Releases

• Tails 4.9 was released on June 28.

• Tails 4.10 is scheduled for August 25.

Code

• Prepared upgrade to tor 0.4.3.6 (#17835)
• Researched how to cope with the fact Electrum is not installable on Buster anymore (#17828)
• Improved robustness of our automated test suite
• Documented some internal processes (#17571, #17772)

Documentation and website

• We documented how to use USB tethering when Wi-Fi doesn't work in Tails. (#16987)

• We improved our FAQ on VPN. (#9145)

User experience

• Launched a user survey about ease of use, online privacy tools, OpenPGP, and Pidgin. (#17821)

  We got more than 600 responses so far. Thanks a lot to everybody who participated!

Hot topics on our help desk

We started the month with Tails 4.8 and many users wrote to us because of problems with the Tails Welcome Screen:

1. They had issues with administration passwords that had special characters.

2. They could not access their persistent storage because changing the language on the Welcome Screen didn't change the keyboard layout as usual, although it claimed to do it.

These two issues were very upsetting for the users, although had easy workarounds. They are fixed in Tails 4.9 (Apologies!), but in the same time the kernel upgrade brought new issues (Re: Apologies!):

1. A lot of people reported the starting Tails was impossible since the upgrade to Tails 4.9 with their Intel Corporation [8086:22b0] GPU.

2. Some people reported that their Wi-Fi adapter was not working anymore.

Infrastructure

• Put our translation platform. back in sync' with Git
• Updated our Jenkins and its plugins (tails/sysadmin/-/issues/16955)
• Improved our monitoring of download mirrors
• Ported detection of stalled issues/MRs to GitLab (!110)

Funding

• Our proposal to OTF on anti-censorship was paused due to their budget problems.

• Our joint proposal with Tor to DRL was declined but invited to submit again next year.

• We applied to the Mecenat Code Lutins to work on usability improvements.

• We added Wordable and Exam Success as partners.

• We coded some A/B testing to measure the impact of a design change on our one-time and monthly donations buttons. (52a2d90a42)

• We made plans to improve our donation process.

• We published our income statement for 2019.

Outreach

Past events

• Mexico City hackerspace Rancho Electrónico did a series of three virtual Tails workshops on July 14 - 21 and August 4 as part of their AutoDefensa Digital sessions.

  

Translations

All the website

• fr: 82% (5350) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• es: 46% (3030) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• de: 30% (1966) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• it: 27% (1795) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
• fa: 22% (1468) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
• pt: 21% (1401) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

• fr: 80% (1678) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy
• es: 75% (1565) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy
• it: 49% (1031) strings translated, 21% strings fuzzy
• de: 49% (1025) strings translated, 22% strings fuzzy
• pt: 39% (812) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
• fa: 19% (414) 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 951 736 times this month. This makes 30 701 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?