Releases

• Tails 4.13 was released on November 17.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.13:

• Update Thunderbird from 68.12 to 78.4.2. Thunderbird 78 replaces the Enigmail extension with built-in support for OpenPGP encryption. If you used Enigmail before Tails 4.13, follow our instructions to migrate from Enigmail to Thunderbird 78.

• Add a button to restart Tails at the end of creating the Persistent Storage. (#16384)

• Only include translations for languages that are available in the Welcome Screen. This reduces the size of the download by 5%. (#17139)

• Make the root directory of the Persistent Storage only readable by the root user. (#7465)

• Users of the Dotfiles feature of the Persistent Storage can choose Places ▸ Dotfiles to open the /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked/dotfiles folder in the Files browser.

• Enable TCP timestamps. This might increase stability on slower Internet connections. (#17491)

Release management

A year ago, when we learned we had to switch to a 4-weeks release cycle to follow Mozilla's lead, we acknowledged that the need to streamline our release process, in order to make this part of our work more sustainable. In November, the Tails Release Managers team had a sprint focused on this very topic, during which we identified a great number of issues and fixed most of them! :)

For details, read the sprint report.

Code

• We had a meeting to prioritize & organize work on our next big things. We decided to first focus on:

  • Wayland blockers, that can be addressed incrementally.

  • Deal with deprecation of Tor Launcher (#17215)

  • Rewrite Persistent Storage GUI frontend (#17803

• We scheduled a sprint in January to bootstrap our work on the RIPE grant and on Wayland blockers.

• We re-bootstrapped our experiment on sharing our team's "front desk" workload.

• We started reorganizing our team meetings.

• We now require Debian 10 "Buster" or newer for running our test suite (#17842), and started to take benefit from this change.

• We automated a great part of the tests we do as part of release quality assurance.

Documentation and website

• Planned the deprecation of the Tails Verification extension.

• Documented how to use GMail in Thunderbird. (#17879)

• Explained why is a bad idea to use an old version of Tails in the FAQ. (#18001)

• Recommended doing backups at the end of our installation instructions. (#18000)

• Decided to remove /support/learn. (#17920)

• Updated our doc to Thunderbird 78 and wrote migration instructions. (#17147)

User experience

• Published improved consent documents for user research: (#16534)

  • Consent form
  • Research information sheet

• Cleaned our user research data for 2021/2022. (#17409)

Hot topics on our help desk

1. Touchpad and keyboard do not work in Asus computers
2. Some users lost their OpenPGP keys but could recover them from the backup file
3. Panda Wireless adaptors stopped working

Funding

• The first numbers that we could analyze for the donation campaign look very promising compared to the same period last year:

  • PayPal: 34% more donations, 28% more money
  • Bitcoin: 62% more donations
  • Monero: 205% more donations

• We programmed our biggest Twitter campaign ever: 34 tweets, 1 tweet every 2 days at most. Half of them are not direct calls to donate but rather build up on the new Home and About pages to talk about the main properties of Tails.

• We decided not to blog about the donation campaign for now because our team is seriously overworked. It doesn't seem to have impacted the campaign significantly. We might still blog about achievements and plans in December.

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

Outreach

Past events

• Privacy Week 2020: Tails.

• Tails was mentioned in another Privacy Week 2020 speech: How internet works

• Tails was presented (among other tools) to journalism students at Sciences Po Rennes (Rennes, France).

Translations

All the website

• de: 28% (1897) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
• es: 51% (3392) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• fa: 21% (1396) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• fr: 78% (5224) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• it: 28% (1879) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
• pt: 19% (1300) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

• de: 45% (970) strings translated, 23% strings fuzzy
• es: 86% (1844) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• fa: 19% (426) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy
• fr: 76% (1633) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy
• it: 50% (1075) strings translated, 21% strings fuzzy
• pt: 38% (822) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy

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

• ar: 7% (165) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• ca: 8% (174) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• id: 6% (138) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• pl: 7% (166) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• ru: 8% (182) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• sr_Latn: 5% (114) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
• tr: 8% (172) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• zh: 10% (222) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• zh_TW: 21% (460) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 947 384 times this month. This makes 31 579 boots a day on average.