Circletop via Tails-testers:
> Hello Tails Team and Testers,
>
> Here is our report on Tails 4.11~rc1. Let us know if any clarification is desired.
Wow, thanks for the comprehensive testing and report! We greatly appreciate this!
Below I'll ask for some further details about some of the problems you reported, but I'll also give some feedback on your reporting for next time. A general advice I can give is: when you test something that works fine you only need to say what you tested, you don't really have to provide lots of additional info (like terminal output proving what you say). We're mostly interested in such extra info when something does *not* work fine. In other words, your next report could probably be much shorter. :)
> WELCOME SCREEN:
>
> The persistent volume, Administrative Password, Unsafe Web Browser, and language selection features of the Welcome Screen all worked and persisted through multiple cold boots without problems.
Excellent! This was the primary reason for this release candidate, so this is encouraging to hear! :)
> TOR BROWSER:
We would LOVE if you could verify that the problems you experience with Tor Browser 10.0a6 in Tails also affect the "normal" Tor Browser run in your favorite non-Tails operating system. You can fetch it here:
https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/10.0a6/
> 1. We visited multiple unrelated websites over the course of several days using both the Tor Browser 10.0a6 and Tor Browser 9.5.4. The same sites which never produced a Cloudflare captcha request on Tor Browser 9.5.4 always did responding to Tor Browser 10.0a6. Using "New Identity" or "New Tor Circuit for this Site" made no difference.
> We consider this a serious problem effecting both the functionality and adoption of the Tor Browser and Tails.
Indeed! I doubt this problem is Tails-specific so this must be reported to the Tor Browser developers as soon as possible! It would help if you can tell us a few of these websites you had this problem with so we can try to reproduce. If you don't want to expose these addresses on this public mailing list you can email them to tails@??? (or directly to me).
If you feel like reporting this issue to the Tor Browser developers yourself (which will save some time for us ♥) that would also be appreciated, but if it feels too daunting I'll do it, no worries:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/
> 2. Some embedded content which loaded automatically using Tor Browser 9.5.4 produced the following notice with Tor Browser 10.0a6:
>
> "Tor Browser Can't Open This Page
> To protect your security, [URL] will not allow Tor Browser to display the page if another site has embedded it. To see this page, you need to open it in a new window."
>
> Then clicking "Open Site in New Window" opened a Cloudflare-protected link which rendered content without user intervention in a few seconds.
Again, some example websites would help!
> 3. When we visited the internet utility website Arul John [2] the initial Tor Browser 10.0a6 resolution and size displayed was 640x480, but that quickly changed to either 998x499 or 999x500 even though the page hadn't been reloaded. The resolution and size given for Tor Browser 9.5.4 was a static 1000x700. This maybe a bug with the website or the Tor Browser 10.0a6.
I played around with this website with many different desktop resolutions and sizes of the Tor Browser window and it seemed to work fine for me, i.e. all numbers were rounded to 100s. So I cannot reproduce this problem.
> 4. After loading the JonDonym website using Tor Browser 10.0a6 it showed "Warning: Your IP address is neither anonymized by JonDonym nor by Tor." [3] However, the Tor Project's Tor Check site showed "Congratulations. This browser is configured to use Tor." [4] Finally, visiting the JonDonym website using Tor Browser 9.5.4 showed "You are using Tor," as did the Tor Check site. This maybe a problem with the JonDonym website rather than the Tor Browser.
Yeah, even though it was years ago I used it last I recall frequently having it erroneously report that I wasn't using Tor.
> 5. Internet speed tests results showed Tor Browser 10.0a6 was roughly 20-40% faster than Tor Browser 9.5.4
Note that it is very hard to get reliable performance statistics for Tor connections given that you randomly pick "hops" to go through that can have very different speeds. Most likely you just happened to pick faster hops in the attempt with 10.0a6.
> 11. Using the root terminal "apt" or "apropos" commands didn't show anything about the tor-browser package, which the terminal showed as present with the double-tab or "which" commands:
Tor Browser is not installed via Debian's package system. We are unpacking the .tar.xz files just like other Linux users. :)
> 1. WhisperBack 1.8.4 was used to send a test message and headers with a contact email address and its public OpenPGP key included, then printed "Your message has been sent."
In order to reduce the amount of reports our Help desk team has to process I would advice you to only use WhisperBack when reporting real bugs. We already do this test ourselves with every release, so we're good. :)
> 3. When online the "Tails documentation" desktop launcher opened the Tails Documentation website in the Tor Browser. [9] When offline the same launcher opened a copy of the entire Tails website, whose internal links worked well. [10]
Did the offline documentation really work? It should be affected by this bug:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40108
In fact, we mention that local pages are broken as a "Known issue" in the release notes of 4.11~rc1. It would be very strange if it works for you but no one else!
> 10. After turning on then off the "Settings > Universal Access > High Contrast" option the Trash icon on the desktop remained in black-and-white high contrast mode. Turning "High Contrast" on and off again failed to get it back to normal, but, did cause Gedit and Nautilus "Files" to freeze for thirty seconds each.
Seems like a bug in GNOME. This is not serious enough for us to put resources on, so if you want this fixed I recommend reporting it directly to GNOME:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/
Before doing that it might be worth verifying that you can reproduce this problem in some other Linux distro's GNOME, especially one with a newer version than what we have in Tails — if you cannot reproduce, it might already be fixed, and thus be fixed in Tails next time we upgrade GNOME.
Again, thanks a lot for your testing! ♥
Cheers!
