71–80 of 83 posts
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I don't quite know how this works, so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but couldn't someone just take the difference between your inbound and outbound tor traffic to find how much traffic originates from your computer?
They might know how much, but they wouldn't know which traffic was yours.
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> Encryption keys can exist in memory for up to a week in live memory with power on. No. After some high-enough RAM area contained the keys and you keep it powered and your OS uses much less physical RAM than physically available there's no hard limit. Just forget the "week."
Updated comment for HN pedanticism.
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Data can be retrieved from DRAM not after weeks (your claim is "even if you shut your computer down (...) Your encryption keys can be in your computers memory for weeks") but only http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack "in the seconds to minutes after power has been removed." The reason is explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_refresh And even the electrons from SRAM, which doesn't need refreshes…
Thanks, this is true. Encryption keys can exist in memory for up to a week [edit: or longer] in live memory with power on. This is well after they've been used on the machine, or say after you close your Truecrypt volumes. The vast majority of people rarely shutdown their laptops for extended periods of time and often just suspend to disk, instead of a full power-off. This is why it's good to power down or sdmem when…
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Thanks, this is true. Encryption keys can exist in memory for up to a week [edit: or longer] in live memory with power on. This is well after they've been used on the machine, or say after you close your Truecrypt volumes. The vast majority of people rarely shutdown their laptops for extended periods of time and often just suspend to disk, instead of a full power-off. This is why it's good to power down or sdmem when…
Why would the encryption keys sit around in RAM? Properly designed cryptographic software wipes the keys when they are no longer needed.
> How do we now it isn’t some government plot designed to snare activists or criminals? A couple of ways, actually. One of the Snowden leaks show the NSA complaining about Tails in a Power Point Slide; if it’s bad for the NSA, it’s safe to say it’s good for privacy. And all of the Tails code is open source, so it can be inspected by anyone worried about foul play. It does not follow that either, or both, of these poi…
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For some perspective, this was back in the days where it was actually quite a bit of work to get get linux configured and running correctly on your at home desktop. Knoppix was quite a miracle.
Knoppix came out in 2000, a lot of time had passed since it was "actually quite a bit of work to get get linux configured and running correctly on your at home desktop ." If you were mot using a thinkpad or ibook a laptop could still cause some trouble.
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What is Tails, if not an operating system?
A distribution of the Linux operating system. It's a Debian distribution with some userspace tools bundled.
I guess the main thing would be the OS is everything which isn't an application, and Tails is definitely not a single application, though it is specialised.