14 DAY TRIAL // The next major version of the Tails amnesic incognito live system, also known as the Anonymous Live CD used by ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden to stay hidden online using the latest Tor technologies, is now in the works.
Tails 2.4 development is open, and it looks like the first Release Candidate (RC) build has already landed for public beta testing, incorporating some major new features and changes, among which we can mention the upgrade to the latest TOR Browser 6.0 web browser based on Mozilla Firefox 45.2.
However, being based on Debian GNU/Linux, Tails stays true to itself and offers users the Icedove 100% free (libre) email and news suite, which will be shipped with the automatic configuration wizard enabled by default, but patched to use and accept only secure protocols.
The good thing about the Icedove implementation in Tails 2.4 is that it will also contain all the improvements done by the TorBirdy team in their non-automatic configuration wizard. Other new features include the enablement of the Packetization Layer Path MTU Discovery for the IPv4 network protocol.
"If any system on the path to the remote host has a MTU smaller than the standard Ethernet one, then Tails will receive an ICMP packet asking it to send smaller packets. Our firewall will drop such ICMP packets to the floor, and then the TCP connection won't work properly," reads today's announcement.
Firewall and kernel hardening
But it looks like there will be many other small yet useful improvements in the Tails 2.4 major release. Among them are firewall and kernel hardening, updated Tails Upgrader to support other locales than English, the implementation of the Zenity version from Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie," and the removal of the APT pinning feature.
The changelog for the Tails 2.4 RC1 development release has been attached below if you want to know what exactly has been changed and what's coming in the final version, and the Live ISO image is available for download right now via our website. As usual, your help is needed to test this version and report bugs.