Hi,
the report about Tails activity in March is online:
https://tails.boum.org/news/report_2017_03/
Spoiler alert: the "Reproducible Builds" section includes
amazing news.
Due to popular demand, an HTML version is attached, for your offline
reading pleasure :)
Cheers,
--
intrigeri
Tails - Tails report for March, 2017
Tails
The Amnesic Incognito Live System
news
Tails report for March, 2017
Tails report for March, 2017
Releases
Code
Infrastructure
Funding
Outreach
On-going discussions
Translation
Releases
Tails 2.11 was released on March 7 (minor release).
Tails 2.12 is scheduled for April 18.
The following changes were introduced in Tails 2.11:
If running on a 32-bit processor, notify the user that it won't
be able to start Tails 3.0 anymore. (#12193)
Notify I2P users that I2P will be removed in Tails
2.12. (#12271)
Fix CVE-2017-6074 (local root privilege escalation) by disabling
the dccp module. (#12280) Also disable kernel
modules for some other uncommon network protocols. (Part of
#6457)
Tor Browser: Don't show offline warning when opening the local
documentation of Tails. (#12269)
Fix rare issue causing automatic upgrades to not apply properly
(#8449 and #11839)
Install Linux 4.8.15 to prevent GNOME from freezing with Intel
GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics. (#12217)
Code
I2P to be removed
We are very sad to announce that Tails 2.11 will be the last version
to include I2P, an alternative anonymizing
network. But we will be happy to reintroduce I2P if we find
a volunteer to take care of maintaining it in Tails. If you are
a developer and care about I2P in Tails, that person could be you!
Come talk to us!
Reproducible builds
We had a very productive 3-days sprint. After many iterations we have
finally seen an ISO image build reproducibly on several machines!
This implied fixing a number of things, and submitting a number of
patches upstream.
The build environment variations we've tested include: build system
clock (last month, next month; could not test next year yet), number
of CPU cores, CPU brand and model, building in Vagrant or not.
For details, see the
full report
that was written after the sprint.
Porting Tails to Debian 9 (Stretch)
A bunch of Tails developers and technical writers had a very
productive sprint. The remaining work now feels tractable: aside of
the documentation update, only a few major regressions and adjustments
remain to be dealt with.
So, we are increasingly confident that we can make Tails 3.0 a solid
release, published according to schedule on June 13… but possibly
a little bit earlier or later, if it allows us to release at the same
time as Debian 9 (Stretch).
Two beta releases for Tails 3.0 were published
(3.0~beta2 on March 8,
3.0~beta3 on March 19). They introduce the
following changes:
Upgrade Linux to 4.9.0-2 (version 4.9.13-1).
Make it possible to start graphical applications in the Root Terminal.
Improve styling of the GNOME Shell window list.
Tails Greeter:
Make the "Formats" settings in Tails Greeter take effect (it was
introduced in Tails 3.0~alpha1 but has been broken since then).
Add keyboard shortcuts:
Alt key for accelerators in the main window
Ctrl+Shift+A for setting an administrator password
Ctrl+Shift+M for MAC spoofing settings
Ctrl+Shift+N for Tor network settings
Remove I2P.
Reintroduce the X11 guest utilities for VirtualBox (clipboard
sharing and shared folders should work again).
Upgrade X.Org server and the modesetting driver in hope it will fix
crashes when using some Intel graphics cards.
Automate the migration from KeePassX databases generated on
Tails 2.x to the format required by KeePassX 2.0.x.
Infrastructure
We upgraded some of our systems to Debian 9 (Stretch), in order to
help identify remaining issues before it becomes the new Debian
stable release.
All major browsers will now refuse to connect to our website, and to
any web service we host in the tails.boum.org namespace, unless
HTTPS is used with a valid certificate: they are now on the Google
Chrome 57 HSTS preload list, and all other major browsers build
their own list from this one.
We started researching our options for upgrading our server hardware.
We made some progress on deploying a web platform for translations
and an internal XMPP server.
We started a process to hire a new system administrator.
Funding
We've sent a proposal to OTF, that covers:
adding TrueCrypt support in GNOME;
adding a graphical interface for the Additional Packages
persistent feature;
a small fraction of our day-to-day operations budget.
Our budget until the end of March, 2018 was approved by the Tails
core contributors.
Outreach
Past events
On March 1st, Austin English presented Tails at the Austin (Texas) Linux Meetup.
Four of us attended the Tor developers meeting in Amsterdam. It was great!
See the first report
about it.
Two of us gave a training about Tails and digital security at
Mediapart. Apparently, everything went
fine: attendees where mostly interested and happy with it, and asked
a lot of questions, ranging from "How can I manage my passwords" to
"How much does it cost to compromise my laptop?".
Upcoming events
intrigeri will be giving a keynote at
CryptoRave (São Paulo, May 5-6).
On-going discussions
We had a contributors meeting on March 3 (minutes).
Translation
All the website
de: 56% (3189) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 50% words translated
fa: 40% (2265) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 44% words translated
fr: 82% (4670) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 81% words translated
it: 28% (1598) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy, 25% words translated
pt: 27% (1549) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 25% words translated
Total original words: 58396
Core pages of the website
de: 82% (1538) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 83% words translated
fa: 38% (708) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 39% words translated
fr: 99% (1845) strings translated, 0% strings fuzzy, 99% words translated
it: 79% (1486) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 79% words translated
pt: 49% (922) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 50% words translated
Total original words: 17057
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