Releases Tails 3.0 was released on June 13 (major release). Tails 3.1 is scheduled for August 8. Tails 3.0 is the first version of Tails based on Debian 9 (Stretch). It brings a completely new startup and shutdown experience, a lot of polishing to the desktop, security improvements in depth, and major upgrades to a lot of the included software. We cannot list all the improvements it brings here (see the announcement), but let's still highlight a few major changes: Tails Greeter, the application to configure Tails at startup, has been completely redesigned for ease of use. The shutdown experience has also been redesigned in order to be more reliable and more discrete. Tails 3.0 works on 64-bit computers only and not on 32-bit computers anymore. Code Thanks to multiprocess Firefox, we started working on sandboxing Tor Browser's content renderer processes more strictly with AppArmor. We now have a working draft and are waiting for our pull request to be merged upstream. We started fixing regressions introduced in Tails 3.0, such as SSH_AUTH_SOCK occasionally not being set in GNOME Terminal and Tails Installer rejects working USB drives, pretending they're not removable. Our Help Desk and Foundation Team met and prioritized the remaining ones from a user-centric point of view. Reproducible Builds We are still working on making Tails ISO images build reproducibly. We've seen some images build in such a deterministic manner in March and even during a testing session. However, in some build environments it does not work reliably yet and some new issues have manifested themselves which need to be fixed until we can claim that our ISO images are really reproducible, such as Comment changes in POT files make ISO non reproducible. Besides, we need to draw a line wrt. what kind of build environment variations we want to support. Furthermore, we are still working on documenting the new release process and verification options for our users (#12616, #12629, #12630). User experience We discussed strategies to porting our Download and Verify extension for Firefox to Web Extensions, a requirement for the upcoming Firefox 57 (November 14), as this will affect the design of our download instructions. We finished the redesign of Tails Installer to get rid of the initial splash screen. (#8859) We installed a prototype of Piwik, a free web analytics platform, to evaluate how well it would work against our privacy constraints and metrics needs. We agreed on increasing the size of the system partition from 2.5 to 4 GiB minimum starting from Tails 3.2 (October 3) to allow for more automatic upgrades before a manual upgrade is needed. (#12705) Infrastructure Improving communication & transparency wrt. our core teams' priorities We have set up some infrastructure bits so that all contributors have more visibility and power over our core teams's priorities. HTTPS mirror pool We've switched our mirror pool to mirrors serving files over HTTPS only (#12837). Our round-robin fallback DNS pool is still serving files over HTTP, and we are currently thinking about how to switch those to HTTPS too (#12833). Reproducible builds Remaining issues on our CI infrastructure include: Retrieving ISO build artifacts sometimes fails on Jenkins /var/lib/libvirt/images sometimes gets filled on isobuilders, take 2 Not enough space in /var/lib/jenkins on isobuilders reproducibly_build_Tails_ISO_* Jenkins jobs are buggy when building from a tag Sysadmin We kept our systems up and running, which was not always easy since we've deployed our updated infrastructure for reproducible builds before upgrading our capacity accordingly, not mentioning a kernel regression caused by the initial Stack Clash fix that broke our CI. We deployed some work done by groente, who is in the process of joining our sysadmin team. tails-support mailing list We closed the tails-support@boum.org mailing list. Funding We've created a page listing our partners, previous and current grants, private companies and individuals who help keep Tails alive by supporting us financially. Do you want to partner with us too? We are making good progress on our proposal with OTF, and we hope we'll be able to share great news soon We kept working on migrating our European fiscal sponsor from Zwiebelfreunde to CCT, the Center for the Cultivation of Technology. We have bootstrapped a process to do our budget forecasting for next year. Outreach Past events Tails was presented at Pas Sage en Seine Festival, in Choisy-Le-Roi, France. Tails was presented (among other tools) in an independent journalists event in Rennes, France. Tails 3.0 was presented at the annual festivities of the EKH in Vienna, Austria. Upcoming events Tails contributors will attend DebConf17, the annual conference for Debian contributors and users interested in improving Debian. A Tails contributor proposed a talk about Tails for the BalCCon2k17 (Balkan Computer Congress). Press and testimonials The Tails 3.0 release was abundantly covered on the web. Translation All programs ar: 47 translated messages, 9 fuzzy translations, 6 untranslated messages. az: 47 translated messages, 9 fuzzy translations, 6 untranslated messages. bg: 62 translated messages. ca: 62 translated messages. cs: 54 translated messages, 6 fuzzy translations, 2 untranslated messages. cy: 44 translated messages, 11 fuzzy translations, 7 untranslated messages. da: 62 translated messages. de: 62 translated messages. el: 62 translated messages. en_GB: 62 translated messages. es: 62 translated messages. es_AR: 62 translated messages. fa: 62 translated messages. fi: 62 translated messages. fr: 62 translated messages. fr_CA: 62 translated messages. he: 54 translated messages, 6 fuzzy translations, 2 untranslated messages. hr_HR: 62 translated messages. hu: 62 translated messages. id: 62 translated messages. is: 62 translated messages. it: 62 translated messages. ja: 62 translated messages. km: 45 translated messages, 11 fuzzy translations, 6 untranslated messages. ko: 62 translated messages. lv: 62 translated messages. nb: 62 translated messages. nl: 62 translated messages. nn: 62 translated messages. pl: 62 translated messages. pt: 62 translated messages. pt_BR: 62 translated messages. ro: 62 translated messages. ru: 62 translated messages. sk: 54 translated messages, 6 fuzzy translations, 2 untranslated messages. sk_SK: 62 translated messages. sl_SI: 47 translated messages, 9 fuzzy translations, 6 untranslated messages. sq: 62 translated messages. sr: 54 translated messages, 6 fuzzy translations, 2 untranslated messages. sv: 62 translated messages. tr: 62 translated messages. uk: 62 translated messages. vi: 62 translated messages. zh: 0 translated messages, 62 untranslated messages. zh_CN: 62 translated messages. zh_HK: 62 translated messages. zh_TW: 62 translated messages. All the website de: 57% (2863) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 51% words translated fa: 43% (2162) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 46% words translated fr: 89% (4428) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 87% words translated it: 31% (1547) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 27% words translated pt: 26% (1335) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 23% words translated Total original words: 52933 Core pages of the website de: 78% (1492) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 79% words translated fa: 36% (690) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 38% words translated fr: 98% (1869) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 98% words translated it: 75% (1434) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 76% words translated pt: 46% (886) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated Total original words: 17298 Metrics Tails has been started more than 695 672 times this month. This makes 23 189 boots a day on average. 15 508 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of the Tails ISO from our website. 215 bug reports were received through WhisperBack. Continue reading...
