How can I be sure this project isn't sponsored by XYZ government secret agency and that more than 1GB of data does not contain any surveillance software?
Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
121–130 of 192 posts
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#122Would 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.
Tails didn't patch a non-root exploit that could leak the users real IP by bypassing the firewall without them knowing it for 3 years. I do not understand why Tails is recommended over Whonix (specifically Qubes-Whonix, thus with a trusted TCB).
> The Unsafe Browser allows to retrieve the public IP address by a compromised amnesia user with no user interaction
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#123Hi. We're building The Nose (https://thenose.cc), a safe haven for training data that can't be taken down with DMCA. Since this involves copyright infringement, strong anonymity is a requirement.
I wrote up our security procedures here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37346620
The reason Tails isn't an option is because, as others have mentioned, there have been Tor browser exploits which reveal the IP address of the Tails user. While this is unlikely for our case, it's important to approach security from first principles with threat modeling. An attack from the FBI may seem unlikely today, but both Silk Road and one of its successors were taken down by mistakes they made when setting up their site. Learning from history, if you're not careful early, you're in for a surprise later.
Case in point: When I started Whonix Workstation to post this comment, the Whonix Gateway VM failed to boot. So when I tried to start Tor Browser and go to https://news.ycombinator.com, all I saw was a connection error. This kind of layered defense is essential if you're serious about staying out of jail.
Realistically, you'll likely dox yourself through some other means: sending Bitcoin to your pseudonym from your real identity, admitting to someone you know that you control your pseudonym (this work gets lonely, so this is a real temptation), or even accidentally signing off an email with "Thanks, [your real name]". And once you make a single mistake, you can never recover.
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#124Hi. We're building The Nose ( https://thenose.cc ), a safe haven for training data that can't be taken down with DMCA. Since this involves copyright infringement, strong anonymity is a requirement. I wrote up our security procedures here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37346620 The reason Tails isn't an option is because, as others have mentioned, there have been Tor browser exploits which reveal the IP address…
Other thoughts:
Day to day browsing is a pain. I use a VNC client to remote into our server, which is running a desktop environment with a regular browser. That way you can use apps (gmail, discord, etc) from outside the Tor network. But since you're tunneling through Tor, this is painfully slow. You'll likely want to type out long messages in Whonix, then copy-paste into your remote session. Each keystroke can sometimes take a full second to appear when animations are heavy.
Transferring large amounts of data is also painful. If you try to start Litecoin Core on Whonix, you'll need to sync more than 30 GB, which can take a very long time.
Patience is your weapon. You have all the time in the world not to make a mistake, and moments to make a fatal one. Think carefully about everything you do.
Stylometry scares me. AI can help here: run an assistant locally, and ask it to reword everything you write. You won't be able to use ChatGPT for this, obviously because OpenAI retains a history of everything you submit, but also because they require a real phone number to sign up. And you can't get a real number through any means I've found so far.
Payment is also a pain. I'm hoping to ask the community to donate Vanilla gift cards so that I can sign up for Tarsnap or spin up a droplet.
By applying the discipline normally found in aeronautics, I think it's possible to do this safely. But you'll still be risking jail time, and the intersection of people who want to do something for altruistic reasons and willing to risk prison is pretty small. I'll be documenting everything I do so that you can learn from my example, or perhaps from my mistakes.
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#125Would 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.
I left a comment in this thread of a non-root deanonymizing, Tails specific exploit that bizarrely went unpatched for multiple years.
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#126How can I be sure this project isn't sponsored by XYZ government secret agency and that more than 1GB of data does not contain any surveillance software?
They appear to support reproducible builds, which would make it a lot harder to sneak in surveillance software - https://tails.net/contribute/design/reproducibility/
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#127I 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…
Being blunt: your setup doesnt protect you from Apple. Websites will and does recognize you on every visit, both those done in private tabs and the usual ones. DDG and ProtonMail i cant comment on, but they are one of the better choices for the less tech-savvy/i-want-to-spend-my-free-time-having-fun. You have a pretty nice setup in terms of security, however.
If you want better protection for websites identifying you, you should consider researching on browser fingerprinting (which is extremely hard, if not impossible to do on Safari). If you want better protection overall, ditch Apple.
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've been needing to create virtualbox images for use in some courses (teaching data science and the like) at my previous work. This usecase has popped up often enough that I feel O need to be able to do this on my main laptop.
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#129I 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.
> and that now I2Pnis the preferred method of browsing the darknet
This is not true by any means. A "switch" to I2P never happened, and just a few months ago an exploit[1] that could deanonymize eepsites was published. Tor is still the only "method of browsing the darknet"; by most definitions.
Re: Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship
#130How can I be sure this project isn't sponsored by XYZ government secret agency and that more than 1GB of data does not contain any surveillance software?
you can't. but here are some reasons XYZ should not target Tails specifically :
- People who use Tails are not interesting data collection targets
- They have already access to people using Tails by other means
- It's just Linux. So their 0days could work with little effort in case they need it.
- The main purpose of Tor being an opensource project is plausible deniability for CIA agents using it. The main purpose of Tails (which is really a UX focused project) is more plausible deniability. They wouldn't ruin it by making a different "clean" version for their agents.