Complete manual/225/en

To mitigate these risks (which are very common human errors—nobody’s perfect!), you can use a different device for each of your online accounts (and their respective social domains), which reduces the possible harm caused by potential spyware or human error. Most of us don't have those kind of resources, however. Therefore, an inexpensive (and usually free) option is to use a different operating system on your one main computer by using a GNU/Linux live distribution like Tails or by creating ‘virtual machines’ that run ‘inside’ your computer’s main operating system. A virtual machine (VM) can be described as a simulated computer with its own operating system, which runs as software on your physical computer. You can think of a VM as a computer within a computer. Using VMs can be useful for a wide range of things, including anonymisation, sharing machines with other people, or for opening untrusted and potentially harmful attachments ‘isolated’ in the VM from your main operating system in order to avoid a potential malware infection of your entire system.