Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

Post by trw55 » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 10:45 PM UTC

paravirtualized wrote: post #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 net…

Post by brightlancer » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 11:30 PM UTC

boxed wrote: post #141

mrb wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Post by replwoacause » Fri, Sep 15, 2023, 12:48 AM UTC

paravirtualized wrote: post #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 net…

Post by replwoacause » Fri, Sep 15, 2023, 12:52 AM UTC

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #147

woodruffw wrote: post #139

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.

Post by costco » Fri, Sep 15, 2023, 2:47 AM UTC

nostril wrote: post #124

nostril wrote: post #123

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…