Releases

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

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.