14 DAY TRIAL // Tails 0.23 RC1, a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and that helps you use the Internet anonymously, has been officially released and it available for download.
Tails is a distribution based on Debian and TOR technologies, and it was designed with one purpose in mind: to allow users to surf the Internet as anonymously as possible and to circumvent censorship wherever possible.
Unlike most other Linux operating systems, Tails is not built to be installed on the target computer, but only to run in a Live session from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card. This is de default procedure, but the developers also provide a Tails installer, if you want to make a more permanent OS.
This means that you can also upgrade from one version to another. This is done very easily by running Tails 0.22.1 and setting an administration password. Open a terminal and enter the following command:
echo 'TAILS_CHANNEL="alpha"' | sudo tee --append /etc/os-release && \ tails-upgrade-frontend-wrapper
You should now be able to enjoy the improvements brought by the latest Tails update.
There are two major improvements since the previous 0.22.1 stable release. The network interfaces' MAC address are now spoofed by default, which is actually a very important countermeasure. The second change is about the way users configure how Tor connects to the network (bridges, proxies, restrictive firewalls, and so on). This means that new options has been added to the Tails Greeter that says “start Tor Launcher when needed.”
Also, the Tor package has been updated to version 0.2.4.21-1~d60.squeeze+1, obfsproxy has been updated to version 0.2.6-2~~squeeze+1, and I2P has been updated to version 0.9.11-1deb6u1.
The Intel Management Engine Interface driver has been disabled. According to the developers, in Tails it might be dangerous, and it causes bugs on various hardware such as systems that reboot when asked to shut down.
The possibility to switch identities in the Tor Browser has been implemented, by using a filtering proxy in front of the Tor ControlPort to avoid giving full control over Tor to the desktop user.
A complete changelog can be found in the official announcement. Download Tails 0.23 RC1 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only. Even so, the distribution will most likely perform the task it was designed to do.