 Possibly, the most important Linux distribution on the planet is Tails. What is Tails? 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, it doesn't matter what operating system it's running, anyway, you boot into the Tails operating system, and then you start the Tor 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. That'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 Tails 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 VertManagers, 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. I'm going to 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. It's nothing that will ever be able to be identifiable towards you, the user. And of course, this is done for, again, privacy 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 tiles. All right. And it finally loads up. And 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 TILs 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 TILs or do anything in TILs 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. 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 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 1920 by 1080 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 Tor 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. 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. If you needed to send a private text messages or private emails, encrypted emails, things like that, you might want to use a live USB of Tils for that rather than your standard operating system. Now, one thing I do notice about this version of Tils compared to previous versions I've tried out, I do notice that Tils is now no longer spilled all caps and they don't really talk about an acronym because in the early days of Tils, Tils 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 kind of not a great acronym. I mean, nobody's going to call it the amnesic incognito live system, right? Everybody just calls it Tils and that just kind of rolls off the tongue. I'm kind of glad for branding purposes, they dropped pushing what the acronym actually stands for. I also notice that in previous versions of Tils, 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 tour browser. This is tour browser 11 dot oh dot two. And you can say it's based off of Mozilla Firefox 91 dot four dot zero ESR, the extended support release of Mozilla Firefox. And that is the tour 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 tour network inside the tour browser and using a live operating system like Tils. 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 Tils and because it's all about using the internet anonymously. They have pigeon internet messenger. So this allows you to use pigeon 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 pigeon 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 a 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 pigeon 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 one below it, require private messaging. So that's just a little bit of what you can do with pigeon instant messenger on Tils. Now, I did notice that in some of the recent chat about Tils 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 pigeon 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 Tils guys are thinking about moving to is this program here called Dino, which is a modern open source chat 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 Tils is going to end up. It's moving away from pigeon 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 Tils, 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 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 have become popular, that we have concerns about security and privacy anonymity and things like that. And unfortunately, email is really tough to make email secure or private. And back to the virtual machine here under applications and internet. See, we also have our Electrum Bitcoin Wallet. So if we need to, I guess, 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 tour network. You're probably not going to really play around with that much. Under the favorites category, I do notice we have KeyPass 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. By default, if I had actually opened the browser, for example, and I bookmark 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. You typically don't want anything to be persistent. You want nothing saved. Now you can make tails enable persistence. If you want to save things like browser bookmarks, emails, or in this case, the key pass 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 in 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 say like your browser bookmarks and things like that. Now, eventually you may want to delete that persistent volume to for privacy purposes. It does have a way to delete your persistence as well. There's also this really neat tails 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 an upgrade path as well. So if you're running an older version of tails, maybe this would allow you to upgrade to a newer one because other than clone the current tails, 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. It's 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 a Kepass XC. That's where that was. And we have G edit, which is the text editor under graphics. We have GIMP and Inkscape. So we got some graphics programs installed on this live USB. That's actually really nice to have a library office straw 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 Brasero, 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. We have additional software here. So I'm assuming this is where you can 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. And 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. And 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 of my 24 threads CPU. It's using about 20 percent of it. And we're using one gig of 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 Tils 4.25. And I know, you know, not a lot of people have a need for Tils. 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 site 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, what 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 are 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 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, 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 Tills is maybe the most important Linux distribution out there. And I am not kidding about that. And as one of those distributions, I really hope you guys support. So if you go to the Tills 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 Tills 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. Devin, Gabe, James, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, Wes, Kamie, Alan, Lennox, Ninja, Chuck, Commander, Gregory, Kirk, Diocai, David, Dylan, Gregory, Heiko, Kaskali, Max, Mike, Nitrix, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Sergeant, Fedora, Polytech, Ray, Rick, Profit, Steven and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick first look at Tills for that 25 would not be possible. The show is 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.