Highlights

Here's a glimpse at what happened in Tails in September and October.

Analyzing results of usability tests

We analyzed the results of the usability tests we did in São Paulo:

Then we prioritized the issues identified there and planned to fix a bunch of them in the next few months.

New features

Our developers brought 3 major new features to beta quality:

  • New Persistent Storage, completely redesigned and vastly more usable

  • Wayland and better Unsafe Browser, for better security in depth and usability

  • QR code scanning for Tor bridges

We will only release these features officially in Tails 5.8 (December 2022), but you can try them already in Tails 5.8~beta1!

Donation campaign

We launched our end-of-year donation campaign.

Donations from passionate people like you are our most valuable source of funding because they guarantee our independence. We are a very small nonprofit and our yearly budget is ridiculously small compared to the value of Tails.

Donate now to fight surveillance and censorship!

Releases

Tails 5.5 was released on October 17, including:

  • Update Thunderbird to 102.3.0.

    Thunderbird 102 is a major update with many changes to the navigation, folder icons, and address book.

    Thunderbird 102 also includes important usability improvements to the OpenPGP feature. When composing an email, you can now see whether it will be encrypted or not. If encryption is impossible, a key assistant helps you solve key issues.

    Thunderbird composer window with encryption turned on and notification about a missing key and how to resolve the issue.

  • Always ask to configure a screen locking password when pressing Ctrl+L and no administration pasword was set. (#19090)

Tails 5.6 was released on October 25.

Metrics

Tails has been started more than 698 160 times in September, and 736 378 times in October. This makes 23 517 boots a day on average.