Tails 6.6 2024-08-13

Changes and updates

Update Tor Browser to 13.5.2.

Update Thunderbird to 115.14.0.

Update many firmware packages. This improves the support for newer hardware: graphics, Wi-Fi, and so on.

Fixed problems Persistent Storage

Increase the maximum waiting time to 4 minutes when unlocking the Persistent Storage before returning an error. (#20475)

Made the creation of the Persistent Storage more robust after starting a Tails USB stick for the first time. (#20451)

Prevent the Persistent Storage settings from freezing after opening a link to the documentation. (#20438)

Prevent Additional Software from crashing when installing virtual packages. (#20477)

Networking

Fix connecting to the Tor network using default bridges. (#20467)

Allow enabling multiple network interfaces again. (#20128)

Tails Cloner

Remove 30 seconds of waiting time when installing by cloning. (#20131)

For more details, read our changelog.

F-Droid core

It’s no secret that F-Droid continues to live and thrive thanks in part to you, the users that donate, but also in part thanks to different grants we’ve received along these 14 years of existence. Our recent post covered the endangered NGI program and its importance.

The Guardian Project has been a long time supporter of F-Droid, pouring in not only grant money but also human resources. They are now looking for a part-time Grant Administrator so if you find the list of their achievements tempting and your skills match the bullet points, don’t be shy and get in contact. Who knows, maybe you can be featured here next. 😛

Back in May we’ve highlighted the work contributors around F-Droid have done in order to shine a light onto the app downloads stats. The Divested (thanks!) hosted page just got an update, covering the weeks since then: https://divestos.org/pages/fdroid_stats

/PS: if you are involved with the project(s) that download Termux packages 300.000 times per week, two advices: first, do get in contact with us because we’re curious about your work, and second please try to setup a round robin script of sorts that downloads from mirrors instead since we have plenty of those and it’s not in anyone’s benefit that you download 25-30Tb of data from our servers each and every week. 😐

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/14981035

But as I and others looked closer, and thought about it more deeply, things became concerning.

These logs include:

Your precise GPS locations (which are also sent to their servers).
Your WiFi network name.
The IDs of nearby cell towers (even with no SIM card inserted, also sent to their servers).
Your internet-facing IP address.
The user token used by the device to authenticate with Rabbit's back-end API.
Base64-encoded MP3s of everything the Rabbit has ever spoken to you (and the text transcript thereof).

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/163062

Last year Danny Mekić wrote this article : https://dannymekic.com/202310/undermining-democracy-the-european-commissions-controversial-push-for-digital-surveillance which was published in a newspaper and then the author got shadow-banned on X. Today the same Dutch newspaper reported that Mekić won two court-cases about this.

• Dutch article about the verdict - paywall : https://www.volkskrant.nl/tech/x-mag-gebruikers-niet-meer-zomaar-shadowbannen-oordeelt-amsterdamse-rechter~befb7fd0/

• Archived copy : https://archive.ph/ckW2a

• tl;dr English translation :

X is not allowed to shadow-ban users easily the judge said. Only during the court-case X explained why the account of Meki was shadow-banned : He had shared an article about the CSAM law on X. "I still
do not understand why X this only said in the court hall, rather than telling me right away when I
asked about it" Mekić said.

• Mekić on Mastodon : https://mastodon.social/@DannyMekic
• The author's username on X : DannyMekic
• Article from last year by WIRED : https://www.wired.com/story/csar-chat-scan-proposal-european-commission-ads/

Comment by drewg123 on July 25, 2019

I met Linus at the Linux BOF at the 1994 Boston USENIX. Very ironically, I have Linus to thank for a long career using FreeBSD. It sounds like a cheap shot, but please hear me out:

I was sysadmin'ing a university stats department at the time, and NFS use was very important. I had been trying to use Linux on 486's, but performance of xdvi (with NFS mounted fonts) was abysmal. A 486 would take minutes to render the same page that a wimpy DECStation could render in a second. From tcpdump, I figured out it was because Linux did not do any sort of NFS caching at the time, and xdvi wandered around font files one byte at a time.

I asked Linus at the BOF when they planned to implement NFS. He told me NFS was unimportant, nobody used it, and so on.

I then attended the FreeBSD BOF where a clean shaven guy in a collared shirt was giving a power point presentation. I asked about NFS there, and was told it should work fine. When I got home from the conference, I switched the 486 to FreeBSD, and it worked just fine.

I eventually did OS research on FreeBSD, was one of a few people to port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha, and I now do kernel performance work for a large CDN, where we run FreeBSD.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17288716

This project is a port of the Proxmox Hypervisor on NixOS.

⚠️ Proxmox-NixOS is still experimental and we do not advise running it on production machines. Do it at your own risk and only if you are ready to fix issues by yourself.

📬 Help / Discussions

There is a matrix room for discussions about Proxmox-NixOS.

Thanks This project has received support from NLNet.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17288716

This project is a port of the Proxmox Hypervisor on NixOS.

⚠️ Proxmox-NixOS is still experimental and we do not advise running it on production machines. Do it at your own risk and only if you are ready to fix issues by yourself.

📬 Help / Discussions

There is a matrix room for discussions about Proxmox-NixOS.

Thanks This project has received support from NLNet.