Re: [Tails-ux] Terminology for the web assistant: different …

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Author: sajolida
Date:  
To: Tails user experience & user interface design
Subject: Re: [Tails-ux] Terminology for the web assistant: different kinds of Tails
intrigeri:
> u wrote (01 May 2015 22:06:49 GMT) :
>> I would say that Tails without persistence is not less than
>> "full-feature". It depends on the use case what full and minimal /
>> simple means, no? Full feature sort of suggests that you need this to
>> have everything. So maybe we can find a term which is not quantitative
>> here and not oppose "minimal" and "full"...
>
> Just my 2 bits of technical/roadmap background info: it *might* become
> the case that very important Tails features depend on persistence
> being setup, e.g. https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/7675 ("Persist
> entropy pool seeds")


What do you mean by "important" and "depend" here? Will Tails not work
properly without them? Will Tails be less secure that it is today
without them? Will people who activated them benefit from additional
security?

I'm thinking also about a possible persistent Tor state. That is not
necessarily something visible, but that makes Tails to connect faster to
Tor and a bit safer because you're keeping your entry guards. Would this
be in the same family of features?

> -- although it's not clear yet what we'll do, and
> it might be that we want to actually persist that piece of data even
> without persistence being set up, somehow (yes, I know).
>
> I've no idea if/how such a change impacts the discussion we're having
> here, I'll let you folks judge.


The question that we need to answer here is whether the fact that those
new features exist (most probably in persistence but maybe outside) will
affect what we advertise as "Tails" and "Tails with persistence". I
understand better their implications to be sure about that.

Note that this might as well affect our setup tools. Because if it
suddenly becomes insecure or buggy to use Tails without persistence,
then we should do better at enforcing setting up persistence during the
installation process.

And also what about people using DVDs? Or, how are we going to explain
to people that they need a passphrase for something that doesn't protect
any user visible data?

Thanks for raising this issue, and make sure to bring this discussion up
again at some point to talk about the other UX side-effects that this
might have (apart from terminology).

--
sajolida