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Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

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

#181

Post by fmajid »

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…

llama.cpp runs LLaMa 2 7B on common hardware like a MacBook Pro. Haven't tried it yet on my RTX 3070 (Mobile) but there's no reason why it shouldn't work.

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

#182

Post by lost_tourist »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #178
replwoacause wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? This sounds like fear mongering…

the instagram part? https://www.insider.com/russian-influencer-veronika-loginova...

twitter too: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/x-unfit-for-bank...

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

#183

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

xyst wrote: post #117
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?

Not just exit nodes, but guard and relay nodes as well. If they control all hops in the circuit, all your anonymity are belong to them.

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

#184

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

palata wrote: post #171
coppsilgold wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use alpine as the main/root environment. But I rarely use any applications from alpine. For that I have Arch, Fedora and Debian rootfs dirs into which I pivot_root with the help of bubblewrap (bwrap) in shell scripts. There is no overhead and the GPU can be easily attached. You can also dynamically attach ro/rw CWD and target paths (`for arg in "$@"`). Everything that I care about just works and I get a separa…

> For kernel safety applications must be denied direct access to the host kernel, this is usually achieved with virtual machines. And that is what QubesOS does, if I understand correctly?

You do understand correctly.

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

#185

Post by nostril »

qingcharles wrote: post #174
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…

Are you currently hosted on Shinjiru now? I'm thinking about using them as a reverse proxy in front of a site that might suffer false DMCA attacks. I don't want my web host to ban me just because they can't deal with the hassle, so I'm thinking about proxying all the requests. What does Shinjiru do if they receive a DMCA notice? When I ran a huge private torrent tracker I paid a decent chunk to get a host that ignore…

I think if you're interfacing with your server without going through Whonix, you're asking for trouble. Not only do you need to pay for the server using BTC that can't be traced back to your identity, but anything that touches the server (such as your server you're proxying with) needs to take the same precautions, which means no DigitalOcean, unless you can somehow pay them without that also being tied to your identity.

If you're not actually worried that DMCA people will follow through on their threat to sue you, or you really want to risk losing your property in the event of a lawsuit, then perhaps this might work.

Feel free to email me for more advice or to keep in touch. Your project sounds interesting.

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

#186

Post by gymbeaux »

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.

I don’t see why you couldn’t have a persistent install of something like Tails or Kali Linux as long as the OS drive is encrypted with a password of a particular length. Can we brute force 25-character passwords 20 years from now? Maybe, but the statute of limitations would elapse by then (in the US anyway). I suppose it wouldn’t be as “safe” as a live USB that doesn’t persist anything, but that’s the tradeoff- you can’t persist anything and probably have some “setup” to do each time you boot from the Live USB.

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

#187

Post by nostril »

costco wrote: post #169
nostril wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like the way you describe your process. As the person who made the stylometry thing that made the rounds a while back, I would say the best thing you can do on that front is to either get a "paraphraser" like ChatGPT/translators or just write less. Also, there's a site called smspva.com and a lot of sites like it where you can rent "real" phone numbers and they take every payment method under the sun. Depending on…

smspva is perfect. Thanks! Do you know of one for gift cards? Particularly ones that could be used to pay for services like server rental or Tarsnap.

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

#188

Post by versteegen »

fmajid wrote: post #181
nostril wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

llama.cpp runs LLaMa 2 7B on common hardware like a MacBook Pro. Haven't tried it yet on my RTX 3070 (Mobile) but there's no reason why it shouldn't work.

A 7B LLM has a huge quantity of knowledge about the world. You don't need that just to reword sentences. You can use a translation model with English input and English output, or other Text2Text model such as one for textual style transfer. A purpose-built model for rewording into a fixed style different from the input could be easily be 10M parameters or fewer (that's already big enough for translating between two languages, afterall) but you can readily find models in the 100M range for text style transfer.

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

#189

Post by throwitaway156 »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #183
xyst wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not just exit nodes, but guard and relay nodes as well. If they control all hops in the circuit, all your anonymity are belong to them.

You can increase the number of hops to make it very difficult. Guard nodes are pinned, so they might know who uses and who doesnt use Tor (doesnt matter if you arent using a bridge).

You can also set up your own exit/guard node and configure Tor accordingly. While not a recommended setup, it works pretty reliably.

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

#190

Post by lannisterstark »

omani wrote: post #52
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…

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…

Because most people don't need a reason to. Why would they switch to alpine?
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