Tails Closes Security Gaps
Recent privacy revelations bring new importance to the anonymous surfing Live distro.
The Debian-based distribution Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) has announced a new release. Version 0.20.1 fixes several errors and includes some new software. The recent revelations about NSA government surveillance should bring bring renewed interested in Tails, a Live distro designed to allow the user to operate on the Internet anonymously. Like many Live Linux distros, Tails does not provide all-original software but adds value by assembling and configuring a streamlined collection of tools for a specific use case. In the case of Tails, the configuration is centered around the TOR anonymous browsing network. TOR is available to other Linux systems as well, but Tails is configured for anonymous browsing by default.
The TAILS developers recommend switching to the new version as soon as possible. The security fixes included in the latest release apply to the Iceweasel web browser (Debian's Free Software version of Firefox) as well as the Linux kernel, the ImageMagick image processing toolkit, and other packages.See the Tails website for a complete list of bug fixes.
The new release comes with new versions of Tor (0.2.4.17), Iceweasel (17.0.9), and the Linux kernel (3.10.11-1).
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