Releases

• Tails 4.0 was released on October 22 (major release).

• Tails 4.1 is scheduled for December 3.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.0:

• Replace KeePassX with KeePassXC, which is more actively developed.
• Remove Scribus.
• Usability improvements to Tails Greeter
• Tails 4.0 starts 20% faster.
• Tails 4.0 requires about 250 MB less of RAM.
• Tails 4.0 is 47 MB smaller to download than Tails 3.16, despite all these changes.
• Add support for Thunderbolt devices.
• ... and a lot more!

Code

• We finished integrating Tor Browser 9.0 into Tails (#16356).

• Rafael Bonifaz and Sandy Acurio from the Centro de Autonomía Digital published some scripts to run a Mumble server and Mumble clients from Tails.

Documentation and website

• We improved our documentation on verifying Tails using OpenPGP. (#16175 and #15697)

• We improved a lot our manual upgrade documentation, which all users have to follow to upgrade to Tails 4.0:

  • We merged /upgrade and /doc/upgrade.

  • We wrote full scenarios to do manual upgrades from:

    • Windows
    • macOS
    • Linux

Hot topics on our help desk

1. A lot of people reported having issues installing Tails with Etcher on MacOS.

2. We got also numerous reports from people having trouble to import PGP keys with Seahorse.

3. And some users are facing a graphic issue on computers with two GPU caused by MAC spoofing running udevadm trigger.

Infrastructure

• We have published the technical design documentation that describes the setup of our translation platform.

• We upgraded the SMTP relay behind WhisperBack to a v3 Onion service.

• We made progress towards upgrading Chutney for our test suite (#16792).

Funding

• We launched our end-of-year donation campaign:

  • We blogged about why supporting Tails is more important than ever and our achievements in 2019.

  • We received a very generous anonymous donation of 300 Moneros (around 15 000€)!

Outreach

Past events

• Tails was presented in Thessaloniki during 2 days for radical technologies

• intrigeri attended the Mozilla Festival on October 26-27 in London (UK). We held a booth there, talked with lots of people including a number of Tails users, and ran a "Discover Tails and translate it into your own language" session.

• There were a Tails workshop and a talk about the last 10 years of Tails at the privacyweek in Vienna

On-going discussions

• We've started discussing how we will adapt to the fact Firefox will now be released every 4 weeks.

Press and testimonials

• 2019-10-24: ris announced the release of Tails 4.0 in Linux Weekly News.

• 2019-10-23: heise.de published a review of Tails 4.0

Translations

• We have issued a call for translations.

• We have published a documentation for translators who want to use our new web based translation platform.

All the website

• fr: 89% (5318) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy
• es: 51% (3067) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• de: 35% (2128) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy
• it: 31% (1837) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• fa: 28% (1694) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy
• pt: 23% (1364) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

• fr: 93% (1667) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
• es: 85% (1523) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• de: 64% (1139) strings translated, 16% strings fuzzy
• it: 60% (1071) strings translated, 18% strings fuzzy
• pt: 44% (793) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
• fa: 33% (598) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 794 831 times this month. This makes 25 640 boots a day on average.