Tails is a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly.
It is a complete operating system designed to be used from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card independently of the computer's original operating system.
Tails 3.0 is the first version of Tails based on Debian 9 (Stretch). It brings a completely new startup and shutdown experience, a lot of polishing to the desktop, security improvements in depth, and major upgrades to a lot of the included software.
Changes
New features
New startup and shutdown experience
- Tails Greeter, the application to configure Tails at startup, has been completely redesigned for ease of use:
- All options are available from a single window.
- Language and region settings are displayed first to benefit our international audience.
- Accessibility features can be enabled from the start
- The shutdown experience has also been redesigned in order to be:
- More reliable. It was crashing on various computers with unpredictable results.
- More discrete. The screen is now totally black to look less suspicious.
Polishing the desktop
- Switch to the default black theme of GNOME which has a more modern and discrete look.
- Tails 3.0 benefits from many other small improvements to the GNOME desktop
- Files has been redesigned to reduce clutter and make the interface easier to use. Several new features have been added, such as the ability to rename multiple files at the same time and the ability to extract compressed files without needing a separate application.
- The notification area has been improved to allow easy access to previous notifications. Notification popups have also been repositioned to make them more noticeable.
- Shortcut windows have been added to help you discover keyboard shortcuts in GNOME applications.
Security improvements in depth
- Tails 3.0 works on 64-bit computers only and not on 32-bit computers anymore. Dropping hardware support, even for a small portion of our user base, is always a hard decision to make but being 64-bit only has important security and reliability benefits. For example, to protect against some types of security exploits, support for the NX bit is compulsory and most binaries are hardened with PIE which allows ASLR.
- Update Tor Browser to 7.0 (based on Firefox 52 ESR) which is multiprocess and paves the way to content sandboxing. This should make it harder to exploit security vulnerabilities in the browser.