1. Releases
  2. Code
  3. Documentation and website
  4. User experience
  5. Hot topics on our help desk
  6. Outreach
  7. On-going discussions
  8. Translations
  9. Metrics

This month we have published our plans for 2021, make sure to check them if you are interested on the next steps for Tails.

This is the first time ever that there's more than a million Tails boots in a single month!

Releases

Tails 4.15 was released on January 26:

  • Fix support for the Ledger hardware wallets in Electrum. (#18080)
  • Fix sharing mobile data, also called USB tethering, on iOS 14 or later. (#18097)
  • Clarify the error message when starting from a USB stick that is too small. (#18073)

Tails 4.15.1 was released on January 28 (emergency release):

This emergency release fixed a major security vulnerability in sudo, CVE-2021-3156, that allowed normal users to gain root privileges.

Tails 4.16 is scheduled for February 23.

Code

  • #18123: We started implementing changes to make the onion-grater more robust. Onion-grater is a tor controller filter that makes it possible for us to write fine-grained rules about what a particular application can do with tor. The controller allows changing almost everything about how tor runs, so we need to be careful about letting applications access it. For the curious: the solution involves network namespaces.

  • This work is also leading to fix other issues, because until now onion-grater was unable to handle lost connections to the tor controller, as in #11535 where tor bridge mode fails when using Unsafe Browser to get bridges, or #16993 where the circuit view is broken on the Tor Browser after reconnecting to the tor network.

  • We started work to fix the keyboard selection that is broken with some languages.

Documentation and website

User experience

We have been doing usability testing for our future work on rewriting the Persistent Storage into Python.

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Users still have problems importing GPG keys.

  2. Users have reported some problems doing backups. We are happy that more users are doing backups, although we are not sure still of what is happening. See here for more information, and please comment if you had problems while doing backups as well.

  3. Some users get a weird 'initramfs no system found' error, and cannot boot with USB sticks configured as fixed disks. We thought this was not a common problem anymore, but apparently this is still happening with many USB sticks. Hopefully our new documentation about starting Tails from an external hard disk will help them.

Outreach

  • We have been talking about outsourcing Tails merchandising as we are not doing any merchandising lately because of the effort, but many users would like to support Tails in this way. More information at #18141.

On-going discussions

Translations

We have advanced on the integration of the website with the translation platform. Now the staging website gets built daily, with suggestions that will break the build being skipped, and we also have automated tests that help us spot when the translations break the website.

All the website

  • de: 27% (1864) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
  • es: 52% (3569) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 20% (1377) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy
  • fr: 79% (5400) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • it: 31% (2167) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 18% (1286) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

  • de: 45% (942) strings translated, 23% strings fuzzy
  • es: 89% (1880) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 19% (417) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy
  • fr: 79% (1668) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy
  • it: 59% (1242) strings translated, 18% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 39% (831) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy

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

  • ar: 7% (164) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • ca: 7% (165) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • id: 6% (135) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • pl: 7% (167) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • ru: 8% (179) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • sr_Latn: 5% (111) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • tr: 8% (176) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • zh: 11% (236) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • zh_TW: 22% (466) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 1,006,718 times this month. This makes 32,400 boots a day on average.

This is the first time ever that there's more than a million Tails boots in a single month.

How do we know this?