What is Tails

  • Operating system on a USB stick designed for privacy and anonymity
  • Safe environment for:
    • Anonymous Internet and censorship circumvention (all networking goes through Tor)
    • Working on sensitive documents (leaves no trace on the computer)
    • Using privacy tools preconfigured in Tails (OTR, Enigmail, encrypted partitions, etc.)

What is Tails

  • Operating system on a USB stick designed for privacy and anonymity
  • Safe environment for:
    • Anonymous Internet and censorship circumvention (all networking goes through Tor)
    • Working on sensitive documents (leaves no trace on the computer)
    • Using privacy tools preconfigured in Tails (OTR, Enigmail, encrypted partitions, etc.)
  • 19000 users daily

What brought us here

  • UX testing at NUMA in Paris

    • Problems ended being somewhere else
    • No feedback on Tor connection progress
    • People could not connect through the captive portal at NUMA

  • Redesign work on Tor Launcher, the Tor configuration tool of Tor Browser

What we are trying to solve

  • No feedback when behind a captive portal
  • No feedback when Tor is blocked or censored (and you need a bridge)
  • No feedback on whether the connection to Tor is making progress
  • Might require actions in very different places
  • Allow saving settings for a given network (and reusing the same Tor entry guard)
  • Make it easier to circumvent censorship

Let's do an experiment!

  • Any kind of questions: what? why?
  • Things that you don't understand or doubts
  • Suggestions, new ideas, etc.
  • Use cases in which the proposal wouldn't work
  • Privacy or technical issues behind the proposal
  • Missing things