Here is a summary of what happened in Tails land in February, 2019.

This month has seen the highest number of Tails boots per day ever: 27% more than a year ago! This is motivating: it confirms that Tails is useful and relevant.

Releases

• Tails 3.12.1 was released on February 13. A critical vulnerability in the Skia library, used by Firefox and Chrome to render graphics, prompted this emergency release.

• Tails 3.13 is scheduled for March 19.

Code

• We have coordinated with the Tor Browser team wrt. the scope and timeline of upcoming big changes that will impact our work.

• We have implemented a potential fix and a mitigation measure for a longstanding bug: persistence.conf sometimes becomes empty. #10976, #16461

• We have prepared a number of updates for Tails 3.13:

  • Debian Stretch 9.8 (#16462), merged
  • Linux 4.19.20 (#16458), merged
  • Tor 0.3.5 (#16348), in progress

• We released new versions of the verification extension to fix usability and security issues:

  • Download page is not refreshed when verification extension is installed (##16078)
  • Verification extension should not be detectable as per Sjösten, and al. (#14787)
  • Updated to Forge 0.8.0.

Documentation and website

• We improved the known issue about clock going backwards (#15599).

User experience

• We published 3 personas that describe the target audience of Tails. Discover:

  • 

    Riou, The Censorship Evader

  • 

    Cris, The Information Gatherer

  • 

    Kim, The Surveilled at Home

• We contracted visual artists to work on a video to explain how to start Tails (and use the boot menu key). (#10649)

• We analyzed why some people are wiping their persistence while upgrading with USB images. (#16470)

• We investigated outgoing network connections initiated by Etcher and researched how to solve the privacy concerns we have with them. #16381

Hot topics on our help desk

1. Electrum users are complaining about the fact that it may need to be upgraded. (#16421)

2. Some people are affected by a regression with some Intel graphics cards (Braswell, Kaby Lake). #16447

3. Partially applied automatic upgrades still cause trouble to some users. #14754

Infrastructure

• We took one more step towards making our CI feedback loop shorter: we've ordered sample candidate hardware. Next step is to benchmark it. #15501
• The sysadmin team met a few times to update our plans for next year.
• We've helped upstream a solution to the dreaded ikiwiki PO vs. inlines bug. #6907
• As part of our effort to migrate to better maintained Puppet modules, we've switched to the puppetlabs/mysql module. #15513
• We fixed the remaining known regressions that were introduced where we migrated our website from Apache to nginx: #16220, #16259.
• We started discussing our strategy and timeline towards migrating to GitLab. #15878

Funding

• The 2 applications that we submitted to the NLnet NGI Zero PET project got rejected.

Outreach

Past events

• emmapeel and sajolida attended FOSDEM in Brussels.

Upcoming events

• Estrella Soria will organize a Tails workshop at the Cyborgrrrls technofeminist gathering on Thursday March 14 in MedialabMX, Ciudad de México.

• sajolida and emmapeel will be at the Internet Freedom Festival on April 1–5 in Valencia, Spain.

  sajolida will hold there a workshop on "Creating usable tools from day one with paper prototyping".

Press and testimonials

• schabenstolz explains how to hide a Tails USB stick inside a ThinkPad X230 and connect it to an invisible switch to start on either the hard disk or the internal Tails USB stick.

Translations

All the website

• de: 47% (2634) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 43% words translated
• es: 54% (3015) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated
• fa: 34% (1876) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 35% words translated
• fr: 93% (5176) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 93% words translated
• it: 35% (1939) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 30% words translated
• pt: 27% (1516) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 23% words translated

Total original words: 59517

Core pages of the website

• de: 71% (1248) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 73% words translated
• es: 80% (1412) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 81% words translated
• fa: 34% (615) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
• fr: 98% (1745) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 99% words translated
• it: 63% (1107) strings translated, 17% strings fuzzy, 65% words translated
• pt: 45% (794) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated

Total original words: 16467

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 725 034 times this month. This makes 25 894 boots a day on average, which is an all time record :)
• 10 065 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of a Tails USB image or ISO from our website.
• 71 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.