Have a FAT partition with help as first partition on the USB stick
This came up twice during the user research on D:Sponsor03:
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During #18074 (closed), 3 participants our of 5 had a hard time understanding how to start on the USB stick after installing. Having a FAT partition with instructions as first partition on the USB stick would probably have helped them. We already did progress by restructuring the installation instructions in #16808 (closed). We'll test the new instructions again in #18784 (closed).
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During the interview with Lucas he thought that several of his USB sticks had been hacked because they were displaying an error message when plugged in Windows. If instead, Windows would have shown a partition with instructions, he probably would have understand than his USB sticks were still fine.
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During #18784 (closed), 2 participants out of 4 looked for how to eject the USB stick properly in the left pane of Finder after installation. In the FAT had appeared there automatically, it would have helped them.
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Other people also contact tails-bugs@ thinking that their USB stick has been destroyed because it doesn't show up on Windows.
Now that we're distributing USB image, could we have a first FAT partition on it that would be visible on Windows and macOS and could contain some help on:
- Starting Tails
- Not plugging Tails on other operating systems
- Resetting a USB stick
- Sharing files between Tails and other operating systems (another FAQ and reason to plug Tails in another OS)
I understand from https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/installation/ that it's the system partition that is marked as hidden, not the entire USB stick.
An important downside to consider is that it would make it much easier to know that a USB stick is a Tails USB stick and something else (a broken USB stick) when plugged in by an adversary, for example at a border control or checkpoint.
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During the interview for #19472 (closed), P10, a journalist who has been carrying a Tails USB stick through checkpoints and border controls told me:
In those places where you might be going through checkpoints or crossing borders, people are more likely to suspect a laptop or a phone, but a USB stick, which when they plug in to a normal laptop doesn't do anything, is quite innocuous and is not suspicious to a lot of people.
To work around this, the FAT partition could be made editable by the user so that they could delete it and store whatever decoy documents in there.