% Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System % The Tails Project % June 2012

Tails is...

What's in a name?

  • Tails ⇔ The Amnesic Incognito Live System
  • merger of "amnesia" and "Incognito" projects

What is Tails?

  • operating system
  • goal: preserve privacy and anonymity
  • runs from DVD or USB
  • many languages

Incognito?

Use the Internet anonymously

  • Tor
  • pre-configured apps
  • Metadata Anonymization Toolkit (MAT)

Amnesic?

Protects from data recovery after shutdown

  • leaves no trace on your computer
  • erases memory on shutdown

Cryptographic tools

  • Encrypt USB sticks & hard-disks
  • Encrypt email
  • HTTPS Everywhere
  • OTR

Work on sensitive documents

Full operating system

  • Office
  • Graphics
  • Audio
  • Video
  • Printer, scanner

History

Milestones

  • August 2009 - amnesia 0.2, first public release
  • April 2012 - Tails 0.11, major milestone: opt-in persistence, USB installer, many supported languages
  • Yesterday - Tails 0.12
  • Late 2012 - Tails 1.0

Having a history?

Most other similar projects...

... how uncommon!

... died young → Haven, Anonym.OS, ParanoidLinux, onionOS, Phantomix and many others... RIP. Why?

  • One-person projects
  • Much daily maintenance and user support work
  • No long-term commitment?

How to make this sustainable?

What makes the difference?

Optimize for the future

  • avoid NIH → be lazy, reuse and adapt
  • don't carry too many patches → upstream first

Upgrade your hobby

  • don't stay alone → encourage participation, document specs and design decisions
  • be humble → don't grow too fast

Relationships

Tor project

Debian

  • long-term contribution
  • some Debian developers
  • see you at DebConf12 in Managua?

Users

In the beginning...

  • friends
  • social struggles

... and now?

Many!

  • 12 HTTP mirrors, >20GB a day each + BitTorrent
  • every minute...

Who are they?

  • Who knows?
  • Tell us about your/their use cases!

What's next

Upcoming improvements

  • incremental updates
  • change MAC address
  • Thunderbird
  • Tails Server
  • automated builds and tests

Roadmap → https://tails.boum.org/contribute/roadmap/

How about you write this story with us?

Questions?

?

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