Releases

• Tails 3.11 was released on December 11 (bugfix release).

• Tails 3.12 is scheduled for January 29.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 3.11:

• Add a confirm dialog between downloading and applying an automatic upgrade to control better when the network is disabled and prevent partially applied upgrades. (#14754 and #15282)

• When running from a virtual machine, warn about the trustworthiness of the operating system even when running from a free virtualization software. (#16195)

• Disable Autocrypt in Thunderbird to prevent sending unencrypted emails by mistake. (#15923)

• Fix the opening of Thunderbird in non-English languages. (#16113)

• Reduce the logging level of Tor when using bridges. (#15743)

Code

• We continued working on releasing Tails using a disk image format. This will make it easier to install Tails on Windows and macOS. Part of this work was to switch our IDF format to JSON and to rewrite and release a new version of the Tails verification extension.

• Updated onionshare, torsocks and tails-installer in Debian.

Hot topics on our help desk

1. Black screen after the boot menu with Intel GPU (i915) ##16224

2. Partially applied incremental upgrades cause all kinds of trouble ##14754

Infrastructure

• We planned the final steps to make our web translation platform production-ready.

  hefee, emmapeel and our sysadmins have continued working on integrating the translation platform into our infrastructure. The translation server (not yet in production) now updates its Git repository automatically using scripts. A staging website shows translators how their translation will look like in context, once merged into our master branch. The staging website (not yet in production either) is updated automatically.

• We kept working on our new server backup setup, which now works fine in production.

• Our mailing lists were migrated to new providers (puscii, Autistici/Inventati, and some self-hosted on our own infrastructure). Many thanks to boum.org for the support in the last ten years. Thanks as well to puscii and Austistici/Inventati for stepping up now.

• We started running the authoritative nameserver for a couple of Tails DNS zones.

Funding

We continued working on our yearly donation campaign:

• We added support for 4 new cryptocurrencies.

• We wrote about our plans for 2019.

• We closed our donation campaign but we don't have the final numbers yet.

Outreach

Past events

• intrigeri attended the Reproducible Builds 2018 summit. He greatly enjoyed hacking with the Qubes OS folks there, which led us to fix the last issues we had with building our upcoming USB image reproducibly :)

Upcoming events

• emmapeel and sajolida will be at FOSDEM on February 2–3 in Brussels, Belgium.

Press and testimonials

• 2018-12-05: Lebanon, Pennsylvania, libraries face issue of computer filters and offer free Tails drives to library users to browse the internet without fear of being traced

• 2018-12-27: Tails : une cause qui nous touche by Mozinet in Communauté Mozilla francophone.

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 723 198 times this month. This makes 23 329 boots a day on average.
• 8 125 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
• 74 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.