In memoriam of Karsten Loesing

We join the Tor project in mourning Karsten Loesing. Our sincere condolences to Karsten's family and colleagues.

Those of us who were lucky enough to cross Karsten's path remember him as a very kind, thoughtful, and smart person.

Rest in peace, Karsten.

Releases

• Tails 4.14 was released on December 15.

• Tails 4.15 is scheduled for January 26.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.15:

• Add support for the Ledger hardware wallets in Electrum. (#15353)

• Remove the Unifont font. (!263)

• Fix Additional Software by updating the APT key for deb.torproject.org. (#18042)

• Fix changing the administration password stored in the Persistent Storage. (#18018)

• Fix opening the Persistent Storage of another Tails USB stick in the Files browser. (#18050)

• Restore automatically a GnuPG public keyring from its backup when it gets corrupt. (#17807)

🎉 New core developer 🎂

Today, we celebrate the arrival in our Foundations Team of a new member: boyska. His skills and experience in operating systems, software development, and collective projects will:

• Accelerate development of new features, user experience improvements, and bug fixes.

• Make our day-to-day maintenance work more sustainable.

  This work has no visible impact most of the time, except that Tails is still alive after more than a decade, and here to stay!

• Decrease our reliance on a tiny number of key persons.

  This is one important step we're taking, among others, towards making Tails a healthier project.

I'm boyska, a fellow who always loved computers. When I realized the profound social implications of technology, I tried to make my part: that's how I got involved with free software, security and hacking in general. A post-it note in my brain remembers me that computing should be fun, not scary.

Additionally, we would like to thank:

• the thousands of people whose donation allowed us to fund this new position

  Please consider donating today to fight surveillance and censorship.

• the dozens of people who applied to this job offer

  It's been truly heart-warming to see so many great applicants interested in working with us.

Welcome, boyska! :)

Code

• We implemented a mechanism for adding a "Don't Show Again" button to some notifications. We'll try it out in Tails 4.15 for the warning displayed when starting Tails in a virtual machine; then we'll iterate from there.

• We finished porting our Python code to Python 3. Yeah!

• We made plans for rewriting Persistent Storage in Python, making it compatible with Wayland, and redesigning its UX from scratch.

Documentation and website

• Started rewriting /doc/about/warning:

  • Samuel DiBella rewrote the section about contextual identities (#17882)

  • We rewrote the sections about confirmation attacks and global adversaries (#17869)

• Added an FAQ about "Is it safe to use an older version of Tails?" (#18001)

• Improved our security page and replaced "hole" by "vulnerability" everywhere on our website, as per our style guide. (#18032)

User experience

• Started analyzing the search queries on our website, following a methodology by Susan Farrell. (#11649)

• Started preparing the redesign of the Persistent Storage that we'll work on in January. (#15572)

• Investigated what it would take to stop distributing ISO images:

  • #18047: Users unintentionally install ISO to USB instead of the .img
  • #18054: Distribute USB images by default for all virtual machines
  • #18055: Stop distributing ISO images

• Added some depth to the buttons on our website. (#15111)

Funding

Grants

• Our proposal to the UXFund to work on a replacement for Tor Launcher was approved buy scaled down by 20%.

Donations

• Received 57.8k€ from 88 donations at CCT since the beginning of the campaign.

  It's 70% more donations, that's the important part, and 599% more money thanks to a 50k€ donation from some crypto trading company, that's the big cherry on top of the cake!

• Blogged about our achievements in 2020.

Sponsors

• Renamed "partners" as "sponsors" after DeepOnion listed Tails as their partner on their website.

  The word "partners" implies reciprocity and a deeper relationship, while the word "sponsor" doesn't and is more accurate, honest, and common.

• Got invited to the Lifetime Raffle of ProtonMail.

Outreach

Past events

• Tails and Tor were presented (among other tools) to journalism students at Sciences Po Rennes (Rennes, France) as part of their digital safety lessons.

Translations

All the website

• fr: 79% (5378) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• es: 48% (3273) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• it: 28% (1945) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy
• de: 27% (1829) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
• fa: 20% (1359) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy
• pt: 18% (1266) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

• es: 82% (1741) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• fr: 79% (1676) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
• it: 54% (1151) strings translated, 20% strings fuzzy
• de: 44% (935) strings translated, 24% strings fuzzy
• pt: 38% (818) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
• fa: 19% (407) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy

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

• zh_TW: 21% (451) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
• zh: 10% (218) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• tr: 7% (155) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• ca: 7% (153) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• ru: 7% (152) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
• pl: 7% (150) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
• ar: 7% (146) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
• id: 5% (115) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
• sr_Latn: 4% (93) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 978 192 times this month. This makes 31 554 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?