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Call for testing: VeraCrypt support in Tails

You can help Tails! The beta version for the VeraCrypt support in Tails is ready for testing. We are very excited.

What's new in the Beta?

We worked to integrate VeraCrypt support into the existing GNOME workflow for unlocking encrypted volumes. As a result, most of the features already provided for LUKS volumes are now also provided for VeraCrypt volumes. This includes unlocking volumes via the GNOME Disks application and integration into the places sidebar in GNOME Files. If your file containers have the ".hc" file extension, they will be recognized as VeraCrypt volumes and can be easily unlocked in GNOME Files.

Additionally, we created a small application, VeraCrypt Mounter, which makes it easier to unlock VeraCrypt volumes, especially file containers that do not have the ".hc" extension.

How to test the Beta?

Download and install the ISO image on a USB stick or DVD, start it and try to unlock your existing VeraCrypt volumes.

We are interested in your feedback on bugs and usability of this feature.

  • Are there any steps that are not clear?
  • Did you run into technical issues?

Please send feedback emails to tails-testers@boum.org.

Get the Beta

VeraCrypt support in Tails beta ISO image

There is no signature available for this test ISO image.

Known issues

We've identified a list of known issues #14480 among which

  • Trying to unlock via the places sidebar using an incorrect password or keyfile results in a not very helpful error message #15663
  • Unlocking via the places sidebar doesn't provide any feedback #15664
  • No integration in the places sidebar of the file chooser dialog of some applications (including Tor Browser) #15667

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted Fri 13 Jul 2018 10:00:00 PM CEST Tags:
Tails report for June, 2018

Releases

The following changes were introduced in Tails 3.7.1:

  • Upgrade Tor Browser to 7.5.5.

    This fixes a critical issue in Firefox announced on June 6.

  • Upgrade Thunderbird to 52.8.0.

    This partly mitigates the infamous EFAIL attack and fixes importing OpenPGP keys from keyservers with Enigmail.

  • Fix setting a screen locker password with non-ASCII characters. (#15636)

  • Rename the WhisperBack launcher to "WhisperBack Error Reporting" so that users have a better chance to understand what it does. (#6432)

The following changes were introduced in Tails 3.8:

  • Upgrade Enigmail from 1.9.9 to 2.0.7 which fixes some of the EFAIL attacks on OpenPGP.

  • Fix importing OpenPGP keys from email attachments. (#15610)

  • Fix the translations of the homepage of the Unsafe Browser. (#15461)

Code

  • We have worked on improving support for recent graphics cards and in particular those produced by NVIDIA. We've sent a call for testing and updated it. If the feedback is good, we will probably include these changes in Tails 3.9.

  • We have kept working on fixing the EFAIL attacks against encrypted email (#15602). Tails 3.8 fixed most of them and Tails 3.9 should fix the remaining ones.

  • We have worked on detecting earlier changes that would break automatic upgrades (#15419)… and already identified one we need to fix in time for Tails 3.9 (#15695).

  • Chris Lamb prepared a fix for the most infamous rendering issue (raw PO content being inserted in some page) that affects our website (#6907).

User experience

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Surface Pro users reported having trouble with wireless (#15520).

  2. We still receive emails from several users displayed with the message pointing to https://tails.boum.org/gdm.

Outreach

Upcoming events

  • BitingBird, intrigeri, nodens, and u will be at DebConf18 in Hsinchu, Taiwan from July 29 to August 5.

On-going discussions

Translation

All the website

  • fr: 89% (5169) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 88% words translated
  • es: 58% (3356) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated
  • de: 53% (3099) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 47% words translated
  • fa: 36% (2096) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 38% words translated
  • it: 32% (1881) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 28% words translated
  • pt: 28% (1618) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 24% words translated

Total original words: 60692

Core pages of the website

  • fr: 98% (1900) strings translated, 0% strings fuzzy, 99% words translated
  • es: 96% (1862) strings translated, 0% strings fuzzy, 94% words translated
  • de: 79% (1528) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 79% words translated
  • it: 67% (1295) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 66% words translated
  • pt: 45% (879) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 49% words translated
  • fa: 33% (640) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated

Total original words: 17447

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 666 921 times this month. This makes 22 231 boots a day on average.
  • 8 830 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
  • 65 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.

How do we know this?

Posted Mon 09 Jul 2018 06:00:00 PM CEST
Police raid at Zwiebelfreunde: Donor data compromised

On June 20th 2018, German police searched the homes of board members of our former fiscal sponsor Zwiebelfreunde in a coordinated raid. Zwiebelfreunde (Friends of onions in German) is a non-profit organization that supports privacy and anonymity projects and operates several Tor exit nodes.

They are not accused of a crime but considered to be witnesses in a case: the operators of an anonymous website calling for protest against the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party convention used an email address at Riseup, a privacy-friendly email provider to which Zwiebelfreunde facilitates donations.

During the search, computers, storage media, personal items, bank account records, and paper receipts have been confiscated. This unfortunately means that if you have donated to Tails before October 18th 2017 using our European bank account, your data is now in the hands of the German police (IBAN account number, name of account holder, amount, and date). If you donated after this date, you donated to our new fiscal sponsor CCT and not to Zwiebelfreunde.

According to Moritz Bartl, one of the board members, "there's a long history of police using that kind of data to investigate social structures; who's working where, who's involved in which projects, so we have to assume that they are looking into the social networks of people" (Source).

The raid has been strongly criticized by German media and digital rights activists as being disproportionate.

Please join us in supporting our friends at Zwiebelfreunde. We are very grateful for the support they have provided to Tails.

Read more about the case and find links to international press coverage on Zwiebelfreunde's blog.

Posted Thu 05 Jul 2018 05:00:00 PM CEST Tags:
Tails 3.8 is out

This release fixes many security issues and users should upgrade as soon as possible.

Changes

Upgrades and changes

  • Upgrade Enigmail from 1.9.9 to 2.0.7 which fixes some of the EFAIL attacks on OpenPGP.

Fixed problems

  • Fix importing OpenPGP keys from email attachments. (#15610)

  • Fix the translations of the homepage of the Unsafe Browser. (#15461)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

After upgrading to Tails 3.8, you have to go through the Enigmail Setup Wizard again every time you restart Tails.

Your OpenPGP keys and your per-recipient rules are preserved.

To avoid going through the Enigmail Setup Wizard, you can execute the following command in a terminal before starting Thunderbird:

echo 'pref("extensions.enigmail.configuredVersion", "2.0.7");' >> ~/.thunderbird/profile.default/preferences/0000tails.js

This bug will be fixed in the next version of Tails. (#15693)

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 3.8

What's coming up?

Tails 3.9 is scheduled for September 5.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted Tue 26 Jun 2018 02:34:56 PM CEST Tags:
Tails report for May, 2018

Releases

Code

Documentation and website

User experience

  • We did some moderated user testing of the Additional Software beta.

  • We wrote a scope of work together with Simply Secure to work on explaining what it Tails and got it approved by the OTF usability lab. (#9814) It covers:

    • Defining brand attributes for Tails
    • Writing a new tagline
    • Structuring an explanation of the main properties of Tails
    • Ideating on visuals to support the explanation of Tails
    • Reviewing our current introductory pages and proposing more approachable copy samples and tone guidelines

  • We started reviewing collectively the persona skeletons that were defined last August. We started with Kim, the surveilled at home.

  • We documented some resources that we use for user testing.

Hot topics on our help desk

Help desk has seen the same issues than last month:

  1. Users are still affected by a loss of persistence.conf

  2. We received also several reports about keyboard and mouse not working after upgrading

  3. A few users reported the disappearance of a part of their keyring

  4. And some users had trouble with obfs4 bridges

Infrastructure

  • We continued working on the integration of the translation platform with our infrastructure #10034.

  • With the help of our mirror operators we've started to remove rsync.torproject.org from the mirrors synchronization chain #15162.

  • We started working on hosting our website ourselves (#14588): we've identified potential issues, evaluated corresponding solutions, designed a migration plan and started working on it.

  • We made progress on having our automated test suite run on current Debian testing/sid but hit a new, major and concerning blocking issue regarding the state of SikuliX in Debian (#15460, Debian bug #897215, Debian bug #897333). We could definitely use help from Debian package maintainers; bonus points if you know anything about packaging Java code!

Funding

Outreach

Past events

Translation

All the website

  • de: 54% (3097) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 47% words translated
  • es: 59% (3370) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 49% words translated
  • fa: 36% (2096) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 38% words translated
  • fr: 90% (5181) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 89% words translated
  • it: 32% (1879) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 28% words translated
  • pt: 28% (1625) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 24% words translated

Total original words: 60238

Core pages of the website

  • de: 79% (1530) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 78% words translated
  • es: 97% (1872) strings translated, 0% strings fuzzy, 94% words translated
  • fa: 33% (641) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
  • fr: 99% (1910) strings translated, 0% strings fuzzy, 99% words translated
  • it: 67% (1297) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 66% words translated
  • pt: 45% (882) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 49% words translated

Total original words: 17498

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 677 422 times this month. This makes 21852 boots a day on average.
  • 8 650 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
  • 77 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.

How do we know this?

Posted Sun 17 Jun 2018 03:23:45 AM CEST
Tails 3.7.1 is out

This release fixes many security issues and users should upgrade as soon as possible.

Changes

Upgrades and changes

  • Upgrade Tor Browser to 7.5.5.

    This fixes a critical issue in Firefox announced on June 6.

  • Upgrade Thunderbird to 52.8.0.

    This partly mitigates the infamous EFAIL attack and fixes importing OpenPGP keys from keyservers with Enigmail.

Fixed problems

  • Fix setting a screen locker password with non-ASCII characters. (#15636)

  • Rename the WhisperBack launcher to "WhisperBack Error Reporting" so that users have a better chance to understand what it does. (#6432)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 3.7.1

What's coming up?

Tails 3.8 is scheduled for June 26.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted Sun 10 Jun 2018 06:34:56 PM CEST Tags:
Call for testing: Additional Software feature

You can help Tails! The beta version for the Additional Software feature is ready for testing. We are very excited.

What's new in the Additional Software feature Beta?

We've designed and implemented a user interface to select additional software packages and make additional software persistent.

Users are now able to decide, for each additional piece of software that they might install in Tails once, whether it shall be installed automatically in the future.

How to test Tails Additional Software feature Beta?

  1. Download and install the ISO image on a USB stick, start from the stick and configure a persistent volume. Reboot and use the package manager to install a package currently not in Tails (example: Mumble). Note that in order to carry out these steps you need to set up a root password in the Tails Greeter.

  2. Configure if you want this package to be installed automatically on each boot.

  3. Restart Tails and use Mumble (or another program you've just installed).

  4. Imagine that over time you have installed several additional programs (Mumble, VLC, etc.) but don’t remember the exact list. How would you check your list of additional software?

  5. How would you stop installing Mumble every time you start Tails?

We are interested in your feedback on bugs and usability of this feature.

  • Are there any notifications that are not clear?
  • Did you run into technical issues?
  • Were you able to to modify the installation details as asked in the last question?
  • Do you have ideas on packages that we should propose to Tails users for installation?

Please send feedback emails to tails-testers@boum.org.

Get Tails Additional Software Feature Beta

Tails Additional Software feature beta ISO image

There is no signature available for this test ISO image.

Known issues

We've identified a list of known issues #15567 among which

  • Additional Software gets opened multiple times #15528
  • Remove and Cancel buttons don't work after escaping password prompt #15581

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted Mon 14 May 2018 04:00:00 PM CEST
Tails 3.7 is out

This release fixes several security issues and users should upgrade as soon as possible.

Changes

Upgrades and changes

Fixed problems

  • Allow removing the optional OpenPGP key in WhisperBack, in case you specified one.

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 3.7

  • To install, follow our installation instructions.

  • To upgrade, automatic upgrades are available from 3.6, 3.6.1, and 3.6.2 to 3.7.

    If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

    If you are doing a manual upgrade from Tails 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, or 3.5, it is only possible to select an ISO image when running Tails in English. For other languages, the file chooser button remains inactive:

    To do a manual upgrade from Tails 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, or 3.5, you can either:

    • Restart Tails in English.

    • Start Tails Installer in English from the command line:

      LANG=en_US tails-installer

  • Download Tails 3.7.

What's coming up?

Tails 3.8 is scheduled for June 26.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted Wed 09 May 2018 07:26:18 PM CEST Tags:
Tails report for April, 2018

Releases

There have been no releases in April (a big change compared to the three releases in March!).

Code

  • We kept working with upstream to be able to support VeraCrypt in GNOME.

  • MAT2 is being developed. Lots of improvements, will come with support for new formats (torrents!) and more.

  • We worked on the new Additional Software feature, that will be ready for Tails 3.9 and will make programs easy to install each time you start Tails (as long as they are available from Debian).

Documentation and website

  • We wrote a new page to list known issues with graphics cards. Combined with the better error message when GDM fails to start that we introduced in Tails 3.6, it should gradually improve a lot the experience of people who cannot start Tails with their graphics card.

User experience

  • We started designing a quantitative survey of our user base.

    What would be useful for us to know about our users?

  • We drafted a ?fourth persona skeleton.

  • We removed the zooming effect on the screenshots in our installation instructions which was annoying. (#14678)

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Users are still affected by a loss of persistence.conf

  2. We received also several reports about keyboard and mouse not working after upgrading

  3. A few users reported the disappearance of a part of their keyring

  4. And some users had trouble with obfs4 bridges

Infrastructure

Funding

  • We participated in the DuckDuckGo Privacy Challenge. We raised $9 870 in donations and will receive $33 000 in prizes from DuckDuckGo.

    Thanks a lot to everybody who participated!

Outreach

Past events

  • There was a Tails introductory workshop at the Flisol2018 conference on April 28, Rancho Electronico, Mexico City

Upcoming events

  • intrigeri will host a Tails users' meetup in the Cryptorave, May 5th, in São Paulo, Brazil

Press and testimonials

  • The italian association "Mutuo Soccorso", in their last book "Stop al Panico! Difesa legale, note per una maggiore consapevolezza", "Don't Panic!Legal defense, notes for greater awareness" - Bologna march 2018, suggests use Tails (p 132) for high needs of anonimity, to circumvent the censorships, or to manage in an easy way confidential communications. The writers: https://mutuosoccorso.noblogs.org/ The distribution of the book: https://www.openddb.it/libri/stop-al-panico/

  • sajolida did an interview with Simply Secure on our UX process and formative testing.

  • The FIDH - Worldwide Movement for Human Rights, relayed our call for donation by making it clear that Tails is an important tool for Human Rights Defenders in French, English and Farsi.

Translation

Timidly, groups are forming to translate Tails to Arabic and Chinese (simplified and TW). Contact Tails l10n if you want to know more.

All the website

  • de: 53% (3033) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 46% words translated
  • es: 55% (3104) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated
  • fa: 36% (2054) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 38% words translated
  • fr: 91% (5172) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 89% words translated
  • it: 33% (1881) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 29% words translated
  • pt: 27% (1542) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 24% words translated

Total original words: 59730

Core pages of the website

  • de: 76% (1468) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 75% words translated
  • es: 94% (1827) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 91% words translated
  • fa: 32% (634) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 32% words translated
  • fr: 98% (1898) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 96% words translated
  • it: 67% (1302) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 66% words translated
  • pt: 44% (854) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 47% words translated

Total original words: 17621

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 650 000 times this month. This makes 21 900 boots a day on average.
  • 9 226 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
  • 104 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.

How do we know this?

Posted Wed 09 May 2018 03:23:45 AM CEST
Tails report for March, 2018

Releases

March was a heavy month regarding Tails releases: shortly after putting out the Tails 3.6 major release, we had to publish an emergency 3.6.1 release to fix security issues identified at Pwn2Own, and finally we had to prepare another emergency release (3.6.2) that was released in April. Due to an unfortunate combination of software development and release management mistakes, applying these upgrades was harder than usual for Tails users; apologies!

The following changes were introduced in Tails 3.6:

  • You can now lock your screen by clicking on the Lock button in the system menu.

    • If you set up an administration password when starting Tails, you can unlock your screen with your administration password.
    • Otherwise, you can set up a password to unlock your screen when locking your screen for the first time.

  • We improved a lot the backend of the Additional Software persistence feature. Your additional software is now:

    • Installed in the background after the session starts instead of blocking the opening of the desktop.
    • Always installed even if you are offline.

  • Install pdf-redact-tools, a command line tool to clean metadata and redact PDF files by converting them to PNG images.

  • An error message indicating the name of the graphics card is now displayed when Tails fails to start GNOME.

  • The Tails documentation launcher on the desktop now opens the documentation on our website if you are online.

  • We activated the AppArmor profile for Thunderbird from Debian to confine Thunderbird for security.

  • Rewrite some internal scripts from shell scripting to Python, thanks to GoodCrypto.

  • Remove the display of debug and error messages when starting.

  • Fix the ISO image selection being unavailable in Tails Installer in languages other than English. (#15233)

  • Fix OpenPGP Applet being unresponsive when decrypting a lot of text. (#6398)

The following changes were introduced in Tails 3.6.1:

Code

Documentation and website

We documented how to:

We also made the output of the GnuPG command line to verify an ISO image more consistent across different versions of GnuPG.

User experience

  • From a session at the Internet Freedom Festival, we took notes on how participants used the metaphor of a tent to describe Tails:

    • It's portable: you can store it in your backpack.
    • It's amnesic: it's empty every time you set it up.
    • It's incognito: you can move it around and it looks like other tents.

  • We started discussing a collaboration with Simply Secure to explain better what is Tails. The goals are both to reach a consensus among contributors and to make it easier to explain Tails to the world.

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Several users complained about Tails Installer failing.

  2. And there seems to be more people complaining about losing their Persistent Volume than usual.

Infrastructure

  • We've worked on a more detailed scheme to include our web translation platform into our workflow (#10034).

  • We documented our survey platform.

Funding

Outreach

Past events

  • Emma Peel and sajolida where at the Internet Freedom Festival where they participated in several sessions on documentation and user experience and presented Tails in the tools showcase.

  • anonym and intrigeri attended the Tor meeting in Rome. We've had lots of interesting discussions there, including heart-warming ones about how Tails could work more closely with the Tor project in the future.

  • Tails was presented by jvoisin at the Journées FedeRez in Paris, France. The slides (in French) are available here.

Upcoming events

  • Tails contributors will attend CryptoRave (São Paulo, May 4-5) and will run a number of Tails/Tor-related events there, including a users meetup aimed at gathering feedback and better understanding who our users are, what they do with Tails, what works well and what is problematic. If you're around São Paulo, join us there! :)

Press and testimonials

  • 2018-03-19: Edward Snowden retweeted about our participation to the DuckDuckGo Privacy Challenge explaining:

    Because I've used @Tails_live for years. The journalists who broke the mass surveillance revelations of 2013 all relied on it. Free, libre, and open source software projects quietly save the world every day, even when you can't see it, and their success depends on your support.

Translation

All the website

  • de: 52% (2820) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 46% words translated
  • es: 44% (2422) strings translated, 0% strings fuzzy, 34% words translated
  • fa: 38% (2071) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 40% words translated
  • fr: 91% (4933) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 89% words translated
  • it: 35% (1899) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 31% words translated
  • pt: 23% (1245) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 19% words translated

Total original words: 57706

Core pages of the website

  • de: 75% (1433) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 76% words translated
  • es: 93% (1771) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 89% words translated
  • fa: 33% (636) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
  • fr: 98% (1862) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 98% words translated
  • it: 69% (1322) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 70% words translated
  • pt: 41% (781) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 41% words translated

Total original words: 17281

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 693 060 times this month. This makes 22 357 boots a day on average.
  • 13 315 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
  • 139 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.

How do we know this?

Posted Wed 11 Apr 2018 03:23:45 AM CEST
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