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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

#71

There have been quite a few exploits in tails. I suspect you're better off with a more obscure project, because then your adversary is less likely to have a 'ready to go' exploit.

Wouldn't that be security through obscurity? Which is bad security and a good way to be exploited. I thought that having more eyes on a system made it more secure because people find the exploits.

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

#72

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 filesystem…

In NixOs it's called Impermanence: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence Also NixOs has absurd levels of control for upgrades, rollbacks, and control over the build and resulting files.

Be warned; your hard drive may file for a divorce after a few years of daily-driving NixOS. It is both a blessing and a curse:

  $ smol@computer ~> du -hcs /nix/store/
  257G    /nix/store/

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

#73
post #27

Tails OS is my daily driver for absolutely normal day usage and do legal stuff. (No tomfoolery involved)

Does it not become cumbersome to use the web for normal usage without persistent cookies, history, bookmarks, ...? If you save those to persistent storage (if that's even possible, I imagine Tails has safeguards against shooting yourself in the foot), you lose one of the main reasons why people use Tails.

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

#74
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not sure what you’re saying there…the Internet grew out of ARPANet, it’s not a separate thing. Is the oak tree “inspired” by the acorn?

I think that's an incorrect oversimplification. The Internet didn't grow from ARPANET like a seed grows into a tree. ARPANET didn't become bigger and bigger until it became the Internet. The Internet was the merger of many networks and many of them never communicated with any computer in ARPANET and we're developed with absolutely zero funding from the United States government.

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The DoD created TCP/IP.

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NixOs it's called Impermanence: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence Also NixOs has absurd levels of control for upgrades, rollbacks, and control over the build and resulting files.

Be warned; your hard drive may file for a divorce after a few years of daily-driving NixOS. It is both a blessing and a curse: $ smol@computer ~> du -hcs /nix/store/ 257G /nix/store/

You... do regular GC, right?

I have 45G, and this computer is more than two years old

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

#77
I love the idea of Tails. It is unfortunate that it only runs on Intel macOS.

I consider my personal setup to be pretty good, but not Tails grade privacy: 1. Avoid installing apps, use Safari with all possible privacy settings. 2. Run Lockdown mode iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. 3. Use duck duck go and ProtonMail. 4. Prefer to run in Safari private browsing tabs. 5. Become non-private when logging into Amazon to make a purchase, etc.

I would love it if people more knowledgeable than I could critique my setup, make suggestions. Thanks in advance.

I would like to mention Cory Doctorow’s excellent new book The Internet Con [1]. It carries on in the fine tradition of the books Surveillance Capitalism and Privacy is Power for the narrative that regular law abiding people also benefit from doubling down on privacy.

[1] https://craphound.com/internetcon/

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

#78

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 filesystem…

How do Tails and Qubes relate, any reuse of functionality?

(Tried Qubes as written up in [1] but eventually gave up as it won't allow me to create virtualbox images, and some other caveats, as well as being pretty resource hungry)

[1] https://bionics.it/posts/installing-qubes-os

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

#79

I love the idea of Tails. It is unfortunate that it only runs on Intel macOS. I consider my personal setup to be pretty good, but not Tails grade privacy: 1. Avoid installing apps, use Safari with all possible privacy settings. 2. Run Lockdown mode iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. 3. Use duck duck go and ProtonMail. 4. Prefer to run in Safari private browsing tabs. 5. Become non-private when logging into Amazon to make a purc…

"It is unfortunate that it only runs on Intel macOS."

Tails runs on most computers. It doesn't have to be a "macOS" (you mean Apple?). macOS is an OS, tails replaces the OS.

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

#80
post #79

I love the idea of Tails. It is unfortunate that it only runs on Intel macOS. I consider my personal setup to be pretty good, but not Tails grade privacy: 1. Avoid installing apps, use Safari with all possible privacy settings. 2. Run Lockdown mode iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. 3. Use duck duck go and ProtonMail. 4. Prefer to run in Safari private browsing tabs. 5. Become non-private when logging into Amazon to make a purc…

"It is unfortunate that it only runs on Intel macOS." Tails runs on most computers. It doesn't have to be a "macOS" (you mean Apple?). macOS is an OS, tails replaces the OS.

It doesn't run on ARM macs. Which is all new macs.
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