Releases

• Tails 2.7 was released on November 15 (minor release).

• Tails 2.7.1 was released on November 30 (minor release).

• Tails 2.9 is scheduled for December 13.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 2.7:

• Fix multi-architecture support in Synaptic. This should fix broken installations of additional packages from Synaptic. (#11820)

• Set default spell checking language of Icedove to English instead of French. (#11037)

Code

New Tails Greeter

After many months of development, the redesigned version of Tails Greeter is ready to be tested.

Tails based on Debian 9 (Stretch)

We made lots of progress on porting Tails to Debian 9 (Stretch). This work culminated with the release of Tails 3.0~alpha1.

• Merged the devel Git branch, and upgraded to a current snapshot of the Debian archive.
• Switched userspace to 64-bit (x86_64).
• By running our manual test suite on Stretch-based ISO images and testing our entire documentation, we identified a few regressions and documentation that needs updating.
• GNOME with its default black theme
• Fixed a long-standing issue with the firewall not being set up during early boot.
• Fixed the Greeter not switching to the Desktop VT upon login, and not displaying the More Options window properly.
• Test suite:
  • Fixed a bug in the debugging code.
  • Ported great numbers of test cases to Stretch, including the persistence, Tor enforcement, encryption, Evince and MAC spoofing ones.
• Verified that tails-security-check's CA pinning is repaired.
• Verified that MAC address spoofing works in various cases, including Wi-Fi connections and existing persistent network connections created on Tails 2.x.
• Switch to using the aufs kernel module from Debian.
• Made progress on porting to GnuPG v2: #11905, #11948.
• Removed ekeyd and obsolete udev rules.
• Fixed handling of /etc/hosts.
• Fixed issues in the revamped greeter to have it included in next Jessie alpha ISO. A testing ISO is available. Among others, last changes include:
  • fix on-the-fly translation #11947 #11957
  • update user visible strings #11438
  • integrate latest icons #11472

Reproducible ISO build

We had an initial sprint about reproducible builds. We are very happy with the progress we've made: the tree that becomes filesystem.squashfs is now almost fully reproducible; so is also the tree that is the basis for automatic upgrades. Along the way, we've contributed a number of patches to Debian and upstream projects.

• Make our PO files update reproducibly, by not updating them unless something other than POT-Creation-Date has changed.
• live-build:
  • Use xorriso, that honors the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH variable, to build the ISO filesystem reproducibly.
  • Expose the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH variable when running scripts inside the chroot.
  • Clamp mtimes to SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the chroot and binary filesystems.
  • Use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to populate /.disk/info timestamp.
  • Use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH when templating syslinux templates.
• Made mksquashfs honor SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for the filesystem creation date, and had it clamp mtimes to SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
• Incremental upgrade kits:
  • Made aufs white-outs reproducible.
  • Made aufs pseudo-links permanent, so that they are reproducible.
  • Passed --sort=name --clamp-mtime --mtime=@$SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to tar.
• Made our web site build reproducibly… and then discovered more bits that are not generated in a deterministic way, which lead us to discover that our cleanall build option did not clean as well as it should (fix).
• Eliminated various causes for non-determinism, such as caches and other generated files.
• On the infrastructure side of things:
  • Vagrant boxes management: we came up with a new design that will be reflected on the blueprint shortly.
  • Experimented with using our Vagrant + libvirt build system on one of our Jenkins ISO builders, and started work towards migrating them all.

Documentation and website

• Explain why it is impossible to connect to GMail from Icedove.

• spriver updated our documentation on shutdown and OpenPGP Applet to 2.0.

• Chris Lamb fixed a bunch of typos.

User experience

Infrastructure

• The deployment of our mechanism for the distribution and activation of the revocation certificate of the Tails signing key has progressed a lot and it is now operational. Thanks to everybody who accepted being part of this!

• We finished deploying our new infrastructure of download mirrors which allows for more mirrors, easier maintenance, and more flexibility in the future.

• Our test suite covers 213 scenarios, 4 more that in October.

Funding

• We continued our donation campaign and wrote about what we do with our money and our plans for the coming years.

• Our grant proposal for NLnet on porting Tails to Debian Stretch was rejected.

• Our grant proposal for ISC Project on a translation platform for our website was rejected.

Outreach

• Cristina Carnevali presented Tails at Linux Day 2016 in Bologna, Italy.

• Tails was presented in the security track of the Iberian hackmeeting in Firestone, Donostia, Basque Country.

• gagz presented Tails at Capitole du libre 2016, Toulouse, France.

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% (3979) 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% (1657) 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 613099 times this month. This makes 20437 boots a day on average. It's the first time we're over 20000 boots a day!
• 14634 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
• 110 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.