Tag: Tails

Tails 3.0 Released

The latest version of the privacy-oriented Linux distro, Tails, is now out. Tails 3.0 is based on Debian 9 and includes a number of usability and security improvements.

Among those is a requirement to run Tails on 64-bit platforms,

Tails 3.0 works on 64-bit computers only and not on 32-bit computers anymore. Dropping hardware support, even for a small portion of our user base, is always a hard decision to make but being 64-bit only has important security and reliability benefits. For example, to protect against some types of security exploits, support for the NX bit is compulsory and most binaries are hardened with PIE which allows ASLR.

 

The Amnesic Icognito Live System (Tails)

The Amnesic Icognito Live System is a Debian-based USB/CD-bootable system designed to preserve as much anonymity as possible. Tails does this first by routing all Internet communications through Tor and second by avoiding using any permanent data storage on the host machine.

Probably one of the more useful things — other than the distro itself — is Tail’s excellent warning page giving a nice overview of the limitations of Tails, Tor, and a lot of Internet security problems in general. For example, the warning page notes that Tails  “…doesn’t make your crappy passwords stronger” and that while Tor does a good job of providing anonymity for what it is, there are certain problems that it was never intended to solve (such as an attack by a global adversary able to monitor all computer traffic in the network).