C. Mitchell Shaw:
> I have used Tails for several years and have been very pleased with both
> the distro and its development. I am writing a book for a well-known
> publisher. The book is about the various open-source tools available for
> closing the holes through which the NSA and others conduct surveillance on
> all of us. I am writing a chapter on Tor and another chapter on Tails.
That's a nice initiative, thanks for letting us know.
> I recently downloaded and installed the recent version to a USB stick and
> am very impressed with the installer and the ability to create a persistent
> encrypted partition within the drive. I have a question about the future
> development. Since a book is — by nature — static and software is — by
> nature — dynamic, what is the likelihood that changes to Tails in the
> immediate future will render this chapter in my book obsolete by the time
> the book is published and distributed? In other words, if I show the reader
> how to download, install, configure, and use Tale's, and someone reads this
> book a year or two from now, will the changes mean that my chapter is
> meaningless?
In general, I think it's super cool to write about what Tails is, what
it can do for you, how it helps against surveillance, etc. But I would
recommend against copying step-by-step instructions from our website
because, as you are pointing out, these are very likely to evolve
rapidly. For example, the installation procedure from Windows and Mac OS
X is still quite complicated and we really want to propose something
much easier (maybe porting Tails Installer to Windows or Mac OS X). The
procedure for Ubuntu that we wrote 5 months ago already needs to be
adjusted for Ubuntu 16.04. Maybe some time from now, Tails Installer
will itself verify the ISO image, etc.
You should instead point to our documentation that will keep updated as
our tools change. People can read it from our website or directly from
Tails as it's included in the ISO image.
What could be interesting to include, though, is the fingerprint of the
Tails signing key. This would provide, for people knowledgeable about
OpenPGP, some way of verifying our signing key without relying on their
Internet connection (assuming that the book is genuine the fingerprint
should be the correct one). See
http://tails.boum.org/install/download/openpgp.
And if you want us to review and comment on your chapter before
publication, you can send it to us.
