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Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

tails.net

101–110 of 192 posts

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

#103
The best code is the one not being run.

- Set unbound with DNS over HTTP.

- Use Links+ with Tor/i2pd and enforcing all the connections to the proxy in the settings. Avoid the web for news sites and use Gemini with offpunk and gemini://gemi.dev for news sources Bookmark the news sites and sync. Then, reading the news offline it's easy. Offpunk has a command for that, 'offline', and then run 'list', it will show up your cached bookmarks.

- Use nncpgo and sneakernet (or any inet protocol on top) to share data between the machines you own.

- News are better being fetched and read online with sfeed and lynx. Ditto with email with mbsync/msmtp + Mutt. Also, Gopher and Gemini, to read all the nice sites offline. Fetch your news/posts offline and forget.

- Use keyboard locked (u)xterms with TMUX. Nsxiv and mpv for images/videos. Better if you run them under the framebuffer.

- Convert all the PDF's you have to DJVU with the highest settings, then use gzip or xz on it, with DJView as the viewer. The less code you run, the better.

- Avoid Brave, Chromium, or worse, Edge.

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

#104

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.

Also if you’re rolling your own, you’re way more likely to not keep updates perfectly and patch everything that comes up.

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

#105
Tails has a very specific use case, very few people need anti-forensics.

I suggest looking into Whonix[1] if you want something that you can truly use for privacy. It is also much more secure than Tails by design, and does not have any limitations like locking down the root user account.

Summary from GitHub:

"Whonix is an operating system focused on anonymity, privacy and security. It's based on the Tor anonymity network, Debian GNU/Linux and security by isolation. DNS leaks are impossible, and not even malware with root privileges can find out the user's real IP."

[1]: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/FAQ

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

#106

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.

It depends. Monocultures are also bad for computer security, since the failure mode is catastrophic.

Ideally, there would be a few tails-style projects competing with each other (there are; see sibling threads), and the internet would be more federated (for instance, if github is completely compromised right now, many people reading this will git pull malware in the next day or so).

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

#107
post #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

> it won't allow me to create virtualbox images

What's the use case[1] for VirtualBox images in an operating system designed around virtualization with Xen? You can simply create a Xen VM.

[1]: Note that I'm asking a question here, not invalidating your experience.

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

#108
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Dont understand why not more ppl switched to alpine on the desktop. It is my daily driver. Plus LXD for stuff I must do (typically spawn ubuntu, etc.) my whole PDE (Personal Developer Environment) is within a container. Need python? Shell into (via dmenu) python container. All with complete neovim setup. Need a GUI? No problem. Spawn a container. My lxd profile is set up for this. Use chezmoi for heavy aut…

How do you run a GUI with a container? Xorg server running in the container?

Here's how I do it using Docker Compose:

https://gist.github.com/kspacewalk/52ea8f0c383f57a34042db2a0...

Access via http://localhost:8080/vnc.html

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

#109

Tails 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 tunne…

> Whonix is also integrated in Qubes OS ( https://www.qubes-os.org )

Qubes-Whonix with fully ephemeral disposable VMs is the future. It would be a total killer for nearly every use case of Tails besides ease of use.

Note that this is in the works, but not fully implemented by default yet. https://github.com/anywaydense/QubesEphemerize

> The steps below outline how to make all PVH DispVM's permanently fully ephemeral. All data written to the disk will be encrypted with an ephemeral encryption key only stored in RAM. The encryption and encryption key generation is handled by dom0 and is thus inaccessible to the VM.

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

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tails has the entire OS as Tor connections only, an escape from the Tor browser would still be stuck in a Tor only OS. What information do you have to the contrary?

Tails includes an "Unsafe Browser" which connects in the clear. So on top of a Firefox exploit, you would need another exploit to launch that browser or an exploit to escalate to root and tamper with the firewall rules. At least one Tails user has been successfully targeted like this ("an exploit taking advantage of a flaw in Tails’ video player to reveal the real IP address of the person viewing the video").[1] With…

wow! that story is wild I totally missed that during the pandemic. now I'm no longer annoyed at always having to update tails the few times I boot it up.

but yeah probably going to prioritize Qubes and whonix again.

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