- news
- Tails report for August, 2016
Releases
Tails 2.5 was released on August 2. It includes a number of fixes for bugs and security holes.
Code
We updated our roadmap, listing our priorities for the next years.
Use a dedicated homepage for Tor Browser in Tails to be able to customize what we are showing when people start Tails (#11725).
We enabled address space layout randomization in the Linux kernel (
kASLR
) to improve protection from buffer overflow attacks.We installed
rngd
to improve the entropy of the random numbers generated on computers that have a hardware random number generator.Upgrade to Linux 4.6. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.)
Improved the automatic configuration of Icedove for some use cases (#11536), and started writing automated tests for Icedove.
We've successfully provided an AppArmor profile to Debian's Icedove package and started integrating it into Tails (#10750).
We started porting Tails to Debian 9 (Stretch).
Documentation and website
- We documented how to install Tails Installer in Ubuntu 16.04 (#11570). Unfortunately, this has to be done on the command line since Tails Installer is not listed in the new Ubuntu Software yet. But we are working on fixing this (#11569).
Infrastructure
- 658 ISO images were automatically built and tested by our continuous integration infrastructure.
- We started porting Tails to Debian 9 (Stretch). Adjusting our test suite to make it able to provide feedback about our early Tails 3.0 ISO images is a critical part of this project. To do so, in the past we had to go through a tedious process of updating the dozens of pictures that we ask Sikuli to recognize; but this time, thanks to the work we recently did to support Dogtail in our test suite, we are able to remove many such pictures, and replace them with higher-level means of interacting with graphical user interfaces. So far we could remove 31 such images. This change brings two major benefits: it makes our test suite more robust, and it makes our project more sustainable, by decreasing the cost of porting Tails to future versions of Debian.
- Until recently, the parts of our test suite that rely on emulated USB storage devices were fragile on our Jenkins setup. This prevented us from running a number of tests there, e.g. those involving persistence. We kept working on it, as reported last month, both in Tails Installer itself and in our test suite (#11588, #11582). As a result, we were able to re-enable these tests on production branches in August.
On-going discussions
See the August 2016 online meeting minutes.
We've had a great Tails contributors summit, attended by almost 20 people.
Press and testimonials
2016-08-05: A step-by-step guide on how to download, install, and start using Tails, the world's most secure platform by Dan Patterson in TechRepublic.
2016-08-03: Tails 2.5 final περιηγηθείτε ανώνυμα στο Διαδίκτυο in iGuru News (in Greek).
2016-08-02: Tails 2.5 Anonymous Live CD Released with Tor Browser 6.0.3 and Icedove 45.1 by Marius Nestor in Softpedia.
Translation
All the website
- de: 57% (2880) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 51% words translated
- fa: 46% (2344) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 52% words translated
- fr: 79% (3987) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 78% words translated
- it: 17% (885) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 18% words translated
- pt: 31% (1593) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 29% words translated
Total original words: 50832
Core pages of the website
- de: 85% (1569) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 85% words translated
- fa: 39% (724) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 40% words translated
- fr: 90% (1662) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 91% words translated
- it: 47% (871) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 53% words translated
- pt: 51% (947) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 52% words translated
Total original words: 16995
Metrics
- Tails has been started more than 589774 times this month. This makes 19025 boots a day on average.
- 10921 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
- 111 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.