I've burned hundreds of Linux and BSD discs since I figured out what to do with an ISO sometime in late 2006/early 2007. I've saved many and gotten rid of many as well.

Nowadays my main laptop can boot from USB, so I tend to put the ISO images that allow both testing of live systems as well as installation straight onto flash-memory thumb drives. Now with the "hybrid" images that projects like Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora are using, it's easier than ever to use the cat command to copy the ISO to the USB thumb drive.

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Courtesy of Distrowatch, I learned about Tails, a live Linux distribution based on Debian Live that uses Tor and other cryptographic- and privacy-minded features to protect a users anonymity while using the Internet.

I've been interested in projects like this for quite some time. I used a live CD based on OpenBSD called Anonym.OS to do this some time ago (more to see if OpenBSD would run on my hardware, but I did appreciate the security emphasis of Tor then and now).

No sooner did I hear about Tails than did I download it and write it to a bootable USB drive.

Now I'm in the Debian Live/Tails environment, using the Iceweasel browser with Tor and excited about the possibilities of using Tails to operate computers (plural) on the Web in a truly free and (mostly) traceless way.

It all should be like this but isn't, of course. The endgame for me is a fully installable distribution that adheres to these privacy principles.

I'll write more about Tails later. Until then, download it yourself and give it a try. It runs great (it's Debian under the hood after all) in case you were wondering.