ftp.acc.umu.se/.../Tails_a_technical_overview.webm

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.