https://tails.boum.org/news/report_2020_01/
Releases
========
- Tails 4.2 was released on January 7.
- Tails 4.2.2 was released on January 14 (emergency release).
- Tails 4.3 is scheduled for February 11.
The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.2:
- Improvements to automatic upgrades
We worked on important improvements to the automatic upgrade feature,
which is still one of your major pain points when using Tails:
- Until now, if your version of Tails was several months old, you
sometimes had to do 2 or more automatic upgrades in a row. For
example, to upgrade from Tails 3.12 to Tails 3.16, you first had to
upgrade to Tails 3.14.
Starting with 4.2, direct automatic upgrades will be available from
all prior versions to the latest version.
- Until now, you could only do a limited number of automatic upgrades,
after which you had to do a much more complicated "manual" upgrade.
https://tails.boum.org/doc/upgrade/#manual
Starting with 4.2, you will only have to do a manual upgrade between
major versions, for example to upgrade to Tails 5.0 in 2021.
- We made automatic upgrades use less memory.
- We optimized a bit the size of the download when doing automatic
upgrades.
- We included several command line tools used by SecureDrop users to
analyze the metadata of leaked documents on computers that cannot use
the Additional Software feature:
- PDF Redact Tools to redact and strip metadata from text documents
before publishing
- Tesseract OCR to convert images containing text into a text document
- FFmpeg to record and convert audio and video
- Open ~/Persistent/keepassx.kdbx by default when starting KeePassX. If
this database does not exist yet, stop pointing to it in the list of
recent databases.
The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.2:
- Update Tor Browser to 9.0.4.
This fixes a critical vulnerability in the JavaScript JIT compiler of
Firefox and Tor Browser.
Mozilla is aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this
vulnerability.
This vulnerability only affects the standard security level of Tor
Browser. The safer and safest security levels are not affected.
- Avoid a 2-minutes delay when restarting after doing an automatic
upgrade. (#17026)
Code
====
- We fixed critical regressions that were introduced while improving
automatic upgrades.
- We started work on making the download of automatic upgrades more
robust (#15875).
- We fixed the long delay while rebooting after applying an automatic
upgrade (#17026).
- In order to make the development process a bit smoother:
- We now use the tarball with all Tor Browser langpacks (#17400),
instead of downloading a complete Tor Browser for every language.
- Our build system is now able to cache the website build.
Documentation and website
=========================
- Göktürk Yüksek improved the dd command in the expert installation
scenario to display progress (status=progress) and sync on-the-fly
(oflag=direct).
- We fixed the display of the output of rsync when doing a backup of the
persistent volume.
https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/persistence/copy/
Infrastructure
==============
- We made progress on our migration to GitLab.
- We resumed work on upgrading our CI hardware (#16960).
Funding
=======
- We added ThinkPenguin as a partner.
https://tails.boum.org/partners/
- We teared down the donation campaign. We raised around 100k€ from
2 000 donations.
- We were invited to submit a full proposal for the joint grant proposal
with Tor and the Guardian Project to the DRL Internet Freedom program.
Hot topics on our help desk
===========================
- A lot of users are complaining about Seahorse failing to import public
keys. (#17183)
- A few people reported graphic issues, mostly #16875, but also with
Nvidia Turing. (#17155)
- Some users are facing issues (#17388, #17430, #17418) with some
network adapter since 4.1.1. (#17388, #17430, #17418)
Translations
============
All the website
---------------
fr: 86% (5293) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy
es: 51% (3134) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
de: 34% (2143) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
it: 30% (1852) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
fa: 27% (1689) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
pt: 22% (1359) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
Core pages of the website
-------------------------
fr: 93% (1695) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
es: 90% (1636) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy
de: 64% (1168) strings translated, 16% strings fuzzy
it: 60% (1094) strings translated, 18% strings fuzzy
pt: 43% (792) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
fa: 32% (596) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
Metrics
=======
- Tails has been started more than 856 922 times this month. This makes
27 643 boots a day on average.
--
sajolida
Tails —
https://tails.boum.org/
UX · Fundraising · Technical Writing
