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Tails 4.3 is out

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

New features

  • We included the trezor package, which provides a command line tool to use a Trezor hardware wallet for cryptocurrencies.

Changes and updates

  • Update Tor Browser to 9.0.5.

  • Update Thunderbird to 68.4.1.

  • Update Linux to 5.4.13. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.).

  • Update Tor to 0.4.2.6.

  • Update the VirtualBox Guest Additions to 6.1.2.

Fixed problems

  • Fix the progress bar and prevent closing the window while an upgrade is being applied. (#16603)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.3

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from 4.2 and 4.2.2 to 4.3.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can directly download Tails 4.3:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.4 is scheduled for March 10.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2020-02-11 Tags:
Tails report for January, 2020

Releases

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.2:

  • Improvements to automatic upgrades

    We worked on important improvements to the automatic upgrade feature, which is still one of your major pain points when using Tails:

    • Until now, if your version of Tails was several months old, you sometimes had to do 2 or more automatic upgrades in a row. For example, to upgrade from Tails 3.12 to Tails 3.16, you first had to upgrade to Tails 3.14.

      Starting with 4.2, direct automatic upgrades will be available from all prior versions to the latest version.

    • Until now, you could only do a limited number of automatic upgrades, after which you had to do a much more complicated "manual" upgrade.

      Starting with 4.2, you will only have to do a manual upgrade between major versions, for example to upgrade to Tails 5.0 in 2021.

    • We made automatic upgrades use less memory.

    • We optimized a bit the size of the download when doing automatic upgrades.

  • We included several command line tools used by SecureDrop users to analyze the metadata of leaked documents on computers that cannot use the Additional Software feature:

    • PDF Redact Tools to redact and strip metadata from text documents before publishing
    • Tesseract OCR to convert images containing text into a text document
    • FFmpeg to record and convert audio and video

  • Open ~/Persistent/keepassx.kdbx by default when starting KeePassX. If this database does not exist yet, stop pointing to it in the list of recent databases.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.2:

  • Update Tor Browser to 9.0.4.

    This fixes a critical vulnerability in the JavaScript JIT compiler of Firefox and Tor Browser.

    Mozilla is aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this vulnerability.

    This vulnerability only affects the standard security level of Tor Browser. The safer and safest security levels are not affected.

  • Avoid a 2-minutes delay when restarting after doing an automatic upgrade. (#17026)

Code

  • We fixed critical regressions that were introduced while improving automatic upgrades.

  • We started work on making the download of automatic upgrades more robust (#15875).

  • We fixed the long delay while rebooting after applying an automatic upgrade (#17026).

  • In order to make the development process a bit smoother:

    • We now use the tarball with all Tor Browser langpacks (#17400), instead of downloading a complete Tor Browser for every language.
    • Our build system is now able to cache the website build.

Documentation and website

  • Göktürk Yüksek improved the dd command in the expert installation scenario to display progress (status=progress) and sync on-the-fly (oflag=direct).

  • We fixed the display of the output of rsync when doing a backup of the persistent volume.

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. A lot of users are complaining about Seahorse failing to import public keys

  2. A few people reported graphic issues, mostly #16875, but also with Nvidia Turing

  3. Some users are facing issues (#17388, #17430, #17418) with some network adapter since 4.1.1

Infrastructure

  • We made progress on our migration to GitLab.

  • We resumed work on upgrading our CI hardware (#16960).

Funding

  • We added ThinkPenguin as a partner.

  • We teared down the donation campaign. We raised around 100k€ from 2 000 donations.

  • We were invited to submit a full proposal for the joint grant proposal with Tor and the Guardian Project to the DRL Internet Freedom program.

Translations

All the website

  • fr: 86% (5293) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy
  • es: 51% (3134) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • de: 34% (2143) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
  • it: 30% (1852) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 27% (1689) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 22% (1359) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

  • fr: 93% (1695) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • es: 90% (1636) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy
  • de: 64% (1168) strings translated, 16% strings fuzzy
  • it: 60% (1094) strings translated, 18% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 43% (792) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 32% (596) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 856 922 times this month. This makes 27 643 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

Posted 2020-02-11
Tails report for December, 2019

Releases

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.1:

Code

Documentation and website

User experience

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Users reported various issues related to GPU nvidia and radeon.

  2. Seahorse still cannot import GPG keys (#17183) as well as other issues like encrypts file using most recent key only and connect to keyserver.

  3. Mac - kernel panic (fixed, caused an emergency release), graphical distorsions (there's a workaround), and no boot.

Infrastructure

  • We discussed our needs and desires regarding our upcoming GitLab instance and eventually decided to hosting it at immerda.ch.

    Thanks immerda.ch for your support since so many years!

  • We taught our CI to reproducibly build automatic upgrades.

Funding

Outreach

Past events

On-going discussions

  • Our Release Managers have been discussing how to adapt to the Firefox 4-weeks release cycle.

Press and testimonials

Translations

All the website

  • fr: 88% (5418) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 86% words translated
  • es: 51% (3137) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 42% words translated
  • de: 46% (2832) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 41% words translated
  • fa: 32% (1982) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
  • it: 32% (1969) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 28% words translated
  • pt: 25% (1553) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 21% words translated

Total original words: 65286

Core pages of the website

  • fr: 96% (1705) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 96% words translated
  • es: 80% (1417) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 82% words translated
  • de: 71% (1252) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 74% words translated
  • it: 63% (1112) strings translated, 17% strings fuzzy, 65% words translated
  • pt: 45% (798) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated
  • fa: 34% (615) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated

Total original words: 16439

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 819 136 times this month. This makes 26 424 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

Posted 2020-01-21
Tails 4.2.2 is out

This release is an emergency release to fix a critical security vulnerability in Tor Browser.

Updates

  • Update Tor Browser to 9.0.4.

    This fixes a critical vulnerability in the JavaScript JIT compiler of Firefox and Tor Browser.

    Mozilla is aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this vulnerability.

    This vulnerability only affects the standard security level of Tor Browser. The safer and safest security levels are not affected.

Fixed problems

  • Avoid a 2-minutes delay when restarting after doing an automatic upgrade. (#17026)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.2.2

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from 4.2 to 4.2.2.

    Users of Tails 4.0, 4.1, and 4.1.1 have to upgrade to 4.2 first and then to 4.2.2.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can directly download Tails 4.2.2:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.3 is scheduled for February 11.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2020-01-14 Tags:
Tails 4.2 is out

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

Improvements to automatic upgrades

We worked on important improvements to the automatic upgrade feature, which is still one of your major pain points when using Tails:

  • Until now, if your version of Tails was several months old, you sometimes had to do 2 or more automatic upgrades in a row. For example, to upgrade from Tails 3.12 to Tails 3.16, you first had to upgrade to Tails 3.14.

    Starting with 4.2, direct automatic upgrades will be available from all prior versions to the latest version.

  • Until now, you could only do a limited number of automatic upgrades, after which you had to do a much more complicated "manual" upgrade.

    Starting with 4.2, you will only have to do a manual upgrade between major versions, for example to upgrade to Tails 5.0 in 2021.

  • We made automatic upgrades use less memory.

  • We optimized a bit the size of the download when doing automatic upgrades.

New features

  • We included several command line tools used by SecureDrop users to analyze the metadata of leaked documents on computers that cannot use the Additional Software feature:

    • PDF Redact Tools to redact and strip metadata from text documents before publishing
    • Tesseract OCR to convert images containing text into a text document
    • FFmpeg to record and convert audio and video

Changes and upgrades

  • Update Tor Browser to 9.0.3.

  • Update Thunderbird to 68.3.0.

  • Update Linux to 5.3.15.

Fixed problems

  • Open ~/Persistent/keepassx.kdbx by default when starting KeePassX. If this database does not exist yet, stop pointing to it in the list of recent databases.

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.2

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from 4.0, 4.1, and 4.1.1 to 4.2.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can directly download Tails 4.2:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.3 is scheduled for February 11.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2020-01-07 Tags:
Tails 4.1.1 is out

Fixed problems

This release fixes a problem when starting Tails 4.1 on some Mac computers.

If Tails 4.1 starts successfully on your computer, you do not have to upgrade to Tails 4.1.1.

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.1.1

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from 4.0 and 4.1 to 4.1.1.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can directly download Tails 4.1.1:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.2 is scheduled for January 7.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2019-12-17 Tags:
Celebrating 10 years of Tails!

In 2019, we are especially proud of celebrating with you the 10 years of Tails.

The first release of Tails, back then amnesia, was announced in 2009. Since then we released 98 versions of Tails, which were used more than 40 million times.

Here are some stories about how it all started and some vintage screenshots. But first of all, the birthday cake!

                      _____
                     |_|_|_|
                     | . . |
                     |_____|
                    ´       `
                    |       |
                    |  :-)  |
                   {}       {}
                   ||       ||
                  _||_______||_
             {}  {~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~}  {}
             ||  { ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ }  ||
           __||__{_____________}__||__
          {\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\}
       {} {         H a p p y        \} {}
       || {\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\} ||
     __||_{___________________________}_||__
    {\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\}
    {            B i r t h d a y            }
    {       ! ! !   T a i ls   ! ! !        }
    {/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/}
    {_______________________________________}

2009–2010: amnesia, T(A)ILS, and their ancestors

Today, Tails is based on Debian, Tor, and GNOME. We inherit from their work and try to contribute back in order to create a healthy ecosystem of reliable, secure, and usable tools.

When we started the amnesia project back in 2009, other projects before us paved the way to what is Tails today:

  • Knoppix, born in 2000 and still alive today, was the first popular live Linux distribution. Back then, it was a groundbreaking achievement to be able to start and use Linux without going through lengthy, very complex, and uncertain Linux install "parties". Knoppix was primarily designed for convenience and diagnosis.

  • ELE, born in 2005 and based on Damn Small Linux, Anonym.OS, born in 2006 and based on OpenBSD, and Incognito, born in 2007 and based on Gentoo, pushed the concept of live operating systems a bit further by focusing on security, online anonymity, and the use of Tor.

    Incognito was the first live operating system to include a full set of applications preconfigured to go through Tor (browser, email client, IRC client, etc.), offer a persistent Home directory, and even allow hosting onion services. Incognito was also the first live operating system to receive an official recognition from the Tor Project.

    The original author of Incognito, Pat Double, resigned in 2007 and anonym, who still works for Tails today, took over the maintenance.

  • On August 16 2009, intrigeri announced the first release of amnesia on the tor-talk mailing list.

  • In March 2010, Incognito was declared dead and amnesia its "spiritual successor". Some weeks later, amnesia would be renamed T(A)ILS, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, to act the fusion between amnesia and Incognito.

    We quickly realized that having parenthesis in our name looked very radical but was quite confusing and finally settled on Tails in 2011. Eight years later, we still see most people on the Internet write it TAILS though it's never been written in all caps on our website.

    Hey people, it's Tails not TAILS!

This is how amnesia 0.2 and our website looked like in 2009. The browser was Iceweasel with Tor Button and the Tor controller was TorK.

2011-2014: core features, Tails 1.0, and public recognition

Until Tails 1.0 (April 2014), we would develop most of the core features that make Tails today:

  • Tails Installer, forked from the Fedora Live USB Creator
  • Persistence
  • Tails Greeter, our welcome screen
  • Automatic upgades
  • MAC Spoofing
  • MAT (Metadata Anonymization Toolkit), which was developed by Julien Voisin as a Google Summer of Code with our help in 2011.

To support this intense development and the increased responsibility on our shoulders, we accepted our first grant, from the Swedish International Development Agency in 2011 and started paying for some of the development work.

In October 2012, Tails was started around 2 500 times a day, 10 times less than today.

In June 2013, Edward Snowden would reveal thousands of classified documents on the surveillance programs of the NSA. Tails got mentioned by famous technologists Bruce Schneier and Micah Lee as one of the tools that protect from the NSA surveillance.

In March 2014, we received our first award, the Access Innovation Prize for Endpoint Security. According to Access Now:

Tails embodies the successful collaboration of developers, trainers, security professionals towards tackling the spectrum of user needs -- from usability to security -- in high-risk environments.

The same month, we launched a logo contest. It was heartwarming to receive 36 very creative proposals. Here are some of the best ones:

In April 2014, Freedom of the Press Foundation launched the first crowdfunding campaign for Tails and revealed that Tails "has been critical to all of the main NSA journalists". Since then, Edward Snowden and journalists Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Micah Lee have repeatedly stated the importance of Tails for their work and supported us in many ways.

Snowden plugging an SD card in a laptop with a blue Tails USB stick Snowden showing NSA documents on Tails to Ewen MacAskill Images from Citizenfour by Laura Poitras, minutes 37 and 41.

A few weeks later, the release of Tails 1.0 got press coverage on The Verge, CNET, Boing Boing, and many others. In December, Der Spiegel published internal NSA slides that categorize Tails as "catastrophic impact" and "highest priority":

Tor, TrueCrypt, Tails are classified as 'Use Risk: Current Highest Priority Target Use' and 'Impact: Catastrophic (near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence)'

This is how Tails 1.0 looked like in 2014. It had a camouflage mode that looked like Windows XP and the Tor controller was Vidalia.

2015-2019 - Maturity, user experience, and automation

In May 2014, the UX team at NUMA Paris invited us to organize a usability testing session of Tails with journalists. We asked participants to do slightly complex tasks such as establishing an encrypted conversation with someone else using Pidgin. Reality hit us hard when all the journalists in the room encountered problems to either install, start, or connect Tails to Tor. We realized that, despite having laid down most of the core features in Tails 1.0, we still had a lot of work to do to make Tails easy to use by most people.

Since then, we focused our work on 3 aspects of the project that don't bring in so many new features but rather ensure its long term sustainability and growth: user experience, continuous integration, and project sustainability.

User experience

Since these first usability tests in 2014, we systematically relied on user-centered design practices to ensure that all the major changes that we do in Tails are making it easier to use. We conducted 10 sessions of usability tests, used paper prototypes, conducted quantitative surveys, and defined better our audience using personas.

Our 3 personas: Riou, Cris, and Kim

This usability work was key in all the work that we did since 2015 to make Tails easier to install:

Continuous integration

To cope with this rapid development and the many releases, we built a cutting edge continuous integration infrastructure:

  • Images of Tails are built automatically every time we develop a change for an upcoming release.
  • These images are tested automatically against a comprehensive list of usability and security scenarios.
  • All our images are reproducible, which allows security researchers to verify that the images distributed on our website have not been modified to introduce undisclosed security vulnerabilities.

The following video shows the test suite in action. On the left, it displays the scenario that is being tested, for example "symmetrically encrypting a message". On the right, it displays Tails being manipulated automatically according to the scenario.

This infrastructure increases the quality and reliability of our releases. It also makes it faster to publish emergency security releases when important vulnerabilities are fixed, for example in Firefox and Tor Browser.

Project sustainability

The combination of these efforts both on visible improvements and behind the scene had to go hand-in-hand with working on the sustainability of the project as an organization.

Since 2014:

  • The number of Tails users was multiplied by 2.4, increasing by 20% each year on average, reaching 25000 daily users on average in 2019. Our yearly budget was multiplied by a similar amount, to reach 240 000€ (estimated) in 2019.
  • We worked on foundational documents and processes to ensure a healthy community and project, such as our Code of Conduct, Social Contract, and Missions and values.

Sustainability cannot go without enjoying working together and having fun. We had memorable gatherings where we danced to the privacy-protecting sound of Rockwell — Somebody's Watching Me, Rap News — Whistleblower, Pete Seeger — The Onion Makes Us Strong (sic), The Police — Every Breath You Take, and Cyndi Lauper — Girls Just Want To Fix Bugs (sic), ate delicious vegan mafé from our beloved cooking team, and squashed an anarchist coup d'état.

In 2018 and 2019:

  • 66 different people contributed to our main source code, including coders, writers, and translators.
  • 22 different people were paid to work on Tails: a few of them full-time, most of them part-time or as consultants.
  • We attended 21 conferences in 10 different countries to stay connected with the communities of the Tails ecosystem: related Free Software projects, digital security trainers, and users.
  • 20 people, both workers and volunteers, attended our yearly gatherings.

Meanwhile, we counted no less than 21 projects, who also tried to build a live operating system for privacy and anonymity but are now abandoned.

A big thank you to everybody who either contributed to Tails or supported us:

  • All the people mentioned in this article one way or another
  • The people from other related Free Software projects that Tails relies upon
  • The thousands of activists, journalists, and human-rights defenders who are using Tails everyday
  • The digital security trainers and technologists who got excited about Tails in its early days and continue advocating for it today
  • Everybody who ever contributed to our source code, including the dozens of translators
  • Our partners, sponsors, and everybody who ever donated to Tails.

Thank you!

Posted 2019-12-15 Tags:
Tails report for November, 2019

Documentation and website

User experience

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Multiple users reported having trouble importing keys in Seahorse.

  2. We also had some reports about issues with Nvidia graphics cards.

  3. macOS users were affected by a bug in Etcher.

Infrastructure

  • We finished updating the list of members in our signing key revocation mechanism. (#16665)

    We lost 5 members and added 8 new members. So the resiliency of the scheme was increased overall. Thanks again to all the new members :)

Funding

  • Received a very generous donation of 6 bitcoins from PrivCoin.

  • We blogged about our plans for 2020.

  • Our fundraising campaign is doing pretty well.

    Compared to the same period in 2017 and 2018 (first 41 days):

                   2016       2017        2018       2019
               ----       ----        ----       ----
Amount         54 925 €   54 873 €    28 854 €   48 710 €    69%
Count            1124        717        1182       1084     -16%

    Final amount 76 055 € 101 644 € 74 480 €

    We are doing pretty good in terms of both amount and number of donations thought we're not set any record in either metrics.

    This is not due to the lack of counter this year because the first 2 weeks of this year were much worse than last year (when they was no counter yet) and weeks 3-5 were better (when we had a counter already).

    We cannot really explain these 16% less donations but it's not a big deal either.

Outreach

Past events

  • Damaris Mendoza presented Tails to 20 digital security trainers at the Encuentro Centroamericano de Seguridad Digital in Guatemala City.

On-going discussions

Translations

All the website

  • fr: 89% (5302) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy
  • es: 52% (3120) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • de: 36% (2139) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy
  • it: 31% (1854) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 28% (1690) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 22% (1361) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

  • fr: 93% (1697) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • es: 89% (1619) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy
  • de: 64% (1169) strings translated, 16% strings fuzzy
  • it: 60% (1095) strings translated, 18% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 43% (792) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 32% (596) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 767 400 times this month. This makes 25 580 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

Posted 2019-12-14
Our plans for 2020

On October 7, we launched our donation campaign by explaining why supporting Tails is more important than ever. On October 31, we summarized what we did in 2019 to make Tails easier to adopt by new users. Today we pass on to you our plans for 2020.

But first, we are pleased that the donation campaign has been pretty successful so far. We received around 50 000 € already, which is 69% more than last year. Still, these good results are due to some large donations and fewer people have been donating so far, 16% less than in 2018. We hope that after reading this post many of you will consider donating to Tails.

Less manual upgrades (January 2020)

Tails ships an automatic upgrade mechanism since 2013. But this mechanism only works for a limited amount of upgrades, after which a "manual" upgrade is needed.

These manual upgrades are a major pain point and we know that users often think their Tails is "broken" when automatic upgrades are not possible anymore.

In 2020, we will remove the need for most of these manual upgrades. And as automatic upgrades are also often too painful we will research ways to make them lighter and more robust.

New homepage and outreach material (April 2020)

Leveraging all the work that we have done in the past years to make Tails easier to install and use, in 2020, we will explain better what Tails is and why people should use it.

The text on our Home and About pages have not changed significantly since 2011. It is too verbose, too technical for most people, and not sufficiently engaging visually. Since then Tails has come a long way: the number of people using Tails has been multiplied by 16. Tails is no longer an experimental project for privacy experts but a well-established reference.

For the less technical part of our target audience, Tails is a technological object like nothing they have used before. Some of the core concepts of Tails are particularly innovative and hard to understand before using it:

  • Tails is a full operating system that is started from a USB stick.

  • Tails forgets everything by default.

To make sure that the new explanation of Tails makes sense to less tech-savvy users, we will use user-centered design techniques and work with professional graphic designers.

To reach critical communities of users and digital security trainers worldwide, we will also print outreach materials based on this new explanation, make it available in 4 languages, and send it to partner organizations worldwide.

If your organization works with journalists, activists, or human-defenders and is interested in receiving leaflets about Tails in 2020, please get in touch with us.

Secure Boot for better hardware support (July 2020)

In 2019, we worked on making it much easier for users to start Tails on Mac and as a consequence, their numbers more than doubled.

For years, Secure Boot has been among the main sources of issues reported to our help desk and prevented less tech-savvy users to adopt Tails.

Currently, many have to learn how to disable Secure Boot on their computer. This process is slightly different on every computer, is very complicated to learn on your own, and can lead to scary problems on Windows computers, for example BitLocker asking you for a recovery key.

Next year, we will add support for Secure Boot to Tails, making it easier to start on PC, for which 90% of people download Tails.

In 2020, we will keep the focus on improving Tails usability and outreaching to the people the most in need of digital security. If you also think that this is important, please take a moment to donate to Tails.

Posted 2019-12-09 Tags:
Tails 4.1 is out

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

Changes and upgrades

Fixed problems

  • Add back the Show Passphrase check box in Tails Greeter. (#17177)

  • Fix the display of the troubleshooting error when GDM fails to start. (#17200)

  • Add back the option to Open in Terminal when doing right-click (on Mac, click with two fingers) in a folder in the Files browser. (#17186)

  • Make the installation of additional software more reliable. (#17203)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.1

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from 4.0 to 4.1.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can directly download Tails 4.1:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.2 is scheduled for January 7.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2019-12-03 Tags:
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