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Tails report for April, 2013

  1. Tails report for April, 2013
  2. Releases
  3. Metrics
  4. Code
  5. Documentation and Website
  6. Translation
  7. On-going discussions
  8. Infrastructure
  9. Funding

Releases

Tails 0.17.2 was released on April 9th.

Metrics

  • 121 183 connections of Tails to the Tor network. This makes a boot every 21 seconds on average (this is an approximation from the requests made to the security announcements feed when Tails is connected to Tor).

  • 71 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.

  • 984 comments were posted on the forum, with 76 signed by Tails. This means there has been much more activity on the forum, and that we are having a hard time coping with it, but also that anonymous contributors are providing more and more good answers without our help.

Code

  • We had a highly successful "low-hanging fruits" week: at least 16 tickets were touched, and at least five persons attended one session or more.

  • The persistence feature to remember installed packages (has matured a lot) and should be ready for Tails 0.18.

  • Support for Obfs3 bridges (has been added).

  • Torbutton 1.5.x can now be included in Tails. We also reorganized and cleaned our iceweasel prefs to look a bit more like the ones from TBB.

  • GNOME accessibility themes were installed to provide high contrast and large print themes.

  • The "About GNOME" menu entry has been customized to provide information about the running version of Tails.

  • A branch is ready to disable wireless devices other than Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, WWAN, and WiMAX by default.

  • Some initial work was done to not start the browser automatically anymore.

  • The audio preview when having the mouse pointer on an audio file in Nautilus has been disabled.

  • The support for non-obfsproxy proxy has been fixed.

  • IPv6 is not disabled anymore. It turns out that the IPv6 leaks we wanted to fix actually don't exist.

  • GNOME screenshot has been installed.

Documentation and Website

  • "Getting started..." is now the homepage for the Tails documentation accessible from the desktop.

  • The content of the /bugs section of the website was moved to /todo.

  • A bug concerning MD5 Reborned Hasher has been documented.

  • The instructions for manual installation on Mac have been brought back online and the instructions for Linux and Windows have been improved.

  • The introduction of the bug reporting instructions have been improved.

Translation

  • A solution was proposed to distribute translation workflows in either Git or Transifex.

  • Tails USB installer: update translations for Arabic, German, Greek, Spanish, Farsi, Finnish, Italian, Latvian, Dutch, Polish, and Chinese.

  • WhisperBack: update translations for Arabic, German, Greek, Spanish, Euskera, Finnish, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Chinese Spanish, Korean, Polish, and Russian. New translations: Swedish.

On-going discussions

  • Debian derivatives & DebConf13, about what we can propose for DebConf13

  • secure and simple network time (hack), about tlsdate, a possible segmentation fault and its future in Tails

  • Discussion on minitube, about replacing minitube with smtube

  • GNOME proxy settings, again, about dropping all GNOME proxy settings

Infrastructure

  • Tails 0.17.2 was the first release assisted with automated tests!

    • Cucumber is used to describe the tests to perform.
    • 82 tests have been written so far

  • Huge progress was made on our automatic building infrastructure, based on Jenkins.

Funding

  • The grant application we did with OpenITP (Sponsor Echo) was rejected. But our proposal made it to their finalist set.

  • We started to work on another grant application for more long-term funding with sponsor Foxtrot.

  • The list of bounties that are going to be funded through the Tor project program is closed. It will be made public soon.