#tailsos

DON'T USE BALENA ETCHER TO USB YOUR ISOs

As @tailsos-official stated in their blog post, it displays ads which is weird for a simple disk imaging tool and more important:

It shares your IP address, the file name of the image the model of the USB stick and a bunch of other things with the Balena company and third parties.

On Windows, use Rufus instead. It's pretty neat.

On Mac, use the Raspberry Pi Imager. It does its job. Or if you don't mind the terminal, use dd. It's built-in.

On Linux you can use dd, or whatever comes with your DE. Or whatever else you prefer. We got options.

You can also use Ventoy and just chuck all your ISOs on it. No need to reformat your usb drives again just for a new boot stick. One USB to rule them all.

sources under the cut

whats you completely unbiased opinion on the Private, Portable, charming distro @tailsos-official?

Have you ever traveled and succumbed to using a public computer that could be compromised and could potentially steal your data? Or even want to increase your privacy and anonymity against surveillance? The Tails operating system covers this. After doing some Tor browser surfing, I recently discovered Tails and decided to dig deeper into it and play around with it as I am always looking for new tools and protection measures, I can learn and use. Tails, or “The Amnesic Incognito Live System", is a security-focused Debian-based Linux distribution that connects to the internet only through the Tor network. works by routing internet traffic through a series of volunteer-operated servers called nodes or relays. Each user's data is encrypted multiple times and then sent through a randomly selected path of these nodes before reaching its final destination. At each node, one layer of encryption is removed, revealing only the next node in the path, like peeling layers of an onion, hence its logo and nickname.

Tail's most notable feature is its ability to boot from a USB or CD to turn any computer into a temporary” secure” machine by creating an almost ghost-like presence on the machine. When using Tails nothing is written to the hard disk and only runs from the memory on the computer. On top of this, Tails will actually overwrite the memory when exiting to prevent any cold boot attacks. Meaning, that once you shut down the OS all of your actions and information will be erased from memory. This is much more secure than just using incognito mode in your browser because that information could still be retrieved using computer forensics measures. Despite all this, Tails is not a hundred percent secure. There is still room for vulnerabilities like everything in the cyber realm and you do have the ability to sore data on the portable device to transfer between sessions and it is automatically encrypted, but this can be another vulnerability.

Fun fact: Tails it was used by Edward Snowden the ex-N NSA employee who leaked government secrets.

Sources:

https://tails.net/news/version_7.0/

Automatic upgrades from 7.0 rc1 and rc2 only, everyone else must do a manual upgrade.

Tails is now based on debian 13

3GB of ram is the new requirement

new kernel version is 6.12.43

https://piunikaweb.com/2025/10/13/grapheneos-ending-pixel-exclusivity-new-oem/