onion, you receive a .onion address; arriving via the public domain, you receive the public address. We don't guess, and we don't choose on your behalf.
The payment page does not link back to the plain-text domain. We checked this by actually browsing it through Tor: no link, no redirect, no image leads back to nodecove.net. A single forgotten link would be enough to reveal which site you're visiting at the most sensitive moment.
Your session stays open. A page served over Tor is served as http: the encryption is Tor's, end to end, and does not depend on a certificate. Cookies set only for https pages used to disappear, so the login link to your account seemed not to work. That is no longer the case: the decision follows the path you arrived by.
The email itself leaves Tor. We send you a login link by email, and that link always points to the public domain: a .onion link would only open in the Tor browser, whereas people read their email just about anywhere. More importantly, the email travels in plain text through your email provider: a .onion address would protect nothing there. If you want a journey entirely within Tor, log in from the .onion address and use the email only as a reminder.
What you need to know
This protects your visit, not your traffic. The .onion address concerns how you reach us. Your ordinary browsing, on the other hand, goes through the tunnel you purchase, these are two separate things, and one does not replace the other.
We always know what we know. Coming through Tor changes nothing about what we keep: your email address, your plan, your payments, the public keys of your devices. The full list is on what we see about you. What it changes is what others learn about your visit.
It's slower. A connection through Tor crosses six relays instead of a direct path. Expect one to three seconds to load a page, sometimes more. In our measurements from the server, both addresses respond within a second; from your side, it depends on the path Tor chose that day.
Traffic measurement still applies. Public pages count one anonymous line per visit, destroyed after seven days, and this does not change depending on the path you arrived by, otherwise we would not be able to measure our own ordering flow. Nothing written there identifies you: no address, no identifier, no browser fingerprint. The detail is written out plainly, and if your browser sends a "Do Not Track" signal, no line is written at all, the Tor browser sends this signal by default.
If one of the two addresses is not responding
A .onion service must regularly publish, on the network, the directory entry that allows it to be found. An outage in this publishing makes the address unreachable for a few minutes, even though the site works perfectly over the clear web. Try again, then request a new circuit in the Tor browser. The status page stays reachable both ways.