Edited to add more details; The Tails web site(https://tails.boum.org/) describes how to burn the USB Drive and how to set up encrypted persistence the first time you boot.
Mac boot procedure:
Shutdown the computer, plug your device, start the computer, and immediately press-and-hold Option until a boot menu appears. In that boot menu, choose the entry that reads Boot EFI and looks like a USB stick.
Then you should see the Tails boot menu."
Yep seems pretty good on the basis of the couple that I've watched so far. I like the way the teacher sometimes translates things into German.
Might be worth studying in conjunction with the coursera crypto course https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto which is pretty hard
Just keep in mind that if you want to get started immediately it will have to just be planning and development since the mainnet is not live yet:
> We expect to launch our live mainnet in Q4 2014. All Ether generated on the testnet is 'play Ether' and is reset regularly to prevent its resale.
I'm more of the opinion that LiteCoin is a better implementation since it is not vulnerable to GPU farming, at least in the sense that it's not going to be possible that someone starts building rigs to perform sCrypt hashing--it requires too much memory. It's still a electricity→money transform, but more than likely less vulnerable to the pump/dump trading of BitCoin. It'll be more valuable in the long run I think and in a year we're going to hear more about robberies of LiteCoin wallets instead of BitCoin wallets.
Course materials and topics preview: https://class.coursera.org/crypto-preview
And part II of the course: https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto2
May be of interest to right and left cryptoanarchists alike.
Edit: we could, if anyone is up for it, synchronise our lectures and form discussion groups here. The content looks pretty serious, so would benefit from some group-think.
Cool it won't take long, I don't mind. It's kinda tricky at first but when you get the hang of it it's easy and pretty cool.
download here http://www.gpg4win.org/ then play around with it for yourself and see if you can figure it out. Read the compendium.
Pm me when you have downloaded it and looked over it and we'll sort out a key swap and do a practice message to each other.
I highly recommend riseup.net (US), they provide an amazing service. The only caveat in my experience is that they don't allow big attachments, the maximum is around 7 MB (they say e-mail is not for file sharing, and i can completely understand their point). But their history (up and strong since 1999), achievements (no user data served ever, server seized only once but it contained encrypted non-essential data, won court case against US gov twice) and multitude of services (mail, aliases, lists, chat, VPN, social network, etherpad, next-gen privacy platform Bitmask) make up for that.
I'm also having good experiences with Openmailbox.org (France). They are younger, less ethos-focused, but have strong ambitions, the service is reliable and they allow up to 200 MB in attachments.