Releases

Tails 4.7 was released on June 2:

• Make the installation of Additional Software more robust. (#17278)

• Clarify the error message when entering an incorrect password to unlock a VeraCrypt volume: Wrong passphrase or parameters instead of Error unlocking volume. (#17668)

• Clean up confusing comments in /etc/tor/torrc. (#17706)

Tails 4.8 was released on June 30:

• We disabled the Unsafe Browser by default and clarified that the Unsafe Browser can be used to deanonymize you.

• We added a new feature of the Persistent Storage to save the settings from the Welcome Screen.

  This feature is beta and only the additional setting to enable the Unsafe Browser is made persistent. The other settings (language, keyboard, and other additional settings) will be made persistent in Tails 4.9 (July 28).

• Fix the Find in page feature of Thunderbird. (#17328)

• Fix shutting down automatically the laptop when resuming from suspend with the Tails USB stick removed. (#16787)

• Notify always when MAC address spoofing fails and the network interface is disabled. (#17779)

• Fix the import of OpenPGP public keys in binary format (non armored) from the Files browser.

Tails 4.9 is scheduled for July 28.

Code

• Adapted our test suite to our new homepage and to GitLab. (#17718, #17719)

• Upgraded to tor 0.4.3. (#17741)

• Automated post-release GitLab updates with gitlab-triage. (#17589, !36)

Documentation and website

• @syster added a favicon to our website. (!37)

• Documented the letterboxing feature of Tor Browser. (#17227)

• Interviewed 4 more candidates to the Technical Writer job offer.

• Added a shortcut on top of the cloning instructions for people who are already in Tails.

• Reported a bug upstream to Etcher about Windows manipulating the system partition, leading to a failed verification. (#17634)

Hot topics on our help desk

1. A lot of people complained about having trouble starting Tails with [AMD/ATI] Renoir GPUs, but it seems that a kernel update fixed that problem in Tails 4.8.

2. Some MacBook users reported that Tails fails to boot with some recent MacBooks. A workaround was proposed but people were then affected by their key combinations or mouse and keyboard not being supported by GRUB.

3. There were still a couple of users reporting having problems to import public PGP keys in Seahorse.

Infrastructure

• Decommissioned the system that used to host our Redmine.

• Made it possible for core community members to propose changes to our GitLab configuration with a merge request. (#17753)

Funding

• Submitted a full proposal to the OTF Core Infrastructure Fund to improve the user experience of connecting to Tor and using Tails to circumvent censorship.

Outreach

Published leaflets and their source on the website:

Past events

• El Barracon Digital from El Progreso, Honduras, organized an international online webinar on Tails: Privacidad y Anonimato Con Tails.

Upcoming events

• El Rancho Electronico is organizing 2 online workshops about Tails on July 14 and July 21.

Press and testimonials

• 2020-06-23: Privacy-Focused OS Wants to Know How Facebook and the FBI Hacked it by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai in Motherboard.

• 2020-06-10: Facebook Helped the FBI Hack a Child Predator by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai in Motherboard.

Translations

All the website

• fr: 84% (5415) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• es: 47% (3072) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• de: 30% (1988) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• it: 28% (1808) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
• fa: 22% (1474) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• pt: 22% (1418) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

• fr: 83% (1709) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
• es: 77% (1585) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
• it: 50% (1043) strings translated, 20% strings fuzzy
• de: 50% (1041) strings translated, 21% strings fuzzy
• pt: 39% (815) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
• fa: 20% (415) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website for languages not activated on the website yet

• zh_TW: 25% (447) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy
• zh: 12% (224) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• ru: 8% (160) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• pl: 8% (149) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
• tr: 8% (148) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
• ar: 7% (132) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• ca: 7% (131) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• id: 5% (99) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy
• sr_Latn: 4% (80) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 926 605 times this month. This makes 30 887 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?