Now that we have Thales installed on a USB stick, we can use this USB stick to boot into Thales from
any computer, regardless of what operating system that computer runs, whether it runs Windows Linux
or OSX, it doesn't really matter.
All we'll have to do is connect the USB device that we installed Thales to, to the computer that we
want to run Thales on, start the computer or restart it.
If it's already running, then as it starts, before it even gets into the loading page of Windows or
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 escape F12 or F9.
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 will 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 she 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 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 tales won't leave any traces, but I just like to keep things to the default.
In here.
Again, we have the calendar format.
I'm going to keep that to the default.
The persistent storage option in here allows you to configure a portion of your storage to be persistent.
We will talk about that later.
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 tells 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 disappear along with all the modifications that
you make to tales.
Because like we said, Tales is a live amnesic 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 log in, 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 the 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 to 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.
Tails 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.
Offline mode can be used to disable networking on tales.
So if you are going to use the operating system for any use that does not require the internet, then
it might be a good idea to disable networking for increased security.
The unsafe browser is set to enabled.
This is a browser that is not connected to the TOR network.
So as I said, Tales automatically connects to the TOR network and routes all traffic through the Tor
network.
The only exception is the unsafe browser, so you can have it enabled in here or disabled if you want
to disable it.
We're going to keep it at enabled and we're going to talk about it in the future.
So I'm not going to spend too much time talking about it.
And the network connection option in here is obsolete, so you can't really do much from it from here
anymore.
But we will be talking about your connection and how to use bridges and pluggable transports later on
in the course.
So now that I'm happy with the options, I'm going to click on Cancel and I'm going to click on Start
Tales to start the operating system.
And as you can see, we get the tails desktop, which is very simple and very easy to use.
Don't worry about the fact that it looks pretty different than what you're used to.
We will talk about it and I'm going to teach you how to use it step by step as we go through the course.
But as you can see, as soon as the system started, we got this connection window that is asking us
how do we want to connect to the Tor network?
So the first option is to connect automatically and the second one is to hide to my local network that
I'm connecting to Tor.
So basically the first option will connect you directly to the Tor network.
The second option will allow you to configure a bridge.
You can also configure a bridge using the first option and then ticking the configure bridge option.
If you click on next, you can either use a default bridge, ask to get a bridge by email, or enter
a bridge that you already obtained manually, just as shown previously.
So I'm not going to cover that.
We learned how to do this previously.
All you have to do is simply paste the bridge in here.
So I'm going to go back and tick the box and simply connect automatically to the Tor network.
Click on Connect and watch this icon.
So right now we have an X beside the onion.
But now that we are connected, the X has disappeared from this icon.
And if we click it, we'll be able to see the onion circuit that is being used to route our traffic.
So as mentioned, all traffic going out of this operating system is going to be routed through the Tor
network, not only the traffic going from the Tor browser.
Now you can also start the Tor browser by clicking on this button here, or you can start it from the
applications menu.
Like I said, don't worry about this at all.
We will.
We will talk about how to use this operating system step by step as we go through the course.