Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 1.0, is out.

All users must upgrade as soon as possible: this release fixes numerous security issues.

Introduction

We are especially proud to present you Tails 1.0!

Version 1.0 is often an important milestone that denotes the maturity of a free software project. The first public version of what would become Tails was released on June 23 2009, when it was called Amnesia. That was almost five years ago. Tails 1.0 marks the 36th stable release since then.

Achievements

We have been working since then on the many features we think are essential both in terms of security and usability:

But this has been a continuous work over the past years, and you will see that 1.0 itself does not bring a lot of effective changes for the user. Still, to mark the occasion, we integrated our new logo on the website and the boot menu.

Thank you

The maturity of Tails is also reflected in:

Future

Version 1.0 does not mean that we will stop adding new features and improving Tails. Briefly, here are our plans for the future:

  • Tails 1.1, due in June 2014, will be based on Debian 7 (Wheezy) and will bring many new versions of the software included in Tails.

  • Tails 2.0 will focus on sustainability and maintainability. Most of that work aims at reducing the workload of creating new versions of Tails through infrastructure improvements and automated testing. Our objective is to be able to release same-day security updates.

  • Tails 3.0 will focus on changes in the internals of Tails to make it more secure. That includes sandboxing critical applications and software hardening.

And of course, new contributors with all kinds of skills are always welcome. There is surely something you can do to make Tails better.

Changes

Notable user-visible changes include:

  • Security fixes

    • Upgrade the web browser to 24.5.0esr-0+tails1~bpo60+1 (Firefox 24.5.0esr + Iceweasel patches + Torbrowser patches).
    • Upgrade Tor to 0.2.4.21-1+tails1~d60.squeeze+1:
      • Based on 0.2.4.21-1~d60.squeeze+1.
      • Backport the fix for bug #11464 on Tor Project's Trac. It adds client-side blacklists for all Tor directory authority keys that was vulnerable to Heartbleed. This protects clients in case attackers were able to compromise a majority of the authority signing and identity keys.
  • Bugfixes

    • Disable inbound I2P connections. Tails already restricts incoming connections, but this change tells I2P about it.
    • Fix link to the system requirements documentation page in the Tails Upgrader error shown when too little RAM is available.
  • Minor improvements

    • Upgrade I2P to 0.9.12-2~deb6u+1.
    • Import TorBrowser profile. This was forgotten in Tails 0.23 and even though we didn't explicitly set those preferences in that release they defaulted to the same values. This future-proofs us in case the defaults would ever change.
    • Import new custom version of Tor Launcher:
    • Integrate the new Tails logo into various places:
      • The website
      • The boot splash
      • The "About Tails" dialog

See the online Changelog for technical details.

Known issues

I want to try it or to upgrade!

Go to the install page.

As no software is ever perfect, we maintain a list of problems that affects the last release of Tails.

What's coming up?

The next Tails release is scheduled for June 10.

Would you want to help? There are many ways you can contribute to Tails. If you want to help, come talk to us!