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Release 2.6 of TAILS (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) has been announced: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tails-26-out.
TAILS is believed to be one of the most secure ways currently in use on the internet of protecting your identity, although it is possible to compromise information if it is used used incorrectly.
Their home page is https://tails.boum.org/
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(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday September 24 2016, @08:27AM
While I think that your aims are laudable, I believe that they are misdirected. The problems with producing open source software drivers are many. Firstly, you mention the fact that reverse engineering is illegal in your own country. Fortunately, this appears to be limited to a very small number of countries and US law is not applicable in most places around the world. Secondly, manufacturers want to keep their competitive edge and thus are unwilling in many cases to reveal sufficient technical details to enable others to write the necessary drivers. While this is aimed at potential competitors it also prevents Linux devs from producing the most efficient drivers that are an equal to commercial offerings. Finally, no manufacturer is going to put any effort into writing drivers for older devices even if they can be persuaded to produce them for new products - which in itself is hard for them to do as there is little to no profit in it. But this isn't the fault of TAILS any more than it is the fault of any other particular distro. In order to work with the maximum number of devices, Linux (and Windows, Android etc) have to provide older drivers that are no longer supported. Directing your rather forthright questions at TAILS was, in my opinion, almost doomed to receive the response it did.
Any company being caught sending data via a means intended to be covert (at least outside of the US) would find themselves unable to justify their business strategy. The EU has very strong laws about sending unnecessary data about users, an act for which several companies have found themselves being heavily fined. Their business interests would also be significantly hit. Remember the Sony Rootkit? I don't suppose anyone will be in a hurry to emulate their disastrous attempts at planting unauthorised software on private computers. However, several security firms make some good money by monitoring exactly what is being sent via networks and I don't believe that any such attempt to send data via a network would remain undetected for very long. There is a theoretical risk but it has not been seen being used, and similar risks also exist in other firmware e.g. hard drive management software inside the drive itself. These risks are faced by all OS, and insisting the the TAILS' devs have their head in the sand is unjustified and unwarranted. There are plenty of other potential risks which the TAILS' devs can address and that is the reason for the 2.6 release.
If you were to create an action group to address the problem of closed source software you would have my support and, I suspect, the support of many in our community and the wider world. However, I do not think that you are helping your case by directing your comments to TAILS in particular, particularly as there is no evidence of any actual current risk from the drivers in question. Nevertheless, there will always be code inside your computer that you cannot inspect or control; CPU microcode, hard drive and graphics card firmware, hidden BIOS firmware etc. I agree that we should endeavour to replace as much as possible with open source, libre software but we are unlikely to ever achieve 100%. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try but it will take a lot more than pointing the finger at any particular distro.