Releases

• Tails 3.4 was released on January 9 (bugfix release to mitigate Meltdown and Spectre).

• Tails 3.5 was released on January 23 (bugfix release).

• Tails 3.6 is scheduled for March 13.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 3.5:

• Tor redesigned Tor Launcher, the application to configure a Tor bridge or a local proxy.

• Fix printing to a PDF in Tor Browser. (#13403 and #15024)

• Fix the opening of the Applications menu when the time synchronization changed the clock in the past. (#14250)

• Fix the opening of the documentation included in Tails for many non-English languages. (#15160)

• Fix translations of the time synchronization and "Tor is ready" notifications. (#13437)

• Remove the code to migrate from Claws Mail that was preventing Thunderbird to start in some cases. (#12734)

User experience

Interviews of Tails users

We published 4 new interviews:

• 2 from people attending 34C4: Daan and Charles.

• 4 from journalists from Latin America: Joana and Orlando and Claudia and Felix.

Additional Software

We designed the interactions and interfaces for people to install additional software every time Tails is started.

Like for our work on VeraCrypt in December, we did that through paper prototyping and formative testing with users in Berlin.

Here are the most visible parts of this upcoming feature.

When installing a Debian package:

When starting Tails with some additional packages configured:

Additional Software feature in the persistent storage configuration:

Example list of additional software:

Hot topics on our help desk

1. Electrum users were very stressed about vulnerability found in Electrum in January. Tails is not affected as our firewall blocks the connections required to exploit this vulnerability. Still, we will update Electrum in Tails 3.6.

2. Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities made our users restless.

3. Tails Installer breaks in locales other than the default was a hard one, although on the other side we see again that many people use Tails in another language than English.

4. Nvidia Maxwell and Pascal graphic cards are still giving problems in Tails 3.5.

5. As every time we update the Tails signing key, many users got scared by the gpg messages received during OpenGPG ISO verification, but there are several tickets open about this #14711, #13634, #14977.

Strategic planning

We published notes on strategic planning sessions that we had in August to organize future discussions.

Infrastructure

• We made plans to finish migrating all our download mirrors to HTTPS.

• We updated almost all the Puppet modules we use. (#15154)

• We started working on migrating our infrastructure to Puppet 4. (#11834)

Funding

• We closed our donation campaign.

• We added I2P in our list of sponsors. Thank you I2P for your generous donation!

Outreach

Past events

Upcoming events

• Tails will be presented at the Festival des Libertés Numériques in different cities of Brittany, France, from February 10 to 25.

• emmapeel and sajolida will be at the Internet Freedom Festival, in Valencia from March 5 to 9.

• jvoisin will give a talk about Tails at the Journées FedeRez in Paris on March 10.

• intrigeri will be at the Tor Meeting in Rome from March 11 to 15.

On-going discussions

• Restructuring our support page

Translations

All the website

• de: 52% (2838) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 46% words translated
• fa: 38% (2074) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 40% words translated
• fr: 91% (4943) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 89% words translated
• it: 35% (1914) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 31% words translated
• pt: 22% (1212) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 19% words translated

Total original words: 57571

Core pages of the website

• de: 76% (1447) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 76% words translated
• fa: 33% (638) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
• fr: 98% (1873) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 99% words translated
• it: 70% (1336) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 70% words translated
• pt: 41% (779) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 41% words translated

Total original words: 17290

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 671878 times this month. This makes 21673 boots a day on average.
• 11977 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
• 107 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.