Monday, January 7, 2013

Tails Distro : Privacy for anyone anywhere


The Amnesic Incognito Live System or Tails is a live media Linux distro designed boot into a highly secure desktop environment. The Amnesic Incognito Live System is free software released under the GNU/GPL.Tails is meant for online privacy and anonymity. Tails interacts to the internet using Tor network.Using Tor, Tails pipes all Internet traffic emanating from your computer through a constantly shifting set of relays that are operated by a network of volunteers. Consequently, it’s then difficult for anyone to monitor your activity on the web or for web hosts to pinpoint your location.Thus making all your internet activites anonymous. 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. But using it on a virtual machine can compromise the anonymity.




Once booted, it executes from RAM, taking care not to make use of a swap partition. The desktop is Gnome 2.0 and the applications are a fairly standard selection. The web browser Iceweasel 3.5 (Debian Firefox). There are other applications to handle graphics work, audio editing, media playback, text editing, instant messaging and a email client. Extra software can be added via the Synaptic package manager which pulls directly from the Debian repositories. So far, so similar to most other live desktop distros. Security and limited footprint on the the host machine are the areas in which the distro differs from the run of the mill. The tails also have open office tools.
One of the best features of the tails distro is the option to run it in a windows XP camouflage .

                                            
Also there is an onscreen keyboard .This helps from the danger of keyloggers. Also the tails have many cryptographic tools that helps to encrypt files ,emails etc.
The supplied version of Iceweasel comes with an extension to enable end to end encryption (HTTPS) whenever possible in order to further increase security and another one to switch Tor on and off. Many of the applications that are supplied have been tweaked in this way, to improve security. Tails also wipes the contents of RAM on shutdown, and it has a little onscreen keyboard to bypass hardware key loggers. Note that it isn't loaded down with security tools, such as those for penetration testing, although such tools can be added via the package manage.
Tails can be downloaded from their official website .The latest verison tails 0.15 was released on November 28 2012.
https://tails.boum.org/



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