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Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

tails.net

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Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

#22

I 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.

The Internet also originated from the US military, among many other things. So tired of this FUD.

Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

#23

The fact that it still does not support an incredibly popular portable computer like the raspberry pi (or anything that ins't intel) saddens me.

I agree, and you have to make the PRs you want to see. I don’t think this project of free software has a big (or perhaps any) budget!

Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

#24

I 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.

The Internet also originated from the US military, among many other things. So tired of this FUD.

That's a false equivalency. The military invented a network that inspired the Internet. We're not all using ARPANET to send emails.

Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

#25

How does Tails help you avoid censorship?

Legit question. IIUC: On the publishing side, it allows people to say things with less fear of bad guys knowing who said them. On the audience side, it allows people to consume media with less fear of bad guys knowing they read it. Unfortunately, I don't believe it can ameliorate what most people think of as the censorship part, which is a guy with a black magic marker crossing out parts of things.

Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

#28

I 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.

In the same manner that parts of the NSA are interested in secure cryptography as opposed to breaking it, parts of the Navy were interested in anonymizing traffic as opposed to de-anonymizing.

Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

#29
post #2

Would 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.

It’s probably important to note that as I understand it, these attacks have generally been Firefox zero-day exploits that have made its way in because the Tor Browser is based on Firefox ESR with patches.

Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

#30
Love Tails, but I haven't used it in ten years. I have had Tails and Qubes disposable VMs on my mind though.

I switched off of Qubes last year to my own Alpine chroot with a hand crafted kernel and initrd that lives only in memory. I find turning off the computer when I'm finished and having it forget everything to be a very peaceful way to compute. I owe the internet a write up.

I feel like ramfs for root filesystems is an underused pattern more broadly. "Want to upgrade? Just reboot. Fallback? Pick a different root squashfs in the grub menu"

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