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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

#141
post #89
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but that's not what parent said. He said it only runs on "intel macOS", which is false. It works on non-Apple computers as well. But I understand the miscommunication, parent meant to say "of the Apple computers, it only runs on Intel ones". There is a world outside of Apple, you know :-)

It's an emphasis thing. You can't tell in text where the emphasis is. In this case it was super clear that it was "intel macOS", but yea, it should have been "intel macs".

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

#142
How does Tails(or Qubes, or etc) provide security in a real use case full time OS system?

Say I log into Facebook, obviously I expect my identity to be exposed to Facebook, but do any of those OS have the ability to keep me private after I logged into some website ?

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

#143

Hi. 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 somet…

You sir are very based.

I too am a fellow qube herder. After having discovered Qubes OS, I've never wanted to go back!

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

#144

How does Tails help you avoid censorship?

It's a Tor client. Bypassing censorship is one of Tor's design goals.

Is there anything Tails does to actively bypass censorship, or is it simply a result of the increased anonymity?

To me, it seems like it can only have limited utility in this regard. For example, Tails (and Tor) isn't going to help you avoid private sector censorship on services like X or Facebook or YouTube, right? It won't help you get a book published or reach an audience with a video.

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

#145

Hi. 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 somet…

[deleted]

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

#146

Hi. 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 somet…

Really appreciate what you're doing. Don't let those danish bottom feeders get you!

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

#147

Could any HN users speak about their experience and rationale for using Tails? My outsiders’ perspective is that the threat model for these kinds of surveillance resistant tools is somewhat perverse: they trade indistinguishability (being lost in the crowd) for a nominally more anonymous but extremely unusual datapoint (a host/browser/etc. that basically looks like no other normal machine.) Put another way: without a…

You put the stick in, access forbidden web site (for example, Instagram). Take the stick out, police searches your computer, there are no traces. If you were using a regular OS, even through Tor, there are some incriminating traces left, in browser cache, in MFT, in pagefile etc. that can be recovered.

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

#148
post #52

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…

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…

Do you have a separate neovim instance (config and all) in every container? Or a single neovim instance on the host which can access all container volumes? What about shell instances?

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

#149

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.

"Many eyes" is a failed philosophy. Even if many people could, theoretically, look at the code few actually do as evidenced by the Heartbleed defect in OpenSSL. One of the most critical pieces of software, used by literally billions of consumers and basically every trillion dollar company, and they missed glaring coding errors that any basic static analyzer would automatically tag. Nobody was looking at even some of the most critical code. The first failure is that you need people actually looking, which basically requires being paid to do full-time work (as most work on Linux is these days).

In addition, even if people are looking, finding defects is really hard. A random onlooker has basically a 0% chance to find most of the critical zero-days afflicting Linux. It takes weeks to months of dedicated effort by technical experts with domain knowledge to find most such bugs. "Many eyes" is worthless to security, what you need is many trained technical experts with domain knowledge using high quality techniques and processes derived from successful high security projects.

This is not to say that "security through obscurity" is a good thing or that "open source" has no impact. Open source and development does have a large impact, it is just mostly on your ability to trust the auditing/security process as a random third-party, not the security itself. The security itself demands focused technical ability. However, the ability to trust the security claims derives from a technical evaluation by a technically competent, trusted party. The easiest way to do that if you are technically competent is to do it yourself. However, few people have that sort of time, so you farm out the work. If you are a big company or the government, you can usually get access to the source code under appropriate contractual protection, then you have your own technical staff (technically competent, trusted party) do the evaluation. If you are a smaller company, you might not have any technical staff appropriate for the task so you farm it out to a testing body (technically competent) who can probably be trusted since you are paying them.

However, if you are just some random person, you do not have the money to pay for a evaluation and you have no way of knowing if "Totally Not the NSA Certification Company" can be trusted. So, your best bet is inherent transparency and hoping that the unaffiliated lookers are, on average, not your enemy and technically competent. This is a okay option if you do not have access to better choices, and certainly better than nothing, but is a far cry from the other options where you have real control, incentive alignment, and insight into auditing processes. Only a organization incompetent at security would not use one of the better options for critical dependencys. Unfortunately, basically every large commercial IT organization, such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Crowdstrike, etc. is incompetent at security and none of them actually evaluate their dependencies or do any meaningful third-party certifications.

Funnily enough, this means my advice is practically useless, because the security of everybody is completely untrustworthy. Your only hope is "many eyes" because that is the only way to get any trustable audit at all. In the physical industries you have standards and certification bodies worth more than the paper they are written on, but in software everything in security is total snake oil and you should only believe what you can see for yourself. Hope that helps.

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

#150
post #63
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…

>why not more ppl switched to alpine I think one reason might be musl and its compatibility.

What's so bad about musl? Everything works fine for me on Alpine.

My desktop is FreeBSD but I have a few alpine servers for docker and other Linux specific stuff.

And FreeBSD is even less Gnu-Linux compatible than Alpine yet everything works fine. Thanks to an army of port maintainers of course.

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