Hello, I've decided to forward my unanswered query to the public mailing list. Tails developers and Tails Foundations team, please check this. I welcome opinion from anyone though.
Thank you in advance.
(I sent this a few days ago, and saw new mail appear [here](
https://lists.autistici.org/list/tails-dev.html) and [here](
https://www.mail-archive.com/tails-dev@boum.org/) without this message listed, so now I created this email address and am resending this.)
---------- Original message ---------
From: <after various unsuccessful attempts to contact you from my original email address, REDACTED>
Date: Tue, Dec 19, 2022 at 10:42 PM UTC
Subject: Fwd: Critical Usability Issue due to which I Haven't Used Tails in Years
To: <tails-support-private@???>
Hello, (I don't need PGP, please don't ignore this,)
I sent the email message reproduced below and forwarding it to you since I didn't get any reply yet as of writing. I have issues that I request that you'll forward to the Tails developers. TL;DR: I wrote about three things, in this order: (1) Firstly, I wrote about the OOM-killing situation in Tails, which needs to be addressed directly by the Tails developers or the Tails Foundations team dealing with Debian/distribution work; (2) secondly, I mentioned my personal stance regarding VRAM wiping on shutdown; (3) finally, I asked whether I can do a manual upgrade of Tails from a very old version to the latest stable version.
Please don't reply with instructions for debugging or troubleshooting, as they're unnecessary -- but you're free to express your disagreement with me on this, provided that you don't jump to hasty conclusions and have read my message.
I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but after various email messages and WhisperBack reports over the past six or seven years or so, it feels like you're actively ignoring me.
Thank you.
---------- Original message ---------
From: <ditto, see above>
Date: Mon, Dec 5, 2022 at 2:41 AM UTC
Subject: Critical Usability Issue due to which I Haven't Used Tails in Years
To: tails@??? <tails@???>, <tails-foundations@???>
Hello. First of all, do not dismiss this email please. I live in a free, democratic country where my human rights are respected; I don't use PGP but I don't require its use for this matter. If you're not an official member of the Tails developers team, then please forward this email to them! In the past, when I used to use Tails, I used both WhisperBack and the helpdesk mailing list to contact you regarding this matter; either you did nothing about the issue, or the helpdesk person dismissed my report as if I should do more troubleshooting or my hardware is faulty or whatever (don't remember, but it doesn't matter actually).
The issue is this:
Tails runs without any swap space (obviously, to maintain amnesia), the entire system may lock up at any moment due to heavy memory usage and opening of many Web browser tabs (which I usually do), the Magic Sysrq functionality of manually invoking the OOM killer in such emergency situations is disabled by default in Tails (and there's no way to enable without rebooting, and it's not recommended to enable it when connecting to the Internet as it's insecure), and Tails bundles no userspace early OOM daemon enabled out-of-the-box (such as systemd-oomd).
The very least you can do is ship a new version of Tails with a slightly modified configuration value under /proc to enable the Magic Sysrq-F key combination. I request that you also consider shipping systemd-oomd enabled by default in the next major release of Tails (i.e. version 6.0).
(I want to use this opportunity to express my stance regarding video RAM erasure during reboot: I don't think that the fact that something cannot be done perfectly is a good excuse to refrain from doing it at all, i.e. if something cannot be done 100% well, it's better to do even 20% of the job rather than 0%; at the same time, I don't ever expect you to ship spaghetti code, so I don't expect you to write a half-assed implementation that does 20% of the job, despite what I said earlier. I request that you research solutions that you can implement in the short term to at least try to erase the VRAM during reboot.)
Related to this:
I have a USB flash drive with Tails, installed using Tails installer, with an encrypted persistence, up-to-date as of around 2019-2020, with an early (stable) version of Tails 4.x if I remember right. My question is this: Can I do a manual upgrade to the latest stable version of Tails 5? (Could I do a manual upgrade to 6.x when it would be released?) When doing manual upgrades, what are the earliest versions supported? Is such an old version of Tails supported for manual upgrades using Tails installer in the latest stable Tails? Should I back up my encrypted persistence before doing anything, or do you not expect such a manual upgrade from Tails 4.x to the latest Tails 5 to cause data loss?
Tails developers: please acknowledge that you received this email ASAP, at least so I would know that you got it, even if you have no answers yet.
Thank you very much.
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