- news
- Tails report for August, 2019
In August, we celebrated the 10 years birthday of the first public announcement of amnesia, the project which would eventually give birth to Tails after the merger with Incognito 🎂 :)
This led Edward Snowden to write this
testimonial:
“In 2013, when a small team of journalists and I went head to head
against @NSAGov to reveal the secret system of global mass
surveillance, we used @Tails_Live to communicate—to reduce the risk
of basic but deadly mistakes.
The NSA only learned of our plan when it hit the news.”
Releases
Tails 4.0~beta1 was released on August 7. This is the first beta for the upcoming version of Tails based on Debian 10 (Buster).
Many thanks to everyone who tried it and gave us feedback!
Tails 3.16 and 4.0~beta2 are scheduled for September 3.
Code
Preparations for Tails 4.0, based on Debian 10 "Buster"
Test suite improvements
New automated tests
We made good progress on persisting a seed for the Pseudorandom number generator across boots (#11897). There's now a good chance that this work is included in a Tails release by the end of the year.
We completed the first iteration of our effort to move the source code for our custom software to our main Git repository: the Greeter was migrated. This will avoid quite some busywork, make it easier to contribute to the affected code bases, and increase the value of our reproducible builds, by removing some binary blobs from our set of de facto trusted inputs.
Documentation and website
We finished updating all of our documentation to Tails based on Debian 10 (Buster). (#16282)
We improved the troubleshooting section when Tails doesn't start on Mac. (#15127)
User experience
- We reworked in depth our plans to improve the user experience of the network connection (configuration and startup).
Infrastructure
We upgraded to Gitolite v3.
We fixed a number of bugs in our web translation platform, thanks to feedback from early adopters. It should soon be officially ready for production usage.
We spent lots of time fighting a DDoS against our Redmine. Not our idea of fun :(
We scheduled the upgrade of our Jenkins (#10068).
Funding
- We're working on a joint grant proposal with Tor and the Guardian Project.
Outreach
Past events
- carlosm2 organized a testing of Tails 4.0~beta1 at the Rancho Electrónico (Ciudad de Mexico) on Saturday August 17.
Upcoming events
Press and testimonials
- 2019-08-04: In Attorney for Daniel Hale blasts indictment for leaking classified drone documents, David Gilmour from The Daily Dot explains that the indictment of Daniel Hale for the leaks of the Drone Papers focuses his use of anonymity tools like Tails and Tor. According to Hale's attorneys Jesselyn Radack “These cases are criminalizing both whistleblowing and journalistic best practices like using encryption and protecting source anonymity”.
Translations
All the website
- de: 41% (2301) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 38% words translated
- es: 52% (2896) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 44% words translated
- fa: 31% (1780) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 34% words translated
- fr: 90% (5052) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 89% words translated
- it: 33% (1849) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 29% words translated
- pt: 25% (1436) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 22% words translated
Total original words: 58995
Core pages of the website
- de: 69% (1227) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 71% words translated
- es: 79% (1404) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 81% words translated
- fa: 34% (607) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 32% words translated
- fr: 97% (1733) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 97% words translated
- it: 61% (1094) strings translated, 17% strings fuzzy, 64% words translated
- pt: 44% (791) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 47% words translated
Total original words: 16629
Metrics
- Tails has been started more than 741 964 times this month. This makes 23 934 boots a day on average.