Hi,
Here is a summary of what happened in Tails land in February, 2019.
Online version with additional links:
https://tails.boum.org/news/report_2019_02/
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.
- We have prepared a number of updates for Tails 3.13:
- Debian Stretch 9.8, merged
- Linux 4.19.20, merged
- Tor 0.3.5, 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.
- Verification extension should not be detectable as per Sjösten, and
al.
- Updated to Forge 0.8.0.
Documentation and website
=========================
- We improved the known issue about clock going backwards.
User experience
===============
- We published 3 personas that describe the target audience of
Tails:
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/personas/
- We contracted visual artists to work on a video to explain how to start Tails
(and use the boot menu key).
- We analyzed why some people are wiping their persistence while
upgrading with USB images.
- We investigated outgoing network connections initiated by
Etcher and researched how to solve the privacy concerns
we have with them.
Hot topics on our help desk
===========================
1. Electrum users are complaining about the fact that it may need to be upgraded.
2. Some people are affected by a regression with some Intel graphics
cards (Braswell, Kaby Lake).
3. Partially applied automatic upgrades still cause trouble to some users.
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.
- 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.
- As part of our effort to migrate to better maintained Puppet modules,
we've switched to the puppetlabs/mysql module.
- We fixed the remaining known regressions that were introduced where we
migrated our website from _Apache_ to _nginx_.
- We started discussing our strategy and timeline towards migrating to
GitLab.
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:
https://twitter.com/tecnochamana/status/1103659283449819137
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:
https://platform.internetfreedomfestival.org/en/IFF2019/public/schedule/custom/975
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:
https://steempeak.com/blog/@schabenstolz/a-hidden-usb-stick-in-the-laptop-or-how-i-installed-tails-os-internally
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.
(How do we know this?
https://tails.boum.org/support/faq/#boot_statistics)
Cheers,
--
intrigeri
