Releases

Tails 3.9 is scheduled for September 5. Its release candidate is scheduled for August 17.

Code

We did most of the work needed to upgrade to Tor Browser 8, based on Firefox 60ESR.

We continued to work on including VeraCrypt in Tails.

We continued our work on creating a user interface for our Additional Software feature to make it easier to use.

We worked on new Debian packages for Torbirdy, Tails Installer and OnionShare.

We prepared a fix for a long standing bug in ikiwiki that makes our website render in a buggy way regularly.

We worked more on integrating our future web translation platform with our infrastructure. This platform is currently not production ready but is being tested and used by a few translators.

We wrote Git hooks for all machines and contributors using Git.
We wrote and improved several scripts that check the validity of PO files that we carry. We need these scripts to further automate our translation processes, hence all translators, humans and interfaces need to respect certain rules when committing PO files to our repository. This is currently not active and still needs to be tested more extensively.
We are working on ikiwiki, our website engine, to support adding translation files for non-active languages.

Documentation and website

We updated our installation instructions for Debian to:

Linux Mint 19
Tails Installer with no splash screen

User experience

We designed interfaces to:

Persist the screen locking password (#15641).
Attach screenshots to WhisperBack reports (#8660).

Hot topics on our help desk

Users complained about GDM not starting (most of them with Intel GPU #15700).
Some others were unable to use Wi-Fi (non supported USB adapters and #15520).
Enigmail setup wizard #15693 generated some requests.
And still a few lost persistence reports. Remember: we need the debugging info from a session in which the persistence seems to be lost, to be able to fix this.

Infrastructure

We asked Wikimedia to become our primary fallback download mirror, and they accepted. We'll implement this change in the coming months. Thank you Wikimedia!

We've updated our web translation platform to a recent version. The process went smoothly.

We started looking into the long-term viability of Dogtail, one of the key components of our automated testing framework.

Funding

We analyzed the results from last year's donation campaign.

We got more money than in 2016 (101 664€, +34%) but from less donations (-43%).

Outreach

Past events

sajolida attended PETS.
Four of us attended DebConf in Hsinchu, Taiwan.
emmapeel attended a dev sprint with Tactical Tech about investigative journalist tools for Tails in Montenegro.

Upcoming events

sajolida will be at Tor meeting in Mexico City from September 29 to October 3 and will present Tails during the open days on October 2.

Translation

All the website

de: 53% (3093) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 47% words translated
es: 57% (3337) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated
fa: 36% (2096) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 38% words translated
fr: 89% (5184) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 88% words translated
it: 32% (1877) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 28% words translated
pt: 28% (1617) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 24% words translated

Total original words: 61156

Core pages of the website

de: 79% (1527) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 78% words translated
es: 96% (1855) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 94% words translated
fa: 33% (640) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
fr: 98% (1893) strings translated, 0% strings fuzzy, 98% words translated
it: 67% (1294) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 66% words translated
pt: 45% (879) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 49% words translated

Metrics

Tails has been started more than 675150 times this month. This makes 21779 boots a day on average.
7372 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
57 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.