Releases

• Tails 3.16 was released on September 4 (major release).

• Tails 4.0 is scheduled for October 22.

These are some of the changes that were introduced in Tails 3.16:

• Removed pre-generated Pidgin accounts
• Removed LibreOffice Math
• Upgraded Tor Browser to 8.5.5

Code

• We started to integrate Tor Browser 9.0 (#16356).

• We started working on the upgrade to Thunderbird 68 (#16771).

• We did lots of work to improve the reliability of our test suite.

• We did some initial research and tests on using Portals to improve the UX of saving downloaded files from Tor Browser (#10422, #15678).

• We did some initial research on redesigning, in a Wayland-compatible way, our current sudo-based privilege separation model (#12213 and subtasks).

• We improved the UX of the Greeter and fixed a few of its most annoying bugs (#16095 and the tickets it blocks). This work will hopefully land in time for Tails 4.0 :)

Documentation and website

• We rewrote completely the instructions to backup the persistent volume.

• We documented how to do right-click on Mac. (#15718)

• We proposed to use Trimage to compress better the images on our website. (#17099)

• We agreed on having a "People" page. (#17046)

User experience

• We published a job offer on illustrations on what is Tails and how it works.

• We did some stats on how good people upgrade their Tails, with data from April 2019. (#17069#note-4)

  • 16.6% of boots (3800/day) had no direct automatic upgrade path to the latest version because they were more than 3 months old.

  • 3.8% of boots (860/day) were stuck before 3.6, which had broken all automatic upgrades. The impact of breaking all automatic upgrades in 3.6 was still huge even 1 year later.

Hot topics on our help desk

• Unfortunately we had some problems with our WhisperBack system, and because of that, some users were prevented from contacting us. We are looking into how to prevent so much downtime the next time.

• Tails can't establish a connection with obfs4 bridges and a hardware clock too far away from UTC is still ongoing

• Graphics cards still give problems to some users (#16447)

Infrastructure

• We upgraded our very old Jenkins to the current LTS version (#10068). This in turn allowed us to implement a bunch of improvements and bugfixes that had been blocked by this postponed upgrade.

• We kept working on making our web translation platform ready for prime-time. We're almost there!

Funding

• We submitted a joint grant proposal with Tor and the Guardian Project to the DRL Internet Freedom program.

• We added Monero and Zcash as cryptocurrencies in which you can donate to Tails.

• We received a $1 000 donation from TOP10VPN.

• We prepared most of the content for our upcoming donation campaign: banner, blog posts, email, tweets, etc. (#16096)

Outreach

Past events

• sajolida attended the 1st Café Internet on September 19 in Mexico City.

Upcoming events

• intrigeri will facilitate a "Discover Tails and translate it into your own language" session at the Mozilla Festival on October 26-27 in London (UK).

Translations

All the website

• de: 38% (2189) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 35% words translated
• es: 54% (3095) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated
• fa: 30% (1721) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 32% words translated
• fr: 90% (5148) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 89% words translated
• it: 33% (1887) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 29% words translated
• pt: 24% (1383) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 20% words translated

Total original words: 59107

Core pages of the website

• de: 66% (1178) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 68% words translated
• es: 88% (1572) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 88% words translated
• fa: 34% (606) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 31% words translated
• fr: 94% (1669) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy, 94% words translated
• it: 62% (1114) strings translated, 17% strings fuzzy, 63% words translated
• pt: 45% (801) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 47% words translated

Total original words: 16513

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 746 622 times this month. This makes 24 887 boots a day on average.