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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

#91

Post by Syonyk »

londons_explore wrote: post #57

If I were wanting do do secure tor browsing, I would use a liveUSB of ubuntu, running virtualbox, running vmware, running tor. On the host ubuntu, I would run a 2nd instance of virtualbox, running vmware, running Chrome. Networking will be set up so the Chrome inner VM can ssh to the tor VM. The tor VM can access only some whitelisted tor nodes. Now an adversary that uses a Chrome exploit needs to break out of Window…

You've just independently developed something almost identical to the Whonix system. :) May as well use the pre-built VMs that do it for you.

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

#92

Post by dwheeler »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #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 purc…

Tails works fine on IBM-PC compatible laptops and desktops with Intel compatible chips, which is nearly all laptops. I presume you meant that Tails doesn't run on ARM Macs?

If you only have an ARM Mac, it's easy to get an old IBM-compatible laptop and run Tails. What matters is a decent speed of USB stick, and today they're generally decent. I find it helpful for testing some things, I can reboot and get to a known state.

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

#93

Post by criddell »

diydsp wrote: post #25
criddell wrote: post #21

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.

> it allows people to say things with less fear of bad guys knowing who said them

I see what you are saying, but AFAIK, the technology is neutral as far as good or bad goes. One could say it lets a person say and do things with less fear of consequences in general.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] »

Jigsy wrote: post #53
NetOpWibby wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard bad things about Tails over the last few years. Like what?

As one of the comments mentioned below, easy for someone to get your IP with an attack on the Tor browser. (Which was actually utilized by law enforcement to catch somebody iirc.) Anecdotal evidence, but I've heard numerous complaints from other users about telemetry settings being enabled in the browser and locked. But worst of all, it uses GNOME.

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by crtasm »

Jigsy wrote: post #53
NetOpWibby wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard bad things about Tails over the last few years. Like what?

As one of the comments mentioned below, easy for someone to get your IP with an attack on the Tor browser. (Which was actually utilized by law enforcement to catch somebody iirc.) Anecdotal evidence, but I've heard numerous complaints from other users about telemetry settings being enabled in the browser and locked. But worst of all, it uses GNOME.

You may be thinking of the case where a video file was specially crafted to cause the media player on Tails to make a direct connection?

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/06/facebook_help...

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

#96

Post by pcurve »

MR4D wrote: post #50
pcurve wrote: post #34

Fireship did a 2:40 minute video on this a few hours ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVKAyw0xqxw Short and informative :-)

Just watched it. Thanks for the recommendation. 100K views in 3 hours - not too shabby!

np! I love his humor. My favorite is "10 programmer stereotypes"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k-F-MMvQV4

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

#99

Post by londons_explore »

Syonyk wrote: post #91
londons_explore wrote: post #57

If I were wanting do do secure tor browsing, I would use a liveUSB of ubuntu, running virtualbox, running vmware, running tor. On the host ubuntu, I would run a 2nd instance of virtualbox, running vmware, running Chrome. Networking will be set up so the Chrome inner VM can ssh to the tor VM. The tor VM can access only some whitelisted tor nodes. Now an adversary that uses a Chrome exploit needs to break out of Window…

You've just independently developed something almost identical to the Whonix system. :) May as well use the pre-built VMs that do it for you.

Pre built VM's mean an adversary probably has pre-built exploits...

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

#100

Post by hedora »

dmwilcox wrote: post #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 filesystem…

I treat my web browser like this, and similarly have a docker container for all my development stuff. I like the idea of making the computer (almost) completely stateless.

How do you deal with stuff you want to store in /home? (Like source code checkouts, ssh keys, etc.)

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