Releases

Tails 4.25 was released on December 2021.

• We added a utility to make a backup of the Persistent Storage to another Tails USB stick.

  

• We added a new entry called Tails (External Hard Disk) to the GRUB boot loader.

  

Hiring a Project Manager

We published a job offer for a Project Manager and reviewed the first 50 applicants.

We were very impressed by the quality of the applicants and this gives us a lot of hope for the future of the project.

We selected 6 applicants that we will interview in January.

We are still reviewing new applications! Please pass the word :)

Automatic time synchronization

We wrote a prototype to automate the synchronization of the computer's clock before connecting to the Tor network. (#18717)

This will help people living in Eastern Europe and Asia connect to Tor bridges from Tails.

When users decide to connect to the Tor network automatically, Tails will connect to Fedora's captive portal detection without going through Tor to automatically correct the clock before connecting to Tor.

You can read more about our security design and current implementation plans or test the nightly build of our prototype.

Usability tests of first-time use

We did some usability tests of our installation instructions. We recruited 5 activists with interest in privacy technologies and observed them while they downloaded, installed, and started Tails for the first time. We hadn't tested this entire flow since 2015 and so many things happened since then.

• 3 of them had a pretty good installation experience of 10-20 minutes, download excluded. This process became much easier since 2015 thanks to the distribution of USB images instead of ISO images.

• 2 of them went a very bad route and took more than 1 hour to install Tails despite us rescuing them along the way. The good news is that we could help these people with only changes to the website.

You can see the detailed findings and the 19 GitLab issues that we created from these usability tests in this rainbow table or read a more detailed report. (#18074)

We also published our policy for the retention of the user research data gathered during such activities.

Metrics

• The Russian translation of our documentation about connecting to the Tor network was the top growing page on our website, according to Google Search.

  This happened while Russia started blocking Tor in December.

  We are very proud to have released the Russian translation of our entire user documentation in October and released the Tor Connection assistant in July to make it easier for people to circumvent this kind of censorship.

  We estimate that 4 times more people are using bridges from Tails since the release of Tor Connection, from the WhisperBack reports that we receive from users.

• Tails has been started more than 752 953 times this month. This makes 24 289 boots a day on average.