Ships new command-line tools used by SecureDrop users

Jan 9, 2020 13:34 GMT  ·  By

Tails, the amnesic incognito live system based on Debian GNU/Linux, which focuses on delivering online privacy to those who need a portable operating system, has been updated to version 4.2.

Both a feature and bugfix release, Tails 4.2 is here to improve and optimize the automatic upgrade feature to use less memory and allow users to upgrade from any previous version to the latest release and do as many automatic upgrades as possible. Manual upgrades will only be required when upgrading to a major release, such as Tails 5.0.

"Until now, if your version of Tails was several months old, you sometimes had to do 2 or more automatic upgrades in a row. For example, to upgrade from Tails 3.12 to Tails 3.16, you first had to upgrade to Tails 3.14," explain the devs. "Starting with 4.2, direct automatic upgrades will be available from all prior versions to the latest version."

New tools, updated components

Tails 4.2 also comes with several new command-line tools that are being used by SecureDrop users to analyze the metadata of leaked documents on computers that can't use the Additional Software feature. These include PDF Redact Tools to redact and strip metadata from text documents, Tesseract OCR for converting images that contain text into text documents, and FFMpeg for recording and converting audio and video.

Under the hood, several core components have been updated to their latest release, such as the Linux 5.3.15 kernel, TOR Browser 9.0.3 anonymous web browser, and Mozilla Thunderbird 68.3.0 email and news client. The KeePassX password manager software has been improved in this release to open the ~/Persistent/keepassx.kdbx database by default. You can download Tails 4.2 right now from our free software portal.