TAILS: The Amnesiac Incognito Live System - A Review and Comparison with Other OSes

Making delirious dictators worldwide quake in their boots, the Tails Project recently announced numerous improvements to its anonymity-obsessed Linux distro, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, aka Tails. Now in version 0.7, Tails is the spiritual successor of the well-known Incognito Live System and is developed with the support of the Tor Project, an onion routing project originally developed to protect US military communications. The live distro, which runs on any PC powerful enough to run Windows XP, is based on Debian Live and runs directly from CD and/or USB Flash memory. No trace is left after using Tails, thanks to many features, such as independent operation of all software and all hardware drivers from the PC's operating system, no permanent data storage and all the channeling of all Internet connections through the Tor anonymization network. "With Tails", say the distro developers, "we provide a tongue and a pen protected by state-of-the-art cryptography to guarantee...basic human rights and allow journalists worldwide to work and communicate freely and without fear of reprisal." The journalists of these pages humbly salute the valiant effort.

TAILS: The Amnesiac Incognito Live System

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Tails, which just came out in its 1.0 version, is a live 32-bit Debian Linux-based operating system that runs from a USB flash drive, CD/DVD or SD card. (A live system is a complete, bootable OS on removable media.)

The Tails team has announced availability of Tails 3.15, latest stable update of amnesic incognito live system. This release includes important security updates and critical bug fixes.

The Amnesic Incognito Live System or Tails is a Linux distribution aimed at preserving privacy and anonymity.[1] It is the next iteration of development on the Incognito Linux distribution.[2] It is based on Debian, with all outgoing connections forced to go through Tor.[3] The system is designed to be booted as a live CD or USB and no trace is left on local storage unless explicitly told to.

Tails is a live operating system built off Debian GNU/Linux. There is no installation process. You boot your computer with it, and it runs from the temporary media you booted from. When you shut it down, it forgets (amnesic) and helps keep you anonymous while using it (incognito).

Kodachi and Tails (an acronym for "The Amnesic Incognito Live System") have quite a few things in common. Both come in the form of a bootable live image that you can run on just about any computer without the need to install it on the host system.

Both distros are fully functional live systems that boot from a USB drive without storing any information on the host computer. When the system loads, you will find many of the most commonly used applications available and ready to use.

If you've thought of a brilliant way to do this, please describe it in a Tails bug report. Better yet, submit a patch. We all would like to see this problem solved, but unfortunately there are no known good solutions that that are "incognito" (the I in Tails). Tails is slowly moving towards becoming a persistent live image, installed on a USB drive, which may allow for a persistent /var/lib/tor directory, but so far there is just no good way to choose the same guard node every time without persistence.

Tails is specifically designed to be, above all, "amnesiac". Even if you don't trust its security for on-line use, you can still use it off-line (booting from R/O live media and writing data to encrypted USB or R/O media).

As it's a live operating system, it boots from a USB stick, and this leaves no trace that it has been run (apart from in the running memory, and which will decade quickly). In the promotion of the operating system they define the terms of:

Tails is a live operating system built on Debian that uses Tor for all its internet traffic. Its main goal is to give you security through anonymity. With it, you can browse the web anonymously through encrypted connections. Tails protects you in a number of ways. Since all your traffic is routed through Tor, it's incredibly difficult to track your physical location or see which sites you visit. Tails doesn't use a computer's hard disk, so nothing you do is saved on the computer you're running it. Instead, everything you're working on is stored in RAM and erased when you shut down. This means any sensitive documents you're working on are never stored permanently. Because of that, Tails is a really good operating system to use when you're on a public computer or network. It's also packed with a bunch of basic cryptographic tools. If you're running Tails off a USB drive, it's encrypted with LUKS. All your internet traffic is encrypted with HTTPS Everywhere, your IM conversations are encrypted with OTR, and your emails and documents are encrypted with OpenPGP.

This live linux distro is a little bit different to the ones we've tried out up until now. This one has a very specific purpose, and it's to make a secure system which uses tor for practically all communications, and then forgets everything on shutdown. Tails itself is an acronym for "The Amnesiac Incognito Live System", where the "amnesia" refers to forgetting everything (there will be no browser history or work files stored on the PC itself) and the "incognito" refers to the use of tor. Obviously all the other live distros here fit the "amnesiac live system" requirement too, but most of the others here don't take steps in pursuit of anonymity.

Tails has a long-term memory, which is the basis of the operating system and stored on the live media you boot it from but nothing that happens or changes that you make will make it into the long-term memory. It forgets anything that happened and reverts to it's long-term memory and exactly the same state it was in before you'd done anything or made any changes.

The Tails interface also comes with e-mail and instant messaging applications so you can use your existing accounts (which can be problematic) or create new ones. While working within Tails, you may also choose to record your activities or wipe all traces of using the live system.

A live USB runs an operating system without installing it on your computer. A live USB lets you jump into a live environment when you use it to install a Linux distro. A good example of this is the Parrot OS live environment, pictured below. 2ff7e9595c