Software Update: Tails 4.8

Tails stands for “The amnesic incognito live system” and is a live Linux distribution that focuses on privacy and anonymity. It uses Debian GNU/Linux as its base and adds a Gnome environment with Tor, Tor Browser, Pidgin, Thunderbird, Electrum, LibreOffice, GPG and KeePassXC. For more information, please refer to this page. The development team has released version 4.8 with the following changes and improvements:

New features

• We disabled the Unsafe Browser by default and clarified that the Unsafe Browser can be used to deanonymize you.
  An attacker could exploit a security vulnerability in another application in Tails to start an invisible Unsafe Browser and reveal your IP address, even if you are not using the Unsafe Browser.
  For example, an attacker could exploit a security vulnerability in Thunderbird by sending you a phishing email that could start an invisible Unsafe Browser and reveal them your IP address. Such an attack is very unlikely but could be performed by a strong attacker, such as a government or a hacking firm.
  This is why we recommend that you:
  • Only enable the Unsafe Browser if you need to log in to a captive portal.
  • Always upgrade to the latest version of Tails to fix known vulnerabilities as soon as possible.
• We added a new feature of the Persistent Storage to save the settings from the Welcome Screen.
  This feature is beta and only the additional setting to enable the Unsafe Browser is made persistent. The other settings (language, keyboard, and other additional settings) will be made persistent in Tails 4.9 (July 28).

Changes and updates

• Update Tor Browser to 9.5.1.
• Update Thunderbird to 68.9.0.
• Update Linux to 5.6.0. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.).

Fixed problems

• Fix the Find in page feature of Thunderbird. (#17328)
• Fix shutting down automatically the laptop when resuming from suspend with the Tails USB stick removed. (#16787)
• Notify always when MAC address spoofing fails and the network interface is disabled. (#17779)
• Fix the import of OpenPGP public keys in binary format (non armored) from the Files browser.

For more details, read our changelog.