Ray is a security consultant and trainer in Africa.

From the 10 journalists that he trained in using Tails at the end of 2015, he knows of 2 who are still using it actively. They were the people with higher risks. For example a blogger with high risks that uses Tails as her regular operating system for her blogging activities, for example while traveling, and be able to use shared computers.

Things he (and the people he trained) like:

  • Tails has low hardware requirements and this is useful when traveling to be able to use it anyway on the computers that are available.
  • The persistent storage.
  • MAC spoofing. Using MAC spoofing in a news room, one of the journalist he trained realized how his activity on the network could be monitored because the IT person, not seeing his computer as being up on the network, came and checked if everything was ok.
  • The Windows camouflage.
  • Having a set of tools already installed in Tails makes it easy for less technical people to get started.

Things he (and the people he trained) dislike:

  • Tails doesn't work well on Chromebooks but these are picking up in Africa because they are cheap.
  • Tor often fails to connect on networks with low bandwidth.
  • Looking for applications is hard for people who are use to their proprietary equivalents (Excel is Calc, Thunderbird is Icedove, etc.).
  • After the training and the participants had to repeat the process of installing Tails again, some failed to carry out this process on their own and the one running on a Chromebook totally failed even during the training.
  • Removing support for 32-bits computers will be problematic for them because they often rely on old machines.
  • When working with a low bandwidth or connecting through a captive portal, after people started the Unsafe Browser, they tend to trust it more than they should because it's running from Tails.