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Tails report for October, 2020

Releases

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.12:

  • Add a button to cancel an automated upgrade while downloading. (#17310)

  • Fix several internationalization issues in Electrum, Tails Installer, and Tails Upgrader. (#17958, #17758, and #17961)

  • Anonymize URLs in the technical details provided by WhisperBack. (#17147)

Code

  • Good progress on the upgrade to Thunderbird 78 (#17148, #17147)

  • Worked together with our Help Desk to improve our collaboration and focus on issues that will make a difference for many Tails users.

  • Resumed work on automating our manual release quality assurance.

  • Re-enabled TCP timestamps (#17491)

  • Added buttons to restart Tails at the end of creating the Persistent Storage (#16384)

  • Dropped obsolete code for read-only persistence (#17972)

  • Fixed tails-installer failing to operate in Turkish (#17576)

  • Anti-Test for ICMP dropping on tor_enforcement fails (#17848)

  • Document --keep-snapshots in our test doc (#17802)

  • Avoid mirrors and rsync.lizard running out of disk space during the release process when upgrades to a beta/RC are present (#17944)

  • Migrate deb.tails.boum.org APT source to v3 onion (#17937)

  • Regression with Intel Corporation [8086:22b0] and [8086:22b1] GPU since 4.9 (#17953)

  • Evaluate Debian packages maintenance setup (#17765)

  • Tor Browser displays an "Update Failed" pop-up (#17159)

  • All branches FTBFS since Thunderbird 78 reached the Buster security repo (#17962)

  • Move custom software to our main Git repository (#7036)

  • Move WhisperBack source to our main Git repository (#16936)

Hot topics on our help desk

  • A lot of people reached the helpdesk at the start of the month worried about JavaScript not being disabled when Tor Browser is in safest mode: NoScript is doing that job now, as intended. (#17963)

  • Keyboard and touchpad are not working anymore on some Acer and Asus laptops. (#17955)

  • Tails cannot start with some new Intel cards. (#17953)

  • Tails Installer does not allow upgrade in languages that have a translation for the 'Clone the current Tails' string. (#17982)

Infrastructure

Funding

Grants

  • Our application to RIPE NCC on improving Tails for censorship circumvention was approved.

  • Our applications to Prototype Fund in March and Code Lutins were rejected.

Donation process

  • We analyzed the results of the A/B testing on the new display of "one- time" and "monthly".

    The new version leads to more donation attempts AND less cancellations in the attempt. The new version is live on the website for everybody now.

Donation campaign

  • We launched the donation campaign!

  • We started a database of problems reported by donors, as a way of gathering data whenever we will want to improve on the most pressing issues.

  • The only metrics that we can gather right now is donations in cryptocurrencies.

    So far we've had +62% donations in Bitcoin (266, 6.9k€) and +205% donations in Monero (156, 2.2k€).

Translations

  • We improved the staging website build process.

  • We changed the maintainers email contact from tails-translations@boum.org to tails-weblate@boum.org, to prevent confusion on matters related to translations. (#17734

All the website

  • fr: 78% (5159) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy
  • es: 49% (3300) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • de: 28% (1899) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
  • it: 28% (1863) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 21% (1396) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 19% (1299) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

  • es: 83% (1791) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • fr: 75% (1603) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
  • it: 49% (1059) strings translated, 21% strings fuzzy
  • de: 45% (972) strings translated, 23% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 38% (821) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 19% (425) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website for languages not activated on the website yet

  • zh_TW: 21% (461) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
  • zh: 10% (222) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • ru: 8% (181) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • ca: 8% (174) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • tr: 7% (171) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • ar: 7% (164) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • pl: 7% (165) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • id: 6% (139) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
  • sr_Latn: 5% (114) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 947 750 times this month. This makes 30 572 boots a day on average.