Tails report for February 2024

Highlights

Despite the bonus day this year, February flew by pretty quickly! Here's what we were up to:

  • We ended February more resilient and collaborative than when we started. We have new tooling to make it easier to work on shared documents, and use XMPP more effectively. We also worked to strengthen our front-end services and set up the back-end infrastructre to build redundancies into our services.

  • In 2021 and 2022, our usability tests with human rights defenders in Mexico and Brazil prompted several improvements in the installation instructions for Tails. Fixing 16 of the identified usability issues were remaining, and we fixed them all this month. These tests, experiences, and improvements will greatly shape our future trainings.

  • We finished updating our website for Tails 6.0. Check out the rewritten recommendation on secure deletion

Releases

📢 Tails 6.0 is out

Tails 6.0 is the first version of Tails based on Debian 12 ("bookworm"), and is the sexiest, slickest, and sleekest Tails yet. It brings:

  • several important security updates: more robust error detection for the Persistent Storage, protections against malicious USB devices, and Diceware word lists in Catalan, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish

  • some more usability features: new light modes—dark, night, and a combination of both; easier screenshoting and screencasting; and easier Gmail configuration in Thunderbird

  • and, updated version of most of the applications in Tails

To know more, check out the Tails 6.0 release notes and the changelog. Thank you to everyone who helped us out by testing the release candidate.

Metrics

Tails was started more than 806,714 times this month. That's a daily average of over 27,817 boots.