Silk Road forums

Discussion => Security => Topic started by: CaptnFusion on March 03, 2012, 05:42 pm

Title: Tails vs liberte?
Post by: CaptnFusion on March 03, 2012, 05:42 pm
I have been using liberte on a usb thanks to a tutorial I found on here, but I've been seeing a lot around onionland saying to use tails. Anyone use tails or know pros and cons of each?
Title: Re: Tails vs liberte?
Post by: CaptainSensible on March 03, 2012, 06:40 pm
Oy vey, the argument about which of the two is better has been raging for quite a while now.  I use both.  Liberte has the advantage of persistence and now has a password manager; plus, you  can lock the screen if you need to walk away for a short period of time. 

Tails is catching up in terms of adding features somewhat like Liberte.  You can now start Tails in Bridge Mode, which allows the user to connect to the same first hop relay.  And if you really want a password manager you can install KeePass, but you have to do it from the command line.  Aaaaand, you can start Tails with an option to install TrueCrypt as one of the applications accessible from the menu. 

Actually, I wish the Tails developers & Maxim Kammerer (the developer of Liberte) would just get together & create a hybrid Tails/Liberte build. 
Title: Re: Tails vs liberte?
Post by: CaptnFusion on March 03, 2012, 06:58 pm
What I got from that post is that I should stick with liberte. Are their any other security precautions or measure I should take on top of the normal liberte setup?
Title: Re: Tails vs liberte?
Post by: CaptainSensible on March 03, 2012, 07:17 pm
Actually I'm not really advocating one over the other.  Liberte is more straightforward & quicker to get up & running, but I like the way that Tails is maintained by a community of skilled developers & security experts.  There are all sorts of people on the lookout for security holes in Tails but pretty much just one guy working on Liberte. 

I'd say as long as you're using a complex, secure password for Liberte you're probably in good shape.  Oh and back up the liberte.vol file from time to time. It's got all your persistent files, password manager entries, & settings.   
Title: Re: Tails vs liberte?
Post by: snapple on March 05, 2012, 10:33 pm

Actually, I wish the Tails developers & Maxim Kammerer (the developer of Liberte) would just get together & create a hybrid Tails/Liberte build.

Funny, I had the same thought.

TAILS allows you to use Tor bridges while Liberte doesn't.
Liberte allows persistence while TAILS doesn't.
TAILS doesn't have a bluetooth option but Liberte does.

And on and on it goes.

Both are good but both are lacking.

Both have GUIs reminisent of ealry 1990s operating systems.

I hate Iceweasel but hate Midori even more. Hard to complain when lots of dedicated guys are banging away for free on these so I just make do like we all do in here.

In the end I settled on TAILS since it's a more dedicated team of developers than the single-developer Liberte.
Title: Re: Tails vs liberte?
Post by: QTC on March 06, 2012, 12:14 am
I think that having persistent guard nodes is a far better feature than using bridges, and besides, can't you manually configure liberte to use bridges? Sorry, I haven't screwed around with it in a while.
Title: Re: Tails vs liberte?
Post by: snapple on March 06, 2012, 12:55 am
I think that having persistent guard nodes is a far better feature than using bridges, and besides, can't you manually configure liberte to use bridges? Sorry, I haven't screwed around with it in a while.

I was using Liberte for a while but some of the SR security experts suggested that living in a remote location demanded using bridges, so I switched to TAILS. I asked around about bridges in Liberte and the general response was it can't be done yet. The only Liberte support forum I found was in Russian. If you know of a way to use bridges I'd switch back in a second.
Title: Re: Tails vs liberte?
Post by: QTC on March 06, 2012, 01:29 am
I was using Liberte for a while but some of the SR security experts suggested that living in a remote location demanded using bridges, so I switched to TAILS. I asked around about bridges in Liberte and the general response was it can't be done yet. The only Liberte support forum I found was in Russian. If you know of a way to use bridges I'd switch back in a second.
Looks like I have to fire up liberte again. :-) The bridge advice is good by the way, but really only applies if you're vending (since the intersection attack comes from you revealing your rough geolocation via your outgoing packs).
Title: Re: Tails vs liberte?
Post by: ikalihi812 on March 06, 2012, 03:30 am
I like Anonym.OS, it's based on OPENBSD which rocks
Title: Re: Tails vs liberte?
Post by: snapple on March 06, 2012, 04:12 am
The bridge advice is good by the way, but really only applies if you're vending (since the intersection attack comes from you revealing your rough geolocation via your outgoing packs).

I'm a vendor here, that's the issue. I made a post in here about this a couple month's back and the consensus was you couldn't get a bridge through Liberte, although that's certainly not definitive. I'd be real curious to know if anyone could do this in Liberte.
Title: Re: Tails vs liberte?
Post by: kmfkewm on March 06, 2012, 01:47 pm
having a persistent bridge with tails is at least as good as having persistent entry guards with liberte.