Tails ws gui updater

Description

The note is to explain the rationale behind the feature documented in GH 3076 - Add simple GUI updater for Tails journalist workstation .

It comes from a conversation with a SecureDrop (SD) contributor.

Date

Late March, 2018

Notes by

@ei8fdb

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The problem

Users are not updating the SecureDrop related pieces of the SD Tails workstation software.

(For background: there are two kinds of updates "Tails" (non-SD pieces maintained by Tails) and "SD", there is an automatic update for the former already provided by Tails, but the latter would be provided by this updater)

The observations

After doing a number of site visits to SD users, "to do CLI things for journalists that they cannot do because they are physically separated from their administrator", it became clear to the contributor that the majority of journalists:

1. are not comfortable with doing work in the command line, and

2. even though they know the importance of doing updates are not willing (comment: or possibly not technical proficient enough) to do any manual [...] Tails upgrades that require "more than clicking a button in a GUI"

User's awareness that something's wrong

The reason for the site visit was to address the exact issue of the update - "they only knew of the need to manually upgrade Tails (since Tails puts up a dialog box to let users know they are behind), which was the reason they had requested a visit

Finding the issue

Once onsite by talking to journalists and inspecting their workstations, the contributor found the journalist was aware of the need for the update, but "seeing that every "upgrade" action involving the command line had not been done due to them not being comfortable and not understanding".

In normal circumstances "their administrator usually does, but when they are not with their administrator they are basically out of luck". This was due to the administrator

Scale of the issue

The contributor has observed this issue at least 4 times.

They think the issue is a large scale problem - though due to the technical proficiency of many SD users they "manage to update regardless of the difficulty (this happens because the admins are on top of things), they just don't love the workflow".

There is a need for this feature to provide the users with an easy way, non-threatening/technical over-complicated way to update their Tails workstation.

The benefit the user gets is maintained security by applying required updates.