Hello, Thank you for coming
We're gonna give a talk about and gonna give a technical overview of tails.
That's kurono, intrigeri and I am BitingBird
We are all tails contributors in different fields.
I don't do technical things,
intrigeri is one of the oldest tails contributors
and kurono contributes since three years now
Tails is the acronym of the-amnesic-incognito-life-system
And there is the nice url, where you can have all the information.
It's a life operating system.
It works on almost any computer - except ARM
And it boots from a dvd or a usb stick
and theoretically from sdcard too, but it doesn't work very well.
The focus of our new distribution is privacy and anonymity.
It allows the user to use the internet anonymously.
And also, when there is censorship, to circumvent it.
All the connections to the internet go with tor,
which is an anonymization network.
That's the first big feature of tails.
And the second one is
that there is no trace on the computer you are using
so after you used it nobody can see that you've used the computer.
If somebody would grab your computer and search files
they would not know, what you have done.
Unless you ask for it explicitly <????>
We have also a lot of data producing tools
because some users use it to write books, articles, video and such things.
They want to be able to create such documents without being traced.
We have a very good report,
not from our users,
actually from the people we are suppused to protect them against.
The NSA says, that it's a pain in the ass.
When the NSA says you're making their life harder
somehow you're doing something right.
[klapping, laughing]
I guess you can imagine who's the famous tails user
who gave us access to the documents where they say that
There is also Bruce Schneier who says he uses tails
so, not bad.
So, what are our goals?
We took a stance in the beginning of tails
that it was not really common back then
to have usability as a security feature
because "ubergeeks" where already able to have secure communication.
We think that privacy is not an individual matter.
It's a collective matter.
Everybody needs to have privacy
and new users and non geek users had no way to get access to this.
The tools existed but they had no user interface
or they where rally hard to configure.
So, we designed a system that gives a quite good level of security
with a quite good level of usability.
Lots of the time people ask us, why we don't include more security features.
We have to make a balance between usability and security.
Because if it's really secure but nobody can use it
then it doesn't bring anything.
It makes security accessible for most people.
Another important point in our project
is to have a very small delta to our upstream.
Our main upstream is Debian and we try to not to diverge to much from it.
Because the more you do things differently
the more work you have to maintain.
The work is not the work of implementing something once
it's the work of maintaining on the long term.
There where a lot of other security distributions
and there are still a few other
But most of them have a very short lifespan
because of maintenance.
It's a distribution and
we're a very tiny team compared to Debian
but we're a team.
Lots of other privacy distributions where either one person
or very tiny teams and they didn't make outrage to be joined by other people
Most other privacy distributions didn't take into account the maintenance work
and the user support because
even if we try to make it usable
it's still a lot of work to teach the users how to use it
and to document how to use it
Also if you want to start such a project
you need to have a long term commitment
and to remember to avoid the <???> term of "not invented here"
It's quite common to try to do something that does exactly what you want
but sometimes it's best to find an existing software
that does something close enough
to <???> the features you want in it or use it as it is