Hi,

Here is a summary of what happened in Tails land in February, 2019.

Online version with additional links:

https://tails.boum.org/news/report_2019_02/

This month has seen the highest number of Tails boots per day ever: 27% more than a year ago! This is motivating: it confirms that Tails is useful and relevant.

Releases ========

* Tails 3.12.1 was released on February 13. A critical vulnerability in the Skia library, used by Firefox and Chrome to render graphics, prompted this emergency release.

* Tails 3.13 is scheduled for March 19.

Code ====

- We have coordinated with the Tor Browser team wrt. the scope and timeline of upcoming big changes that will impact our work.

- We have implemented a potential fix and a mitigation measure for a longstanding bug: `persistence.conf` sometimes becomes empty.

- We have prepared a number of updates for Tails 3.13: - Debian Stretch 9.8, merged - Linux 4.19.20, merged - Tor 0.3.5, in progress

- We released new versions of the verification extension to fix usability and security issues:

- Download page is not refreshed when verification extension is installed. - Verification extension should not be detectable as per Sjösten, and al. - Updated to Forge 0.8.0.

Documentation and website =========================

- We improved the known issue about clock going backwards.

User experience ===============

- We published 3 personas that describe the target audience of Tails: https://tails.boum.org/contribute/personas/

- We contracted visual artists to work on a video to explain how to start Tails (and use the boot menu key).

- We analyzed why some people are wiping their persistence while upgrading with USB images.

- We investigated outgoing network connections initiated by Etcher and researched how to solve the privacy concerns we have with them.

Hot topics on our help desk ===========================

1. Electrum users are complaining about the fact that it may need to be upgraded.

2. Some people are affected by a regression with some Intel graphics cards (Braswell, Kaby Lake).

3. Partially applied automatic upgrades still cause trouble to some users.

Infrastructure ==============

- We took one more step towards making our CI feedback loop shorter: we've ordered sample candidate hardware. Next step is to benchmark it. - The sysadmin team met a few times to update our plans for next year. - We've helped upstream a solution to the dreaded ikiwiki PO vs. inlines bug. - As part of our effort to migrate to better maintained Puppet modules, we've switched to the puppetlabs/mysql module. - We fixed the remaining known regressions that were introduced where we migrated our website from _Apache_ to _nginx_. - We started discussing our strategy and timeline towards migrating to GitLab.

Funding =======

- The 2 applications that we submitted to the NLnet NGI Zero PET project got rejected.

Outreach ========

Past events -----------

- emmapeel and sajolida attended FOSDEM in Brussels.

Upcoming events ---------------

- Estrella Soria will organize a Tails workshop at the Cyborgrrrls technofeminist gathering: https://twitter.com/tecnochamana/status/1103659283449819137 on Thursday March 14 in MedialabMX, Ciudad de México.

- sajolida and emmapeel will be at the Internet Freedom Festival on April 1-5 in Valencia, Spain.

sajolida will hold there a workshop on creating usable tools from day one with paper prototyping: https://platform.internetfreedomfestival.org/en/IFF2019/public/schedule/cust...

Press and testimonials ======================

- schabenstolz explains how to hide a Tails USB stick *inside* a ThinkPad X230 and connect it to an invisible switch to start on either the hard disk or the internal Tails USB stick: https://steempeak.com/blog/@schabenstolz/a-hidden-usb-stick-in-the-laptop-or...

Translations ============

All the website ---------------

- de: 47% (2634) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 43% words translated - es: 54% (3015) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated - fa: 34% (1876) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 35% words translated - fr: 93% (5176) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 93% words translated - it: 35% (1939) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 30% words translated - pt: 27% (1516) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 23% words translated

Total original words: 59517

Core pages of the website -------------------------

- de: 71% (1248) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 73% words translated - es: 80% (1412) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 81% words translated - fa: 34% (615) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated - fr: 98% (1745) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 99% words translated - it: 63% (1107) strings translated, 17% strings fuzzy, 65% words translated - pt: 45% (794) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated

Total original words: 16467

Metrics =======

* Tails has been started more than 725 034 times this month. This makes 25 894 boots a day on average, which is an all time record :) * 10 065 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of a Tails USB image or ISO from our website. * 71 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.

(How do we know this? https://tails.boum.org/support/faq/#boot_statistics)

Cheers,