“Tails 4.8” Released, Unsafe Browser disabled by default
June 30, the development team behind “Tails” released “Tails 4.8”. Tails is a Linux distribution designed for privacy protection. The latest release includes updates like “Unsafe Browser” being disabled by default.
Tails is an OS designed to provide privacy and safety for the users. Based on Debian GNU/Linux, it uses Tor network to secure privacy protection online. To use Tails on your machine, first, install Tails on a USB stick, and then stick it into the machine to boot.
Tails 4.8 is the latest release of the v4 series released in October 2019, and it is the successor of v4.7 released in June. It is based on Linux kernel 5.6.0.
In this release, “Unsafe Browser” is disabled by default. The reason behind this change is that Unsafe Browser can be used to de-anonymize you. Also, because Unsafe Browser does not go through Tor, Unsafe Browser can reveal the IP address to a website that you visit.
The Persistent Storage is added with a new feature to save the settings from the Welcome Screen. This feature is still a beta, and only the additional setting to enable the Unsafe Browser is made persistent. The other settings such as language and keyboard will be made persistent in the next release “Tails 4.9”.
Tor Browser has been updated to 9.5.1, and Thunderbird to 68.9.0. This release also includes bug fixes. It fixed the problem of shutting down automatically when resuming from suspend with the Tails USB stick removed. This release also fixed the problem which occurred when importing OpenPGP public keys in binary format.