Code

• We started evaluating our options regarding a possible upgrade to Linux 4.13 in Tails 3.3.

• We had a first sprint to evaluate how it would be like if Tails was based on quarterly snapshots of Debian testing:

  • We ported most of Tails to Debian Buster.
  • We adjusted most of our test suite accordingly.
  • We designed a process and implemented tools that will allow us to tell technical writers what part of the documentation is affected by changes in our code, test suite, or installed packages.
  • We adapted the Debian Security Tracker code to track security issues fixed in Debian but not in the snapshots Tails uses.
  • In November we will check how we are doing and will decide what the next steps shall be.

Documentation and website

• We improved our donation page in preparation of the donation campaign to mention CCT instead of Zwiebelfreunde and be better structured.

User experience

• We installed LimeSurvey on our infrastructure and advertised a first survey on file storage encryption from the homepage of Tor Browser in Tails. Our users have been very responsive to our call and since then we have gathered 30 complete answers to the survey each day on average, reaching 375 in total on October 30.

• We extensively tested older and newer versions of UUI to understand why cloning from a USB stick installed using UUI sometimes fails. Everything is fine as long as "Format in FAT32" is checked which is documented but not always applied by users, so we should either improve UUI, our documentation, or Tails Greeter to prevent that.

• We continued to port our verification extension for Firefox to Web Extensions and we now have a working prototype that computes the checksum in a reasonable time (45 seconds)!

Hot topics on our help desk

1. Tails Installer treats drives differently depending on when they are plugged

2. Install by cloning sometimes silently fails from a stick installed with UUI

3. A few users with Nvidia graphics reported some issues.

Infrastructure

• We consolidated our system administration team by hiring a new member. Welcome, groente!

• For our installation of LimeSurvey, we implemented an automatic monitoring of new upstream versions to notify system administrators when a security update is available (Git repository).

Funding

• The proposal that we submitted to the Lush Digital Fund in May was accepted. It will fund the integration of a web-based translation platform in the build of our website and documentation.

• We published our finances for 2016.

• We launched our 2017 donation campaign and blogged about Many hands make Tails.

Outreach

Past events

• The Hackmitin 2017 at Rancho Electronico in Ciudad Monstruo, Mexico featured two Tails workshops.

• Some of us attended the Reproducible Builds World summit in Berlin, Germany.

Upcoming events

• intrigeri will attend the OTF summit in Valencia (November 14-16).

• Many Tails people will be at the 34th Chaos Communication Congress, aka. 34C3 in Leipzig (December 27 to December 30).

Press and testimonials

• Tails is briefly mentioned in the Arte televisions' series on philosophy. In French «Incognito, donc libre?», in German: "Inkognito, also frei?"

• Infosec Bytes has created a video crash course series about Tails for journalists. They are based at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London and supported by the Logan Foundation.

Translation

All the website

• de: 54% (2825) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated
• fa: 40% (2107) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 43% words translated
• fr: 89% (4631) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 87% words translated
• it: 39% (2025) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 34% words translated
• pt: 24% (1290) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 21% words translated

Total original words: 54735

Core pages of the website

• de: 76% (1454) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 77% words translated
• fa: 34% (651) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 35% words translated
• fr: 98% (1870) strings translated, 0% strings fuzzy, 99% words translated
• it: 76% (1447) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 77% words translated
• pt: 44% (850) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated

Total original words: 17292

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 683188 times this month. This makes 22036 boots a day on average.
• 11166 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
• 137 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.