Releases

• Tails 3.1 was released on August 8 (minor release).

• Tails 3.2 is scheduled for September 26.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 3.1:

Fixed problems

• Make sure that Thunderbird erases its temporary directory, containing for example attachments opened in the past. #13340

• Fix translations of the time synchronization and "Tor is ready" notifications. #13437

Code

• intrigeri started a discussion about enabling AppArmor by default in Debian. So far the feedback has been good.
• We decided to evaluate this year whether we can base Tails on quarterly snapshots of Debian testing. If we end up answering this question favorably, then the first such release would happen early in 2018 (January or April).
• We worked on regressions introduced in Tails 3.0 that our Help Desk and Foundations Team deems high-priority, such as #12733 and #13437.
• We worked on Tails Installer to make it create larger system partitions so that users can benefit more often from automatic upgrades, instead of having to perform a manual upgrade.
• We are in the process of evaluating whether GNOME's on-screen keyboard could fully replace Florence.
• We started porting Tails to Linux 4.12.
• We started organizing teams, work, timeline and workflow for our upcoming OTF contract:
  • VeraCrypt support in GNOME: make it easier to integrate Tails into workflows with other users and operating systems
  • Additional software: make it easier to tailor Tails to specific needs for sensitive data manipulation (#14568, #5551 and friends)

Documentation and website

• We renamed our "Easy" tasks for new contributors as "Starter tasks".

User experience

• We helped Tor redesign and rephrase Tor Launcher, the configuration screens of Tor Browser that are also used in Tails.

• We held a collective workshop to identify personas with 12 core contributors. We started with a brainstorming of Tails users and their goals, followed by a collective grouping of all the identified use cases into categories based on type of users and user goals.

  After that, a smaller team started drafting persona skeletons based on this output, including holistic security and threat modeling aspects for each persona.

  The process and output are documented in our blueprint on personas.

Hot topics on our help desk

1. A few users reported that during some sessions, the Applications menu button stops working moments after Tails finishes to start

2. A few users were asking about shipping Tails with software for additional cryptocurrencies (i.e. Monero)

3. There was some input on a problem with Install by cloning, which sometimes fails silently on specific installations.

4. Users are still struggling with hardware support.

Funding

• sajolida sent an analysis of the donation campaign from last year, with insights and actionable items to make it even better this year.

Outreach

Past events

• A few Tails contributors attended DebConf17, the annual conference for Debian contributors and users interested in improving Debian. Among other things we had discussions and hacking sessions about enabling AppArmor by default in Debian (see above), OpenPGP Applet, Debian Perl Group open tasks, and how to bring the benefits of Flatpak to our users.
• Alan attended GUADEC and sent a comprehensive report

Upcoming events

• From October 31st to November 2nd the reproducible summit will happen in Berlin
• From November 14th to November 16th is the OTF summit
• From December 27th to December 30th the 34th Chaos Communication Congress, 34C3, will happen in Leipzig

On-going discussions

• There was a call to help us build Tails reproducibly
• Iry restarted the discussion about substituting Tor-launcher with Anon-Connection-Wizard

Translation

All website PO files

• de: 56% (2821) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 49% words translated
• fa: 42% (2115) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 44% words translated
• fr: 89% (4466) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 87% words translated
• it: 41% (2050) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 36% words translated
• pt: 25% (1295) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 22% words translated

Total original words: 53366

Core PO files

• de: 77% (1471) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 78% words translated
• fa: 34% (656) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 35% words translated
• fr: 98% (1866) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 99% words translated
• it: 77% (1459) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 77% words translated
• pt: 45% (853) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated

Total original words: 17252

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 674.373 times this month. This makes 21.754 boots a day on average.
• 13.545 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
• 105 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.