in this video, we're going to discuss what tails actually is.
you might be watching this video as part of the free course preview or maybe you've already purchased the course.
if you purchased it, you probably know a little bit about it and want to learn more.
but if you're just checking this out, we're gonna dive into what tails actually is so you can understand how it works.
at a very high level, tails is just an operating system.
it's portable and secure, meaning you can take it on a usb or dvd and you can boot it up on any computer that lets you boot from a usb.
compared to like normal windows or mac or even some linux, it's not pre- installed on the machine, meaning it has default amnesia.
when you plug that usb stick into a computer, you turn on the tails operating system, you can do normal browsing activity, but when you're done and you actually power down your computer, all the data about the activity you just did goes away.
tails remains in its normal boot configuration.
all the files are the same, but any information about sites you visited, software you open, things you typed, places you visited are all gone.
and that's the amnesia aspect of tails, which makes it really nice to carry with you if you might need to use a computer that you're not sure you can trust.
beyond that, tails has built- in security tools.
it has tor for all of its networking, keypass and thunderbird, thunderbird for email, keypass for password management, and those items will require persistent storage to be set up.
so while tails does have an amnesia mode, you can set up storage to allow for further configuration of tails and reusability to keep some data on there.
but being an operating system with built- in tools, you think it would be a bit on the larger side, but it is a very lightweight, slim operating system that is built on top of linux and is very useful.
so at a high level, that is what tails is.
if you don't really understand what an operating system is, definitely check out some of the previous videos in this course to understand how operating systems work and how tails kind of fits into that.
but in the next video, we're going to talk about why you do tails.
so we've talked about the what now it's time to talk about the why.
so if you have any questions, let me know.
otherwise, i'll see you in the next one.