Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by mixmastamyk » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

justin_oaks wrote: post #37

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 owe the internet a write up. I would definitely be interested in reading more about this. I love the idea of being able to prevent an application from writing all over my disk to random places. If I can't prevent it, I can at least remedy it by having all those changes go away with a reboot. One of the things I love about Docker containers is that they can be ephemeral or persistent, short or long term, have full…

Typically they can only write to home and temp. That can be improved via sandboxing, and there’s Little/Open Snitch as well.

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

#112

Post by trts » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #59

Tor servers were breached by the CIA/NSA, I would be careful

what's the alternative to Tor?

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

#113

Post by Jigsy » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

crtasm wrote: post #95

Jigsy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I believe that is what I was thinking of.

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

#114

Post by paulpauper » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

just be careful that is does not crash when using internet enabled mode. very common problem with tails given how much memory websites use . tails only has limited ram from the portable drive.

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

#115

Post by npteljes » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

ShroudedNight wrote: post #7

It 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?

I'd say the reason for that is marketing, or branding, or positioning the product, which are, as you wrote, essentially Linux distributions.

I find that even combinations that are supposed to be very similar (Linux kernel, same DE, same repos) can behave differently, and I guess this is because of how the distro maintainers set up the different parts and integrations in the system. So in this way, my MX Linux box is different from my Debian+KDE box.

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

#116

Post by paravirtualized » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #59

Tor servers were breached by the CIA/NSA, I would be careful

Do you suggest that we trust our ISP instead, and pretend that they aren't compromised by default?

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

#117

Post by xyst » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #59

Tor servers were breached by the CIA/NSA, I would be careful

By breaches you mean these agencies own a ton of exit nodes?

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

#118

Post by xyst » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

trts wrote: post #112

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #59

Tor servers were breached by the CIA/NSA, I would be careful

what's the alternative to Tor?

Physical world. Lol

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

#119

Post by hedora » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 5:33 PM UTC

sleepybrett wrote: post #9

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'd guess it is a matter of priorities (do you want the safest, best-tested environment, or something less tested?).

However, assuming the source is easily bootstrappable, someone should try producing an unofficial port to Arm and Risc V. I'm sure it would reveal some security holes, even if it isn't appropriate (yet) for tails' target audience.

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

#120

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 5:33 PM UTC

Airsinner wrote: post #104

fullstick wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends how you roll your own; something lightly modified from a "normal" distro can just take upstream package updates and so put you in a good spot.