Anonymous OS Tails 4.19 Improves Automatic Upgrades, Adds Password Feedback for sudo

Tails 4.19

Tails 4.19 amnesic incognito live system (a.k.a. anonymous OS) is now available for download for those who want to protect their privacy and online behaviors.

The monthly Tails ISO releases continue with version 4.19, a regular updated ISO release based on the Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” repositories and including up-to-date components like the Tor Browser 10.0.17 anonymous web browser based on Mozilla Firefox 78.11, and Mozilla Thunderbird 78.10.0 email client.

While the new Tor Connection wizard didn’t make it into this release, Tails 4.19 introduces password feedback for sudo when typing an administration password with sudo in a terminal emulator, and improves the automatic upgrade functionality by removing a security feature that prevented the Tails Upgrader from checking for updates.

“We broke automatic upgrades twice recently; once in December in 4.14 and again during a few days on May 15. These 2 times, it was the consequence of a security feature: the pinning of the TLS certificate of our website when doing automatic upgrades,” explain the Tails devs.

The Tails devs assure users that the upgrade process is still secure even with the said security feature remove. Upgrades remain strongly authenticated as they are signed using the Tails team’s OpenPGP key. Check out the full changelog for more details on that.

There are no known issues with this release, so you can download Tails 4.19 right now from the official website as an ISO or USB live image that you can run directly from the bootable medium, without installing anything on your personal computer.

Those of you who have Tails installed, you don’t need to download the new ISO release. You can update your installations from Tails 4.14 or later to Tails 4.19 using the automatic upgrades, or from Tails versions prior to 4.14 using the manual upgrade process as described here.

Last updated 3 years ago

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