Releases Tails 2.7 was released on November 15 (minor release). Tails 2.7.1 was released on November 30 (minor release). Tails 2.9 is scheduled for December 13. The following changes were introduced in Tails 2.7: Fix multi-architecture support in Synaptic. This should fix broken installations of additional packages from Synaptic. (#11820) Set default spell checking language of Icedove to English instead of French. (#11037) Code Tails based on Debian 9 (Stretch) We made lots of progress on porting Tails to Debian 9 (Stretch). This work culminated with the release of Tails 3.0~alpha1. Merged the devel Git branch, and upgraded to a current snapshot of the Debian archive. Switched userspace to 64-bit (x86_64). By running our manual test suite on Stretch-based ISO images and testing our entire documentation, we identified a few regressions and documentation that needs updating. GNOME with its default black theme Fixed a long-standing issue with the firewall not being set up during early boot. Fixed the Greeter not switching to the Desktop VT upon login, and not displaying the More Options window properly. Test suite: Fixed a bug in the debugging code. Ported great numbers of test cases to Stretch, including the persistence, Tor enforcement, encryption, Evince and MAC spoofing ones. Verified that tails-security-check's CA pinning is repaired. Verified that MAC address spoofing works in various cases, including Wi-Fi connections and existing persistent network connections created on Tails 2.x. Switch to using the aufs kernel module from Debian. Made progress on porting to GnuPG v2: #11905, #11948. Removed ekeyd and obsolete udev rules. Fixed handling of /etc/hosts. Fixed issues in the revamped greeter to have it included in next Jessie alpha ISO. A testing ISO is available. Among others, last changes include: fix on-the-fly translation #11947 #11957 update user visible strings #11438 integrate latest icons #11472 Reproducible ISO build We had an initial sprint about reproducible builds. We are very happy with the progress we've made: the tree that becomes filesystem.squashfs is now almost fully reproducible; so is also the tree that is the basis for automatic upgrades. Along the way, we've contributed a number of patches to Debian and upstream projects. Make our PO files update reproducibly, by not updating them unless something other than POT-Creation-Date has changed. live-build: Use xorriso, that honors the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH variable, to build the ISO filesystem reproducibly. Expose the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH variable when running scripts inside the chroot. Clamp mtimes to SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the chroot and binary filesystems. Use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to populate /.disk/info timestamp. Use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH when templating syslinux templates. Made mksquashfs honor SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for the filesystem creation date, and had it clamp mtimes to SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Incremental upgrade kits: Made aufs white-outs reproducible. Made aufs pseudo-links permanent, so that they are reproducible. Passed --sort=name --clamp-mtime --mtime=@$SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to tar. Made our web site build reproducibly… and then discovered more bits that are not generated in a deterministic way, which lead us to discover that our cleanall build option did not clean as well as it should (fix). Eliminated various causes for non-determinism, such as caches and other generated files. On the infrastructure side of things: Vagrant boxes management: we came up with a new design that will be reflected on the blueprint shortly. Experimented with using our Vagrant + libvirt build system on one of our Jenkins ISO builders, and started work towards migrating them all. Documentation and website Explain why it is impossible to connect to GMail from Icedove. spriver updated our documentation on shutdown and OpenPGP Applet to 2.0. Chris Lamb fixed a bunch of typos. User experience Infrastructure The deployment of our mechanism for the distribution and activation of the revocation certificate of the Tails signing key has progressed a lot and it is now operational. Thanks to everybody who accepted being part of this! We finished deploying our new infrastructure of download mirrors which allows for more mirrors, easier maintenance, and more flexibility in the future. Our test suite covers 213 scenarios, 4 more that in October. Funding We continued our donation campaign and wrote about what we do with our money and our plans for the coming years. Our grant proposal for NLnet on porting Tails to Debian Stretch was rejected. Our grant proposal for ISC Project on a translation platform for our website was rejected. Outreach Cristina Carnevali presented Tails at Linux Day 2016 in Bologna, Italy. Tails was presented in the security track of the Iberian hackmeeting in Firestone, Donostia, Basque Country. gagz presented Tails at Capitole du libre 2016, Toulouse, France. Translation All the website: de: 57% (2880) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 51% words translated fa: 46% (2344) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 52% words translated fr: 79% (3979) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 78% words translated it: 17% (885) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 18% words translated pt: 31% (1593) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 29% words translated Total original words: 50832 Core pages of the website: de: 85% (1569) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 85% words translated fa: 39% (724) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 40% words translated fr: 90% (1657) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 91% words translated it: 47% (871) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 53% words translated pt: 51% (947) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 52% words translated Total original words: 16995 Metrics Tails has been started more than 613099 times this month. This makes 20437 boots a day on average. It's the first time we're over 20000 boots a day! 14634 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website. 110 bug reports were received through WhisperBack. Continue reading...
