November was pretty intense a month for Tails, including two major releases. It was not the happiest though, due to personal issues, unresolved conflicts within the team and server hard disks dying.

Anyhow, Tails' life does go on. Here is a report of what happened last month.

Releases

Tails 0.14 was released on November 13th and 0.15 was released on November 28th. From now on, we should be in a position to stick to the 6-weeks release cycle we have been aiming at for a while.

The Tails 0.16 release is scheduled for the first half of January.

People

Tails has been started and successfully connected to the Tor network around 83731 times in November. That makes a boot every 31 seconds on average. This number is an approximation from the requests made for the security announcements feed. The later is retrieved by Tails after being connected to Tor to eventually encourage users to update.

41 reports were received through WhisperBack.

The forum activity is still very high: 903 messages, 151 signed by Tails.

Code

Some preliminary work to add VirtualBox host software has been done.

Useless cookies exceptions in iceweasel were removed.

Preliminary support for some OpenPGP SmartCards was added.

LCD-optimized fonts settings were implemented.

Do not run setupcon on X.

Better support for printers that us the IJS driver was added.

The Monkeysphere XUL extension and the I2P console bookmark, that were broken by the move to TorBrowser patches, were fixed.

The OpenPGP Applet was fixed to be compatible with the Windows camouflage mode.

Custom APT sources handling was fixed for release candidates.

Bridge mode was found to have problems with Tor restarts and fixed. While we were at it, some refactoring happened, and code was extracted into a shell library to avoid too much duplication in the source tree.

Iceweasel 10.0.11esr-1 + TorBrowser patches was build.

A font for Sinhala script (spoken by 15-20 millions of people, mainly in Sri Lanka) was added.

The Unsafe Browser window name was set to... Unsafe Browser.

Discrepancies between the various build setups used by Tails developers was discovered and fixed.

APT pinning was cleaned up.

Our fake FireGPG package was removed, eventually. RIP.

The SCIM was fixed in the autostarted web browser.

Work started to set wireless devices state to something sane at boot time.

The move to using a recent live-boot was almost completed, but blocked due to a bug we found in upstream live-boot. A patch is in the works.

Work to install a password manager was started.

A poedit 1.5 backport that fixes a long-standing annoying bug was prepared and tested.

Preliminary steps towards installing the Minitube YouTube client were walked. Many thanks to Alessandro Grassi for starting this effort, and going on with it!

The Persistent directory is now displayed in the Places menu.

Work has started to set iceweasel homepage to Tails news.

Shutdown messages were fixed to talk of DVD, not of CD.

IPv6 was disabled to workaround a recently discovered leak.

Work towards a better power off button is ongoing.

obfsproxy support was added.

A number of candidate branches for 0.15 were merged.

Documentation and website

The Tails website now has a Press & media information page.

The News can now be translated.

As planned, the website was locked-down a bit more.

On-going discussions

Improve Polipo configuration, switch to Privoxy, or drop it all?

Progress report on the automated test suite triggered some discussion.

Helping adrelanos to proper copyright and licensing practices when forking Tails documentation pages.

Testing incremental updates and tails-create-iuk.

Benchmarking Redmine.

How to implement remembering installed packages?

Supporting EntropyKey.

Promoting Persistence features.

What to do with Liferea Cookies?

If/How to ship the Minitube native YouTube client?

What's the safest value to set the time from Tor consensus?

Stop shipping bugs/ and todo/ in ISO?