Releases

Code

  • We published our plans for 2018.

  • We started improving the backend of the Additional Software persistent feature. We worked on:

    • Not blocking the opening of the desktop (#9059, Blueprint).
    • Making it work offline (#14570).

Documentation and website

  • Cody and sajolida started fixing issues identified in the expert review done by jaster on our installation instructions in August:

    • Solve all the smaller issues.
    • Create tickets for all remaining issues on Redmine. (#14548)
    • Make plans to restructure our support page in depth.
  • We wrote design documents for our installation instructions and verification extension (Tails Verification).

User experience

New download page

We completely redesigned our download page. This work was triggered by the rewrite of Tails Verification (our browser extension) into Web Extensions but the result improves the overall experience.

Tails Verification is also now available for Chrome.

UX work on VeraCrypt in GNOME

We designed the user experience for our work on the integration of VeraCrypt in GNOME.

  1. We analyzed the results of our online survey.

  2. We did some paper prototypes of the interactions and tested them with users.

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Printing to PDF with Tor Browser does not work anymore

Infrastructure

  • We have converted two sources of email sent by cron with Icinga 2 monitoring checks that are easier to track and fine-tune (#11598, #12455).

  • We have fixed a longstanding bug that made the UX of our CI system confusing when deleting a branch in Git (#15069).

  • We have set up a local email server on every Jenkins node that runs automated ISO tests, as a first step towards making our automatic Thunderbird tests more robust (#12277).

  • We have tuned our servers to get a little bit better performance out of our CI system (#15054).

  • We have extended the blueprint about upgrading the hardware for automated tests.

Outreach

Past events

  • 34c3: A fair number of Tails developers and contributors attended the 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34c3) in Leipzig. During this event, we set up a table to meet with interested parties- users, contributors, or anyone interested. We were able to reach both newcomers and long-time users of Tails, answer questions, help, exchange stickers, give away USB keys and t-shirts in exchange of donations, get feedback or just chat. It was, of course, also a great opportunity to meet people in person, discuss, work, and have fun both within the project and with friend projects.

Upcoming events

Translation

All the website

  • de: 54% (2846) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated
  • fa: 39% (2076) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 41% words translated
  • fr: 91% (4786) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 88% words translated
  • it: 36% (1919) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 32% words translated
  • pt: 23% (1216) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 19% words translated

Total original words: 56302

Core pages of the website

  • de: 76% (1454) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 77% words translated
  • fa: 33% (640) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
  • fr: 97% (1848) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 96% words translated
  • it: 71% (1342) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 71% words translated
  • pt: 41% (784) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 41% words translated

Total original words: 17235

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 637276 times this month. This makes 20557 boots a day on average.
  • 9215 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
  • 66 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.