Be Anonymous Online With The Tails Operating System

possibly the most important linux distribution on the planet is tails what is till's tails is a live linux distribution so it's designed to be run on a live usb stick you put the iso on a usb stick and you carry this usb stick around with you and anytime you want to do anything anonymously on the internet you plug in this usb stick reboot the computer doesn't matter what operating system it's running anyway you boot into the tills operating system and then you start the tour browser the tor network is running everything you do on the internet at that point should be anonymous you should be free of surveillance and this is very important and it's why i say it's the most important linux distribution on the planet is because in so many parts of the world you know some of the things that you say on the internet some of the things you express can actually get you either imprisoned or in some cases killed today what i'm going to do is i'm going to just show you guys a quick first look at the most recent release of tails which is tills 4.25 it was released just last week what i'm going to do is i'm going to take a look at this inside a virtual machine rather than on a usb stick in a virtual machine all i need to do is just attach the iso to a virtual machine i don't need to create a virtual hard drive or anything because we're not actually installing an operating system so installing this inside virtualbox or vert manager is what i'm going to install it on all i need to do is create a virtual machine give it a certain amount of cpu and ram and then attach the iso and then don't bother creating a virtual hard drive of any kind because again we don't need disk space for this we're strictly running this off the live iso so let me go ahead and switch over to my desktop here so this is the virtual machine i just created and let me go ahead and start this and get into full screen mode here and it took a minute or two for this to finally boot up again it's a live image we're not actually running this as an actual installed linux distribution and when you first get into it it's going to ask you about your language your keyboard layout and your format it's always going to ask you this stuff because of course it doesn't know it can't remember settings because the idea of this particular operating system is nothing is saved nothing's ever remembered there's nothing that will ever be able to be identifiable towards you the user and of course this is done for again privacy and anonymity for safety reasons so by default it's chosen english us that is correct for my language and keyboard so i'll just click start tails all right and it finally loads up of course this is the gnome desktop environment we do get a brief message saying about a warning of running this inside a virtual machine because it is designed to be run off a live usb stick not necessarily inside a virtual machine and the problem with running this inside a virtual machine while they warn you is you can run it inside a virtual machine but here's the thing your virtual machines are only as secure private anonymous as the host machine so for example if you were running a proprietary operating system like windows or mac you can't install tails inside a virtual machine and think you're private or anonymous because your host machine is not private or anonymous and if the host machine is compromised your virtual machines are compromised so you always if you're going to try tails or do anything until inside a virtual machine you have to make sure that the host machine and the hypervisor the virtual machine program you're using are all free and open source software and that's the case for me yeah i'm of course running this on a linux host and i'm using vert manager which is free and open source software but if you were using either a proprietary operating system or a proprietary hypervisor then your virtual machine is not secure at that point and you're you're kind of missing the point so at that point you'd probably be better just running it off the live usb back to the desktop here now that the desktop environment has loaded up let me go ahead i'm going to go into applications let me get a proper screen resolution so let's see if i go into system tools and into settings and then i'm going to go into devices and then resolution let me go ahead and set this to a proper 1920x1080 resolution click apply keep changes and close out of the settings manager now the very first window you get past the keyboard layout and the language and all is do we want to connect to the tor network and obviously you want to do this now there's two ways to do this you can connect to tor automatically which is the easiest way you just click a button recommends that you actually connect to tor automatically if you're on public wi-fi or you can do this other option here hide to my local network that i'm connecting to of course that would be a safer option again if you were in control of the network yourself i'm going to choose the first option we'll assume that we're out in public i'm on a laptop at starbucks for example connect automatically and this will take a few seconds and you see connected to tor successfully you can now browse the internet anonymously and uncensored so we can close this window and now i'm going to go into applications and i can click on tor browser here the torp browser is based on firefox and it takes a few seconds for this to load now of course doing everything over the tor network the internet's a little slower everything's a little more sluggish but of course we're not really worried about performance on a distribution like this this is something you use strictly to remain anonymous to remain private uh basically like if you were a government whistleblower for example you know somebody like that where you could get into real trouble if somebody knew what you were doing online you know if you were you needed to send a private text messages or private emails encrypted emails things like that you know you might want to use a live usb of tills for that rather than your standard operating system now one thing i do notice about this version of tails compared to previous versions i've tried out i do notice that tills is now no longer spilled all caps and they don't really talk about an acronym because in the early days of tills tills was all caps and it actually stood for the amnesic incognito live system and that was actually right here up front in the logo and now it doesn't look like they mentioned that acronym anywhere on this page so i guess they're trying to get away from that acronym which is is kind of not a great acronym i mean nobody's going to call it the amnesic incognito live system right everybody just calls it tails and that just kind of rolls off the tongue so i'm kind of glad that for branding purposes they dropped pushing what the acronym actually stands for i also notice that in previous versions of tails you would get a warning if you made your browser full screen because that does give away some tracking abilities as far as at the very least if somebody was tracking your internet usage they could tell what monitor size you were doing you actually were using because of course how big the maximized browser window is but we no longer get a warning now when we actually maximize the browser so maybe that's no longer a concern let me go to the about page here let me go into help about tor browser this is tor browser 11.0.2 and you can see it's based off of mozilla firefox 91.4.0esr the extended support release of mozilla firefox um and that is the tor browser not much to see there i mean again that's just for browsing the internet anonymously maybe if you wanted to browse in various places on the dark web for instance you know you're probably best doing that on the tor network inside the tour browser and using a live operating system like tails going back to applications here and going into internet because the internet stuff is going to be the most appealing to people that need to use tails because it's all about using the internet anonymously they have pidgin internet messenger so this allows you to use pidgin to send internet messaging over whatever protocol you want to connect to and you can do this anonymously and if you click add you can go ahead and add an account and it looks like we can add an irc account xmpp or google talk i don't have any accounts that i could actually add to show you this in action but i really don't you guys don't need to see me actually chat i can show you some of what you want to do though let me make this a little bigger now with pidgin and internet messaging what you want is off the record encryption now off the record encryption it allows you to send of course encrypted instant messages that nobody hopefully other than you and the person that are reading it can actually intercept and what you want to do is you want to go into tools and then there's a plugins system here click on plugins and if i scroll down we should see off the record messaging now it is ticked on it's already installed but they don't enable off the record messaging out of the box so if i click on this and configure plugin and you see enable private messaging and don't log otr conversations that's very important you don't want to log it but you probably want to take on automatically initiate private messaging because what this does is anytime you open pidgin automatically it defaults to otr encryption where if you don't do this you could end up in a situation where you think you're sending encrypted messages and they're not really encrypted so take this on just to make sure that this is always on of course you should also take on the the one below it require private messaging so that's just a little bit of what you can do with pidgin instant messenger on tails now i did notice that in some of the recent uh chat about tales of reading their website there have been discussions about getting rid of pigeon instant messenger because honestly pigeon has been around forever it's been around since way before i started using desktop linux it's been around for a long time and it doesn't seem like pidgin is a very popular program these days as far as internet messaging chat client and they're thinking about maybe switching over to something else i think what the tails guys are thinking about moving to is this program here called dino which is a modern open source check client for the desktop and it focuses primarily on a reliable jabber slash xmpp experience so this is probably what they're eventually going to move to it's not for certain yet but that's probably where tails is going to end up it's moving away from pidgin and moving over to dino if i go back into the applications menu and under internet we have a email client of course it's going to be mozilla thunderbird and i'm not going to set up an email address or anything but obviously if you're using email on a system like tails and you're trying to remain private anonymous you probably want to send pgp encrypted emails i've never really personally liked encrypted emails i know why people would need it and i understand if you have to use it it's great but it's one of those things encrypted email both parties have to have the keys right if i use a pgp key to encrypt an email message the person that's receiving my message has to also have that key so that makes encrypted email a hassle unfortunately i wish there was better encryption methods for email because the entire email system is kind of an outdated system email predates in the modern web even i mean email is such an old internet protocol that was designed way before anybody really considered that the internet would become popular that we have concerns about security and privacy anonymity and things like that and unfortunately email it's really tough to make email secure or private and back to the virtual machine here under applications and internet oh see we also have our electrum bitcoin wallet so if we need to i guess uh send or receive bitcoin that's kind of interesting under internet we also had some onion circuits so this is you know just information about some of the onion circuits for the tor network uh you're probably not going to really play around with that much under the favorites category i do notice we have keepass xc so this is a password manager which is interesting what this does is it creates a database of passwords for you and this database of passwords is encrypted the keys are stored locally on a system the problem with tails is tails is a live system so nothing is permanently saved on the system by default and if you're seriously concerned about remaining anonymous then you want to make sure that nothing ever gets saved to tails that it's strictly a live system you don't save passwords in a database even an encrypted database you don't save browser bookmarks or things like that and by default if i had actually opened the browser for example and i bookmarked something well when i unplug the usb stick everything's lost right so when i plug the usb stick back in and restart tails it's like a fresh instance of tails right nothing is remembered and that's the way you want is especially for for anonymity and privacy is you typically don't want anything to be persistent you want nothing saved now you can make tills enable persistence if you want to save things like browser bookmarks emails or in this case the keypass database of passwords but just know that that anything you save could be used against you and again for most people that are using tails that's probably not a good thing if you wanted to enable persistence and tails let me show you how to do that if i go into applications there is a tails category and configure persistent volume now i'm not going to be able to enable persistence on this because i didn't create a virtual hard drive or anything there's no storage device that tails can write to in this virtual machine i set this virtual machine up specifically for that purpose but on your usb stick if you're running tails off a usb stick you will have the ability to configure that for a persistence volume so it'll have some space set aside for things that you want to save like your browser bookmarks and things like that now eventually you may want to delete that persistent volume too for privacy purposes it does have a way to delete your persistence as well there's also this really neat tills installer that i don't think was here in previous versions so what this is it's a way to basically clone an instance of tails and then then you can i guess clone it to another usb stick it looks like it's also possibly a upgrade path as well you know so if you're running an older version of tills maybe this would allow you to upgrade to a newer one because other than clone the current tills we can use a downloaded tails iso as well of course nothing is downloaded here but i guess we could download one from the internet and then we could select a target usb stick to actually burn that too so let me close that out let me go back into the application just very briefly i'll show you just some of the standard programs that are installed by default so no privacy oriented programs or anything so under accessories we have some of the standard gnome stuff like the gnome calculator we have under accessories we have the gnome file manager which is nautilus under accessories we also had keepassxc that's where that was and we have g edit which is the text editor under graphics we have and inkscape so we've got some graphics programs installed on this live usb that's actually really nice to have libreoffice draw is installed and so is simple scan which is a scanner program for those of you that still have a printer scanner these days it's getting more and more rare the internet category we've already seen most of the internet category under office we have the entire library office suite under sound and video we have audacity which is audio editor that's interesting that they include audio editor on this live usb but audacity can also be used to record audio as well and that might be something that is important for people using this live usb stick we have brazero which is a disc burner we have sound juicer which sound juicer i believe like you can change like metadata on mp3 files and stuff like that i believe is what sound juicer is used for i haven't actually used sound juicer in many many years there is just the standard sound recorder program and then we have videos which is your of course video player here this is going to be the gnome video player and under system tools we have the synaptic package manager just a standard graphical package manager for debian and debian based distributions we should have mentioned that tails actually is a debian based distribution um we have additional software here so i'm assuming this is where you could go and get like third-party drivers yeah you can install additional software automatically from your persistent storage so if you had persistence enabled also under system tools we have the gnome terminal we also have a root terminal as well so it's just the gnome terminal but you're logged in as root when you use that terminal we have a utilities category and this is going to be your archive manager for zip unzip that sort of thing your disk manager your pdf viewer your image viewer screenshot utility system monitor we could take a look at the system monitor but it's not going to be great as far as system resource usage because this is not a installable linux distribution again we're running this off of a usb stick basically we're running this as a live environment and i gave this machine two threads my 24 thread cpu it's using about 20 of it uh and we're using one gig the six gigs of ram that i gave this vm that's actually pretty standard for the gnome desktop environment so that's a very cursory look at tails 4.25 and i know you know not a lot of people have a need for tills and it's one of those things where you know anytime i mention about privacy or online privacy or anonymity every time i mention that on video i'm going to have people in the comments why do you even care well you you're being watched all the time anyway you have cameras and phones and microphones you're on this side on the internet and you know traffic cameras pick you up you know when you're running red lights and everything you're never private anyway why do you care well it's really comforting if you're one of these people that don't have to care about it because you're in you're in a good place right nobody's actually persecuting you unfortunately many people around the world are not in this situation many people are persecuted for their religious beliefs and political beliefs many were persecuted because of ethnicity and various reasons around the world and sometimes it's important to actually be anonymous and private on the internet that's great that you're not in a situation where that's the case and i understand that but it's one of those things when i talk about like freedom you know as free as in freedom as far as free software even free speech the right to defend yourself and things like that and people are like why do you care you know it's not like anything bad is happening where you're at because you live you know in the us or there's some of you guys living in european countries where there's no real strife right there's no real conflict there's no uh you know like ethnic cleansing you know any kind of horrible events like that going on well that's great that's great that you're in a position where you don't have to care about that but just because you are in that position doesn't mean there are other people out there that need actually to be defended in these kinds of matters and that's why i want you guys to remember this if you're in a comfortable place just know that there are a lot of people that don't have that same kind of comfort and when i began this video i said i think tails is maybe the most important linux distribution out there and i'm not kidding about that and it's one of those distributions i really hope you guys support so if you go to the tails website they do have a donate button and i strongly urge you guys especially as we get near the end of the year i know a lot of you guys are donating to various free and open source projects and if you have a little extra cash i strongly urge you guys give a little money to tails because these guys they're doing great work now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of the show devon gabe james matt michael mitchell paul scott wizard comedy linux ninja chuck commander a great current guy david dilling gregory heiko coska lee maxim mike nitrix ariane alexander peace and fedor polytechnic profits stephen and willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick first look at tails 4.25 would not be possible the show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors i'm sponsored by you guys the community at the end of the day it's just me and you guys the community right if you like my work and you want to help support me please take a look at distrotube over on patreon all right guys peace you

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 18,105

Keywords: tails os, tor browser, how to be anonymous on the internet, how to be anonymous, how to be anonymous online, online anonymity, become anonymous, tails os tutorial, tor project, live operating system, tails os installation, linux, gnu linux, privacy online, anonymous web, anonymous web browsing, live usb stick, linux tutorial, pidgin internet messenger, tails persistence, deep web, tor network, distrotube, free software, open source

Id: wV_f4CCR3zA

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/FutureMondo]

You have a lot of Patreons that you thank at the end of your videos and that's really great! Nobody else I follow bothers with that. :( However, I think that those at the top should either receive some higher praise or, at least, be acknowledged in a way that separates them from "the crowd". Just in a way that encourages others to step up from average to top-tier.