A new maintenance update has been released for Tails

Dec 16, 2014 21:26 GMT  ·  By

Tails, a live Linux distribution system that aims to preserve your privacy and that helps users to surf the Internet anonymously, has been upgraded once again and this time it's mostly about a new SSL certificate that has been implemented.

Tails is a Linux distro based on Debian and TOR technologies that is designed to keep users safe from prying eyes, either online or offline. It received a large number of improvements in the past few months and it became rather famous after Edward Snowden himself said that he used this OS to remain hidden.

Interestingly enough, the distro has been around long before the acknowledgement from Snowden but that matters less now.

Tails is actually an acronym for "The Amnesic Incognito Live System" and it perfectly describes the capabilities of the distro. Users can be sure that they won't leave any kind of trace, either online or offline (in the hardware used). The fact that it can be run without any issues from a Live CD helps a lot and it's one of the strong points of the OS.

This basically means that it won't leave any traces online, offline, and that it can run safely from a Live environment. It might not sound like much, but it does all of these jobs very nicely and it's very well regarded by the community.

Tails 1.2.2 is not a major update, but it's definitely something to look for

Usually, new versions of Tails are mostly about upgrade packages. From time to time, some new feature is added, like the ability to emulate a Windows system while surfing online. It might not seem like much, but it's a cool thing to have. The current iteration is more like a maintenance update, but that should stop users from trying it out.

"This release is an emergency release that changes the root certificate which is used to verify automatic upgrades. On January 3rd, the SSL certificate of our website hosting provider, boum.org, will expire. The new certificate will be issued by a different certificate authority. This certificate authority is verified by the automatic upgrade mechanism of Tails."

"As a consequence, versions previous to 1.2.2 won't be able to do the next automatic upgrade to version 1.2.3 and will receive an error message from Tails Upgrader when starting Tails after January 3rd," said the devs on the official blog.

A complete changelog can be found in the official announcement. You can download Tails 1.2.2 right now from Softpedia and give it a spin.

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