The Tails amnesic incognito live system (a.k.a. anonymous OS) has been updated today to version 4.18, continuing the monthly maintenance updates with bug fixes and improvements.
Based on the Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system series, Tails 4.18 contains updated Intel (intel-microcode 3.20210216.1~deb10u1) and Linux firmware (firmware-linux-nonfree 20210315-2) packages to ensure support for the newest hardware (e.g. Wi-Fi, graphics, networking, etc.).
It also ships with the latest Tor Browser 10.0.16 web browser to facilitate anonymous surfing of the World Wide Web, as well as the Mozilla Thunderbird 78.9.0 open-source email client, which is a bugfix release that introduces various improvements around the Address Book, Calendar, Add-ons Manager, and email notifications.
Various other changes are included in Tails 4.18, such as the removal of the shareware Poedit editor for translating interfaces as Tails now uses the libre Weblate web-based translation tool to provide translated text for the distribution and its website.
In addition, this release removes the “Synchronizing the system’s clock” notification that is displayed when connecting to the Tor network because it didn’t recommend a specific action for users to take and it would also appear to be confusing for some as they thought they need to change the UTC clock settings.
Among other changes, Tails now makes use of Debian GNU/Linux’s software repositories more reliable as it connects to the APT repos using the HTTPS address instead of the .onion address. This change also makes the Additional Software feature more reliable.
Last but not least, an error message is now displayed when the Upgrader tool fails to download the signing key. Under the hood, Tails 4.18 is powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series. Check out the release notes for more details.
You can download Tails 4.18 right now from the official website if you want to stay anonymous online at all times. Existing users running Tails 4.15 or later can simply upgrade their installations using the automatic upgrade feature.
If you’re running Tails 4.14 or an earlier version, please note that automatic upgrades are broken so you’ll have to do a manual upgrade following these instructions or by running the sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y command in a terminal emulator.
Source: 9to5linux.com