So now that we have Thales installed on a USB stick, we can use this USB stick to boot into tails from
any computer regardless of what operating system that computer runs, whether it runs Windows, Linux
or OS X, it doesn't really matter.
All we'll have to do is connect the USB device that we install tails two to the computer that we want
to run tails on, start the computer or restarted.
If it's already running, then as it starts, before it even gets into the loading page of Windows or
Ice X as soon as it starts, you want to enter the boot menu.
Now this varies depending on the computer that you have, so you'll have to press a button or maybe
a combination of buttons in order to enter the boot menu.
And this will differ depending on your computer.
So here I have a list of the most common brands and the corresponding keys that will allow you to enter
the boot menu.
For example, if you have an Acer, you should try to press scape F 12 or F nine.
So what you do is you connect your USB device to the computer, you start the computer or restart it.
If it's already running, then keep pressing the escape button multiple times until you see a boot menu
like this one or similar to this one.
If you don't see it, if you boot into the default operating system that your computer usually boots
in, then you should restart and try the next option in the list.
If you tried all of the options and it still doesn't work, then check out the links in the resources
of this lecture on more info on how to boot into tails.
And if you can't find any help, then ask us in the Q&A section and we'll respond to you within 15 hours.
Once you enter the boot menu, you want to select the option that will allow you to boot from a USB
or an external storage hit.
Enter and you will see the tails boot menu.
As you can see in here, you want to keep this at the first option and hit enter.
This will start booting tails from the USB device that you connected.
So give it some time to start the operating system for you.
Perfect.
So as you can see, we have the welcome window of tales.
And if you want to start straight away, all you'd have to do is just click on Start Tales.
But before doing that, let's take a quick look on the options that we can modify in here.
So first of all, you can modify the language which is set to English United States by default, and
I'm going to keep it that way.
The keyboard is also set to English us.
Now you might you might want to modify this if you have a different layout, but I think it's a good
idea to keep it at the default settings because that will give even less info.
Now I know I said that tails won't leave any traces, but I just like to keep things to the default.
And here again we have the calendar format.
I'm going to keep that to the default.
And at the bottom here we have additional settings or advanced settings.
So I'm going to click on the Plus to show you the settings that you can set here.
And the first thing that you can set is an administration password.
So by default, tails disables the admin account.
So as you can see, it's set to off.
So when you go and use the operating system, there will be no admin.
The reason it's configured this way so that if someone manages to hack into your system, they won't
have admin permissions, so they won't be able to change core functions or core settings within the
operating system.
And they also won't be able to install any applications.
If for some reason you needed to modify something that requires admin settings, or if you wanted to
install programs on the system, then you can enable the admin account.
From here you can click on this and you set a password, you repeat the password and click on add to
add it.
Keep in mind that this account will only be added for this current session.
Once you restart the computer, the admin account will disappears along with all the modifications that
you make to tales.
Because, like we said, Tales is a live, amnesiac operating system that completely wipes everything
that you do every time you restart the computer.
So when you create an admin account in here and login, this admin account will disappear and will not
even exist once you restart the computer.
So if you want to use an admin account again, the next time you use this system, you're going to have
to come to this menu and create it.
But for now, I don't really want to do anything that requires admin privileges and I don't want to
install any programs.
So I'm going to click on back and I'm going to keep this TA off.
The next setting that you might want to modify is the MAC spoofing, and as you can see, this is set
to on by default.
Now, MAC address is a unique and permanent address that is assigned to every network device.
It gets assigned to it at the time the device is manufactured and it never changes.
So for example, if I have an Ethernet card or a wi fi card and unplug it from my computer and connect
it to a completely different computer, that card will still have the same Mac address.
Now, this Mac address is only visible within your network.
It's not visible on the internet.
As we know, tales automatically routes all internet traffic through TOR, so we're not really concerned
about stuff that happens on the internet.
It should hide our identity automatically, but within the network, the Mac address is visible and
the Mac address is unique and permanent, like I said, and therefore it can be used to identify you.
So this option by default is set to on and I'm going to keep it to on.
So that tails will also change my Mac address every time I start it.
Therefore, my Mac address will be changed so I'll be hidden or anonymous within the network.
And when I connect to the internet, all the traffic will automatically go through the Tor network and
therefore it will improve my anonymity.
The only time you might want to set this to off is if the network that you're connecting to uses a whitelist.
So if it's only allows specific Mac addresses to connect to it, and if your Mac address is one of these
whitelisted MAC addresses, that's the only time that you might want to set this to off, otherwise
it's better to keep it at on so your identity is hidden within your network.
Now, the third option here, the network connection, and this is set to direct the default.
Like I said, this means that all traffic sent from any application on tails will have to go through
the Tor network.
So this is perfect, but if we click on it.
You'll also see we have two other options.
The second option is to configure a third bridge or a proxy.
And we already discussed what bridges, pluggable transports and proxies are.
Previously, in the course, we discussed how to get them and why you might want to use them.
So I'm not going to really talk about it right now.
If you don't remember what they are, please go back and revise the previous section.
I will, however, show you how to use a bridge or a pluggable transport with Thales because we only
covered how to do it with Tor browser.
So I'll show you how to do this with Thales in a future lecture.
For now, we're keeping this to the default.
Obviously the third option here will disable all networking.
We don't want to this right now, so we're keeping everything here to the default.
And I'm going to click on Cancel and we're back to the welcome menu in which we can just shut down or
start Thales.
So now that we're happy with all of these settings, I'm going to click on Start Tales to start the
Operating System.
On Perfect.
As you can see, we get a nice and simple desktop.
I know it might look strange to you, especially if you're used to windows, but don't worry, it's
actually very simple to use and it's very similar to a lot of operating systems, even though it looks
a little bit different.
In the next lecture, we'll have a basic overview on this operating system, its menus, how to use
it, how to interact with it, just so that we get more comfortable with using it.