The release of the new version of the specialized distribution Tails 4.2 (The Amnesic Incognito Live System). This is a distribution that is based on the base of the Debian 10 package y designed to provide anonymous access to the network, in order to preserve the privacy and anonymity of the user on the network.
Anonymous output from Tails is provided by Tor In all connections since the traffic through the Tor network, they are blocked by default with a packet filter, with which the user does not leave a trace on the network unless they want otherwise. Encryption is used to store user data in save user data mode between startups, in addition to presenting a series of preconfigured applications designed for the security and anonymity of the user, such as a web browser, the mail client, an instant message client among others.
Main new features of Tails 4.2
With the release of this new version of Tails 4.2 developers mention he worked what did they do to improve the system to install updates automatically. For if before, if necessary, to update a system that had not been updated for a long time, a step-by-step update using intermediate versions was required.
As well They highlight the possibility of being able to carry out an immediate direct automatic update to the latest version.
Also, manual participation in the update is now required only when switching to a significant new branch (for example, it will be required when switching to Tails 5.0 in 2021).
On the other hand, They also mention that memory consumption has been reduced during automatic updates and the download size was also optimized.
Regarding the main packages of the system, we can find that the Tor browser has been updated to version 9.0.3, synchronized with the release of Firefox 68.4.0, version in which 9 vulnerabilities were eliminated, five of which could lead to code execution when opening specially designed pages.
The email client Thunderbird has been updated to 68.3.0 and for the heart of the system the Linux kernel was updated to version 5.3.15.
We can also find in this new version of Tails 4.2 includes several utilities nuevas that can be useful for users of the SecureDrop service, which allows anonymous transfer of documents to publications and journalists.
In particular, the package includes the PDF Redact Tools package to clean document metadata PDF, OCR Tesseract to convert images to text and FFmpeg to record and convert audio and video.
Another change mentioned in the announcement is when the KeePassX password manager is started, the database ~ / Persistent / keepassx.kdbx it opens by default, but if this file is missing, it is excluded from the list of recently used databases.
Finally If you want to know more about the details of this release of Tails 4.2, you can visit the announcement of this new version in the following link.
Download Tails 4.2
Si you want to try or install this new version of this Linux distribution on your computer, You can obtain the image of the system which is already available from its official website in its download section, link is this.
The image obtained from the download section is a 1,1 GB ISO image capable of working in live mode.
How to update to the new version of Tails 4.2?
For those users who have an older version of Tails installed and want to upgrade to this new version. They should know that the direct upgrade to Tails 4.2 can be done directly from Tails 4.0 or 4.1.
While for users who are still in the 3.xxx branch, they must first go to version 4.0 (although it would be advisable to perform a clean installation of Tails 4.2). For this they can make use of their USB device that they used to install Tails, they can consult the information to carry this movement on their computer In the following link.