Re: [Tails-dev] interesting free tablet

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Autore: intrigeri
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To: The Tails public development discussion list, zlatan
Oggetto: Re: [Tails-dev] interesting free tablet
Hi,

sajolida wrote (23 May 2016 16:27:04 GMT) :
> intrigeri:
>> Now, we do have certain reservations regarding shipping preinstalled
>> Tails (https://tails.boum.org/support/faq/#preinstalled), so we would
>> need to find a way to communicate clearly to the users 1. who they are
>> trusting (or not) when they use the Tails that comes installed on the
>> aforementioned microSD card; 2. how to re-install Tails on that
>> microSD card, in a way that avoids any such trust issues (we have
>> pretty good doc for that). The way I see it, it's a mere matter of
>> communication, but other project members might feel differently.


> Definitely, this would require a very long collective discussion before
> we can consider be happy with having companies shipping preinstalled
> Tails in a commercial product.


Sure, collectively defining what would make us, as a project, happy,
would be a very long process. I have little interest in going through
that personally about this specific topic. There are plenty of other
sides to collective happiness that matter more to me, and on this one
I see little room for strong consensus, so I bet that whatever happens
(or is prevented from happening) won't make everyone happy.

Now, technically anyone can ship Tails inside a product, regardless of
whether it would make us happy, since Tails is free software; they
might even manage to do it right, if they're up to addressing the
specific concerns we have documented.

OTOH, we can discourage them pretty easily, it's super cheap and it
requires no painfully long collective discussion about what "doing it
right" could possibly mean.

I'm not 100% certain myself of what exactly I would be happy with.
But I really don't want to assume, as a starting point, that nobody is
able to do "it" in a way I would find satisfactory, so I intend to
keep explaining what our specific concerns with pre-installed Tails
are, and how they could possibly be addressed.

> I personally would rather spend that time
> discussing how to make installing Tails easier and more secure for
> everybody.


Yes, let's please keep up the good work in this area :)

>> Still, there's the freshness problem given we release every six weeks,
>> and I doubt that your supply chain can guarantee that only up-to-date
>> Tails are shipped to the user (and even if that was possible, the
>> shipping delay can be enough to make it untrue again). Thankfully we
>> have quite user-friendly automatic updates, so this problem isn't as
>> bad for microSD as it would be for preinstalled DVDs.


> Until we have #7499 [1] ("full-self upgrade"), receiving an SD card that
> has been flashed 6 months ago means today, upgrading 9 times in a row,
> restarting and reconnecting to Tor each time, which probably takes more
> time and definitely generates more frustration than downloading a fresh
> ISO and burning a DVD.


Absolutely. JFTR, I didn't mean to imply that shipping 6 months old
Tails was an OK delay: IMO it would be way too long.

Cheers,
--
intrigeri