As of this week an operating system immune from NSA and similar hacking has finally come of age. A free download of Linux Tails is here.
Based on Debian, the pure, free operating system of basic programs and utilities, the secure Linux version called Tails boots from removable media, not a hard disk, unless you prefer hard disk booting. Tails has crushed a long list of bugs by funneling all data through Tor and a group of cryptography and anonymising tools. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/01/secure_os_tails_1_released/
Many users unfamiliar with Linux or Heartbleed might fail to recognize the significance of this Linux development. To HamiltonFinanceServices.com (HFS) analysts, however, the news is BIG. We absolutely do not encourage evasion of law enforcement when cops are properly doing their important jobs, although Tor has become a significant irritation to NSA and others because they have no known method of breaking through it to discover the user’s identity. So to HFS some risk applies to having a powerful operating system such as Tails. Nonetheless, for the majority of law abiding users, the attraction is clearly to avoid unlawful hacking and other snooping around innocent users’ applications. With Linux Tails as your OS, even uninformed computer amateurs should justifiably feel safe on the Internet, perhaps for the first time in history. To HFS, this development marks a major step towards strong privacy on the web. What do you think?
I have seen it
it’s better than nothing but careful with it
Tor prevents to know where you are, but does not encrypt your communications Using Tor, an attack of the man-of-middle can happen between the output node and the destination server. The output node can also act as a man-of-medium. For an example of such an attack see
https://tails.boum.org/doc/about/warning/index.fr.html