Webconverger was started because I couldn't trust those terminals and kiosks in public spaces to browse the Web.

I trust my work because I had a hand in building it, though there are some technical features which may convince you to trust it too.

First every commit is made publicly on Github. You can see me transparently make changes. You can verify every changed file. Every upstream file is a binary built by Debian, Mozilla & for flash, Adobe, again you can verify that using file checksums.

However how can you infer that the head of Webconverger git repository corresponds to an ISO release you downloaded which you would use to deploy to your hardware?

Previously you would have to trust the checksum I provided on the release page, but if you built Webconverger yourself, you would get a different checksum. A different checksum should make you suspicious that something nefarious was inserted in the build pipeline.

But why were the checksums different if you built this ISO yourself? Because the build chain would typically use the current date and when bundled up, the checksum is different. Chris Lamb has fixed this and now you can too can produce independently verifiable ISO builds of Webconverger. This security feature is called reproducible builds.

I must admit we owe the motivation to achieve this was due to Mozilla sponsoring Tails to do so. Webconverger achieved this feature before Tails, at a lower cost, funded by paying Webconverger subscribers. If you like our work, please tell your {school,office,company} IT department that this is the very best Web kiosk software.

The build system has been improved to use a third party continuous integration process at https://travis-ci.org/Webconverger/webc. The finished builds are uploaded to https://build.webconverger.com/. Since everything now is automated, much like the automatic updates do once Webconverger is installed on read/write medium, there is no need for releases anymore. Hence the x86 download button on the Webconverger homepage is set to https://build.webconverger.com/latest.iso.