how do they know?
I didn’t know about this project, so I took a quick look around.
I didn’t see any mention of Telemetry or Metrics, but I assume they can use this:
After starting Tails and connecting to Tor, Tails Upgrader automatically checks if upgrades are available and then proposes you to upgrade your USB stick. The upgrades are checked for and downloaded through Tor.
https://tails.net/doc/upgrade/index.en.html#automatic
Still, I just gave this a few minutes, so there could be more.
What a convenient way for police to ship you a backdoored version.
/s ?
Don’t worry, the authorities already have the slightly less convenient way to backdoor things. Why make a fake release when you can just include it in the real release for the price of just a little coercion?
Thats why we use cryptography.
You could host the release on the police servers and they still couldn’t get a client with a pinned public key to download a malicious version, because releases are signed.
That said, while TAILS takes security seriously, you shouldn’t just expect all package managers to update themselves securely. This is why you want to avoid these new tools that don’t care about security, like flatpak, snap, brew, chocolaty, docker, pip, npm, etc
Probably with update pings.
how do they know?
I have to know now, this is bugging the hell out of me. Is it an estimate based on daily downloads? Do they get a ping when you connect to the internet, and if so, why would they count that as a boot? If I boot this on an air gapped laptop, there’s no way they could ever know, right? So many questions. Regardless, this seems like a weird thing for them to brag about.
Maybe estimated based up checking for updates or something? Just a blind guess though.
🤔
lucky guess
