14 DAY TRIAL // The Tails Project has released Tails 2.4, a major version of the anonymous Live CD based on Debian GNU/Linux, which was used by ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden to stay hidden online and protect his privacy.
When compared with the previous release, we can notice that Tails 2.4 includes some big changes, among which we can mention the upgrade to Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 "Jessie" and the inclusion of the recently released TOR Browser 6.0 anonymous browser, which is based on the open-source Mozilla Firefox 45.2 web browser.
Another interesting feature is the enablement of the automatic configuration wizard for the Icedove free (libre) email and news suite. The Tails developers have managed to patch Icedove to use and accept only secure protocols, but keep the enhancements from the TorBirdy project, a Mozilla Thunderbird add-on for connecting to the Tor network.
Bug fixes and minor improvements
As expected, Tails 2.4 fixes many of the issues that have been reported by users since the previous update to the open-source amnesic incognito live system. Worth mentioning are an important update to the Tails Upgrader tool to offer support for other languages than English, as well as the enablement of the Packetization Layer Path MTU Discovery for the IPv4 network protocol.
"If any system on the path to the remote host has a MTU smaller than the standard Ethernet one, then Tails will receive an ICMP packet asking it to send smaller packets. Our firewall will drop such ICMP packets to the floor, and then the TCP connection won't work properly. This can happen to any TCP connection, but so far it's been reported as breaking obfs4 for actual users," reads the announcement.
Among other improvements, we can mention better firewall and kernel hardening, the removal of the APT pinning feature, the GNOME Tweak Tool, the hledger accounting program. Then, there are the Debian experimental APT source, the module-assistant hook, the "Power Off" and "Reboot" entries from the Applications Menu, the nmh message handling system, and the Zenity hacks (Tails 2.4 uses the up-to-date Zenity packages from Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie").
Download Tails 2.4 right now via our website.