Is it new or something? This is the second time I've heard about it in 24 hours, and had never heard of it before.
Was pretty popular circa 2012 for dissidents in some countries
Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
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Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#12Is it new or something? This is the second time I've heard about it in 24 hours, and had never heard of it before.
It's been around for a while, but interesting to see this and a Fireship video on it the same day. I was wondering if they did some new release or something but doesn't seem like it
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#13[deleted]
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#14I might be wrong but I think this was a project originated by one of the branches of the US armed forces or security services? In which case, it should be pretty secure. Although, there's the obvious 'honeypot' concern. But maybe I'm thinking of another distro, that ran from RAM and didn't write anything to disk.
I know the TOR project was started by the US navy, and that now I2Pnis the preferred method of browsing the darknet, because many people believe it has been compromised.
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#15Would be curious to hear criticisms of Tails, if anyone has opinions about it. To be clear, I'm a fan of the product -- just wondering what the other side of the story is.
The ''Heads'' distro was meant to address some of the criticisms of Tails. Sadly its development seemed to end in 2018:
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#16It seems like a growing number of things once referred to as Linux distributions are now referring to themselves as operating systems. If the kernel is Linux, and the user-space is GNU, what makes this a distinct operating system from, say, SUSE, or Arch?
The userspace is so diluted now that it’s basically flat out wrong to say it’s just ‘GNU’, I mean Systemd is probably an even bigger a part than GNU is now, and we’ve long had things like OpenSSH from BSD as pretty core parts of the system, and we’re not going to start calling a distribution ‘Kubuntu Linux/Systemd/GNU/BSD/KDE’ or whatever…
Basically about all something needs to be to be called an OS is a kernel and at least one userspace program that does something useful, so I’d definitely say every ‘Linux distribution’ has always counted as an operating system in itself (so ‘Linux distribution’ is just a specific subset of ‘operating systems’).
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#17It seems like a growing number of things once referred to as Linux distributions are now referring to themselves as operating systems. If the kernel is Linux, and the user-space is GNU, what makes this a distinct operating system from, say, SUSE, or Arch?
You could make the argument that this is more of a GNU + Linux than an operating system unto itself.
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#18I might be wrong but I think this was a project originated by one of the branches of the US armed forces or security services? In which case, it should be pretty secure. Although, there's the obvious 'honeypot' concern. But maybe I'm thinking of another distro, that ran from RAM and didn't write anything to disk.
Distrowatch is a good place to get a brief overview of pretty well every Linux distribution ever made, with links and a bit of background info on each:
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#19Tails is great. I am using it for several years now.
Other related projects are whonix ( https://www.whonix.org ), which consists of two virtual machines:
A workstation to work on and a gateway, which torifies all traffic from the workstation VM.
Whonix is also integrated in Qubes OS ( https://www.qubes-os.org ), which allows you to easily work with multiple seperate whonix VMs. There is also the possibility to tunnel all internet traffic of your machine through Tor including system upgrades of the host OS itself.
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#20Would be curious to hear criticisms of Tails, if anyone has opinions about it. To be clear, I'm a fan of the product -- just wondering what the other side of the story is.
All known law enforcement attacks against Tor have involved some kind of exploit (e.g., in Tor Browser) that creates a non-Tor connection to collect the user's IP. Tails does not protect against this. Whonix provides much stronger protection against practical, real-world attacks, since the entire operating system is forced through a Tor connection.