this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I didn't know about this project, so I took a quick look around.

I didn't see any mention of Telemetry or Metrics, but I assume they can use this:

After starting Tails and connecting to Tor, Tails Upgrader automatically checks if upgrades are available and then proposes you to upgrade your USB stick. The upgrades are checked for and downloaded through Tor.

https://tails.net/doc/upgrade/index.en.html#automatic

Still, I just gave this a few minutes, so there could be more.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

What a convenient way for police to ship you a backdoored version.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Don't worry, the authorities already have the slightly less convenient way to backdoor things. Why make a fake release when you can just include it in the real release for the price of just a little coercion?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Thats why we use cryptography.

You could host the release on the police servers and they still couldn't get a client with a pinned public key to download a malicious version, because releases are signed.

That said, while TAILS takes security seriously, you shouldn't just expect all package managers to update themselves securely. This is why you want to avoid these new tools that don't care about security, like flatpak, snap, brew, chocolaty, docker, pip, npm, etc