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!

• Tails 3.6 was released on March 13 (major release).

• Tails 3.7 is scheduled for May 8.

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:

• Update Tor Browser to 7.5.2.

  This fixes a critical issue in Firefox announced on March 16.

• This release is reproducible, unlike Tails 3.6. (#15400)

Code

• The homepage for our OpenPGP Applet, previously hosted on Alioth has been moved to Alioth's successor, Salsa. The address is now https://openpgp-applet-team.pages.debian.net and the project (code repository and issue tracker) is reachable at https://salsa.debian.org/openpgp-applet-team/openpgp-applet, continuing the project of upstreaming this code so that you can use it outside of Tails. Also, version 1.1 as been released, fixing some long-standing bugs.

• We released Tails Verification 1.0 with some minor improvements from an expert review, updated jQuery and Forge libraries, and a fixed the download link on retry.

  We also documented the security aspects of Tails Verification.

• We have worked on a number of regressions that were introduced in Tails 3.6. Many fixes made their way into Tails 3.6.2 (#15434, #15437, #15433, #15400, #15449, #15371) but a few remaining issues require further investigation or have fixes waiting for review upstream.

• We made great progress on our SponsorW-funded project:

  • Regarding adding VeraCrypt support to GNOME, the libblockdev bits were merged upstream and the udisks one are in good way to be merged as well, and we made progress on the GNOME Files side.
  • Regarding Additional Software Packages, the backend and the GUI components are implemented; code review and implementation of automated tests have started.

Documentation and website

We documented how to:

• Save the configuration of your displays if you have more than one display (for example, two monitors or a projector).

• Reproduce a bug in Debian when reporting an error (for advanced users).

• Use Tails Installer to do a manual upgrade from 3.5 in languages other than English.

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

• We submitted again our proposal for the work on distributing USB images to the NLnet call for funding.

• We participated in the DuckDuckGo Privacy Challenge. We raised $4 235 and rank 5th on March 28.

• Our fundraising team got a new member. Welcome aboard!

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?

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

Changes

Upgrades and changes

• Update Tor Browser to 7.5.3.

• Update Thunderbird to 52.7.0.

• Update Intel microcode to 3.20180312.1, which adds Spectre variant 2 mitigation for most common Intel processors.

• Upgrade Linux to 4.15.11-1.

Fixed problems

• Make input of Japanese and Korean characters in Tor Browser work again.

• Fix Tor Browser so add-ons installed by users work again, such as Tails Verification.

For more details, read our changelog.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 3.6.2

• To install, follow our installation instructions.

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

  If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if you fail 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 3.6.2.

What's coming up?

Tails 3.7 is scheduled for May 8.

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!

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.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 19, 2018

Through our end-of-year donation campaign we managed to raise ~103 000€, which is nearly half of our yearly budget for core work and maintenance. A big thanks to everybody who donated!

To fill the gap, we are extremely happy to be part of DuckDuckGo's privacy crowdrising challenge.

If you haven't donated to Tails recently, now is a great opportunity to support us as your donation is likely to be matched by DuckDuckGo. It will also help us get one of the grand prizes awarded by DuckDuckGo, up to $50 000.

Donate to Tails via the DuckDuckGo donation challenge

If you have donated to Tails recently, please help us spread the word within your contacts and on social media by sharing or tweeting our campaign page.

♥ Thank you! ♥

What is Tails?

Tails is an entire operating system which preserves your privacy and provides anonymity out-of-the-box. With Tails, you can use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship. You'll be in control about the traces you want to leave and those that you'd rather see forgotten. Installed onto a USB key, Tails discreetly fits into your pocket.

For the past 9 years, we've been working on making digital security accessible to those who need it most. Counting more than 20 000 boots per day, we've proved that Tails is a reliable and successful tool that helps diverse people around the world to be safe online every day. But we think that the immense work we've done until now should have an even bigger impact on the world!

Even if you're not a Tails user yourself, your donation will help human rights defenders, journalists, activists, victims of domestic violence and many others who rely on Tails every day.

Another detail that makes our work awesome is that we contribute our improvements back to the free software community. When donating to Tails, you're supporting an entire ecosystem which we are part of.

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

Changes

Upgrades and changes

• Update Tor Browser to 7.5.2.

  This fixes a critical issue in Firefox announced on March 16.

Fixed problems

• This release is reproducible, unlike Tails 3.6. (#15400)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

• Tails Verification, our browser extension to verify Tails downloads, is broken in Tails 3.6.1. Please use it from Firefox, Chrome, or Tor Browser outside of Tails. (#15434)

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 3.6.1

• To install, follow our installation instructions.

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

  If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if you fail 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 3.6.1.

What's coming up?

Tails 3.7 is scheduled for May 8.

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!

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

Changes

New features

• You can now lock your screen by clicking on the 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.

Upgrades and changes

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

• Install drivers for the Video Acceleration API to improve the display of videos on many graphics cards.

• Upgrade Electrum from 2.7.9 to 3.0.6.

• Upgrade Linux to 4.15.0.

• Upgrade Tor to 0.3.2.10.

• Upgrade Thunderbird 52.6.0.

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

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

Fixed problems

• 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)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

• Tails Verification, our browser extension to verify Tails downloads, is broken in Tails 3.6. Please use it from Firefox, Chrome, or Tor Browser outside of Tails. (#15434)

• Enigmail is unable to download OpenPGP keys for new contacts if you have the GnuPG persistence feature activated. You can still download OpenPGP keys using Passwords and Keys. (#15395)

• This release is not reproducible, due to various python files in /usr/local having different timestamps. (#15400)

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 3.6

• To install, follow our installation instructions.

• We do not provide automatic upgrades from older Tails installations for this release, as we've hit an old bug while generating the necessary files (#13426). You have to upgrade manually.

  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 3.6.

What's coming up?

Tails 3.7 is scheduled for May 8.

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!

Releases

• Tails 3.6 is scheduled for March 13.

The following changes will be introduced in Tails 3.6:

• Upgrade Tor to 3.2.9.

• Upgrade Linux kernel to 4.15.0.

• Upgrade Thunderbird to 52.6.0 and enable its apparmor profile.

• Upgrade Electrum to 3.0.6.

• Add support for screen locking, even without administration password.

• Upgrade tails-additional-softwares, which does not block anymore the opening of the Desktop while installing the packages, and is more robust when booting in offline mode.

• Upgrade Tails installer to fix bugs when using it in languages different than english.

• Upgrade OpenPGP Applet, it does not hang anymore when decrypting large text from the clipboard.

Code

• We've continued our work on the Additional Software feature.

• We started replacing some of our shell scripts with Python ports. Thanks to GoodCrypto & segfault!

Documentation and website

• We've improved the contributor's documentation for verifying reproducible ISO builds.

• We improved our installation instructions for Windows to prevent people from skipping the Fat32 Format option of Universal USB Installer.

• We fixed our installation instructions for Ubuntu after the removal of the splash screen of Tails Installer.

User experience

• We rethought in depth the installation process and made plans to distribute USB images in addition to ISO images. Doing so will drastically simplify the installation for Windows and macOS and improve support for UEFI computers.

• We made plans to improve the user experience of Tails upgrades:

  • on the short term, we will make automatic upgrades more powerful to remove the need for any manual upgrade (except when releasing a version of Tails based on a new Debian release): #15281, ?Endless upgrades
  • on the long term, we want to research existing system upgrade technologies

• We simplified the manual upgrade instructions from Tails to remove a whole step. Doing a manual upgrade should now be less confusing and take half the time!

• We designed an error message when Tails is incompatible with a given graphics card. It will help users understand the failure better and get better help from our help desk.

Hot topics on our help desk

1. Users are still complaining about Electrum being outdated

2. A lot of reports are about the Tails Installer Unicode issue

Funding

• We submitted a proposal for our work on distributing USB images to the ISC Project's 2018 Round of Small Technology Grants.

• We renewed the agreement what have with Tor for them to pay for the hosting of our main server.

Outreach

Past events

• Tails was presented by syl at Festival des Libertés Numériques in Rennes, France.

Upcoming events

In March some Tails contributors will attend

• the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia, Spain.
• the Tor developer meeting in Rome, Italy.

Translation

Our website can be read in Spanish again, after some years in which the translation was discontinued. We thank all translators for their efforts!

All the website

• de: 51% (2808) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated
• es: 44% (2419) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 34% words translated
• fa: 38% (2070) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 40% words translated
• fr: 90% (4916) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 88% words translated
• it: 34% (1889) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 30% words translated
• pt: 22% (1244) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 19% words translated

Total original words: 57937

Core pages of the website

• de: 75% (1422) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 74% words translated
• es: 93% (1768) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 89% words translated
• fa: 33% (636) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
• fr: 97% (1845) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 95% words translated
• it: 69% (1312) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 68% words translated
• pt: 41% (780) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 41% words translated

Total original words: 17280

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 570.813 times this month. This makes 20.386 boots a day on average.
• 7.587 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
• 75 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.

How do we know this?

You can help Tails! The first release candidate for the upcoming version 3.6 is out. We are very excited and cannot wait to hear what you think about it :)

What's new in 3.6~rc1?

Significant changes since Tails 3.5 include:

• Upgrade Tor to 3.2.9.

• Upgrade Linux kernel to 4.15.0.

• Upgrade Thunderbird to 52.6.0 and enable its apparmor profile.

• Upgrade Electrum to 3.0.6.

• Add support for screen locking, even without administration password.

• Upgrade tails-additional-softwares, which does not block anymore the opening of the Desktop while installing the packages, and is more robust when botting in offline mode.

• Upgrade Tails installer to fix bugs when using it in languages different than english.

• Upgrade OpenPGP Applet, it does not hang anymore when decrypting large text from the clipboard.

Technical details of all the changes are listed in the Changelog.

How to test Tails 3.6~rc1?

Keep in mind that this is a test image. We tested that it is not broken in obvious ways, but it might still contain undiscovered issues.

But test wildly!

If you find anything that is not working as it should, please report to us on tails-testers@boum.org.

Bonus points if you first check if it is a known issue of this release or a longstanding known issue.

Upgrade from 3.5

1. Start Tails 3.5 on a USB stick installed using Tails Installer and set an administration password.

2. Run this command in a Terminal to select the "alpha" upgrade channel and start the upgrade:

   echo TAILS_CHANNEL=\"alpha\" | sudo tee -a /etc/os-release && \
        tails-upgrade-frontend-wrapper
   

   and enter the administration password when asked for the "password for amnesia".

3. After the upgrade is installed, restart Tails and choose Applications ▸ Tails ▸ About Tails to verify that you are running Tails 3.6~rc1.

Download and install

You can install 3.6~rc1 by following our usual installation instructions, skipping the Download and verify step.

Tails 3.6~rc1 ISO image ?OpenPGP signature
Tails 3.6~rc1 torrent

Known issues in 3.6~rc1

We did not discover new issues other than the longstanding ones

What's coming up?

Tails 3.6 is scheduled on March 12.

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!

Releases

• Tails 3.4 was released on January 9 (bugfix release to mitigate Meltdown and Spectre).

• Tails 3.5 was released on January 23 (bugfix release).

• Tails 3.6 is scheduled for March 13.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 3.5:

• Tor redesigned Tor Launcher, the application to configure a Tor bridge or a local proxy.

• Fix printing to a PDF in Tor Browser. (#13403 and #15024)

• Fix the opening of the Applications menu when the time synchronization changed the clock in the past. (#14250)

• Fix the opening of the documentation included in Tails for many non-English languages. (#15160)

• Fix translations of the time synchronization and "Tor is ready" notifications. (#13437)

• Remove the code to migrate from Claws Mail that was preventing Thunderbird to start in some cases. (#12734)

User experience

Interviews of Tails users

We published 4 new interviews:

• 2 from people attending 34C4: Daan and Charles.

• 4 from journalists from Latin America: Joana & Orlando and Claudia & Felix.

Additional Software

We designed the interactions and interfaces for people to install additional software every time Tails is started.

Like for our work on VeraCrypt in December, we did that through paper prototyping and formative testing with users in Berlin.

Here are the most visible parts of this upcoming feature.

When installing a Debian package:

When starting Tails with some additional packages configured:

Additional Software feature in the persistent storage configuration:

Example list of additional software:

Hot topics on our help desk

1. Electrum users were very stressed about vulnerability found in Electrum in January. Tails is not affected as our firewall blocks the connections required to exploit this vulnerability. Still, we will update Electrum in Tails 3.6.

2. Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities made our users restless.

3. Tails Installer breaks in locales other than the default was a hard one, although on the other side we see again that many people use Tails in another language than English.

4. NVidia Maxwell and Pascal graphic cards are still giving problems in Tails 3.5.

5. As every time we update the Tails signing key, many users got scared by the gpg messages received during OpenGPG ISO verification, but there are several tickets open about this #14711, #13634, #14977.

Strategic planning

We published notes on strategic planning sessions that we had in August to organize future discussions.

Infrastructure

• We made plans to finish migrating all our download mirrors to HTTPS.

• We updated almost all the Puppet modules we use. (#15154)

• We started working on migrating our infrastructure to Puppet 4. (#11834)

Funding

• We closed our donation campaign.

• We added I2P in our list of partners. Thank you I2P for your generous donation!

Outreach

Past events

Upcoming events

• Tails will be presented at the Festival des Libertés Numériques in different cities of Brittany, France, from February 10 to 25.

• emmapeel and sajolida will be at the Internet Freedom Festival, in Valencia from March 5 to 9.

• jvoisin will give a talk about Tails at the Journées FedeRez in Paris on March 10.

• intrigeri will be at the Tor Meeting in Rome from March 11 to 15.

On-going discussions

• Restructuring our support page

Translations

All the website

• de: 52% (2838) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 46% words translated
• fa: 38% (2074) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 40% words translated
• fr: 91% (4943) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 89% words translated
• it: 35% (1914) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 31% words translated
• pt: 22% (1212) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 19% words translated

Total original words: 57571

Core pages of the website

• de: 76% (1447) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 76% words translated
• fa: 33% (638) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
• fr: 98% (1873) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 99% words translated
• it: 70% (1336) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 70% words translated
• pt: 41% (779) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 41% words translated

Total original words: 17290

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 671878 times this month. This makes 21673 boots a day on average.
• 11977 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
• 107 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.

How do we know this?

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

Changes

New features

• Tor redesigned Tor Launcher, the application to configure a Tor bridge or a local proxy.

  

Upgrades and changes

• Update Tor Browser to 7.5.

• Update Linux to 4.14.13 and the microcode firmware for AMD to mitigate Spectre.

• Update Thunderbird to 52.5.

Fixed problems

• Fix printing to a PDF in Tor Browser. (#13403 and #15024)

• Fix the opening of the Applications menu when the time synchronization changed the clock in the past. (#14250)

• Fix the opening of the documentation included in Tails for many non-English languages. (#15160)

• Fix translations of the time synchronization and "Tor is ready" notifications. (#13437)

• Remove the code to migrate from Claws Mail that was preventing Thunderbird to start in some cases. (#12734)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

• Debug and error messages appear when starting Tails, including an alarming message about a kernel BUG.

  These messages do not affect the safety of Tails.

  

• In Tails Installer, it is only possible to select an ISO image when choose Use a downloaded Tails ISO image when running Tails in English. For other language, the file chooser button remains inactive:

  

• The documentation shipped in Tails doesn't open in Tor Browser anymore. The warning page of the Unsafe Browser also lacks graphical design. (#14962 and Tor #24243)

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 3.5

• To install, follow our installation instructions.

• To upgrade, automatic upgrades are available from 3.3 and 3.4 to 3.5.

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

• Download Tails 3.5.

What's coming up?

Tails 3.6 is scheduled for March 13.

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!

Releases

• No Tails version was released in December 2017.

• We updated our release schedule for 2018.

Code

• We published our plans for 2018.

• We started improving the backend of the Additional Software persistent feature. We worked on:

  • Not blocking the opening of the desktop (#9059, Blueprint).
  • Making it work offline (#14570, Blueprint).

Documentation and website

• Cody and sajolida started fixing issues identified in the expert review done by jaster on our installation instructions in August:

  • Solve all the smaller issues.
  • Create tickets for all remaining issues on Redmine. (#14548)
  • Make plans to restructure our support page in depth.

• We wrote design documents for our installation instructions and verification extension (Tails Verification).

User experience

New download page

We completely redesigned our download page. This work was triggered by the rewrite of Tails Verification (our browser extension) into Web Extensions but the result improves the overall experience.

Tails Verification is also now available for Chrome.

UX work on VeraCrypt in GNOME

We designed the user experience for our work on the integration of VeraCrypt in GNOME.

1. We analyzed the results of our online survey.

2. We did some paper prototypes of the interactions and tested them with users.

Read more about our UX work in our dedicated report.

Hot topics on our help desk

1. Printing to PDF with Tor Browser does not work anymore

Infrastructure

• We have converted two sources of email sent by cron with Icinga 2 monitoring checks that are easier to track and fine-tune (#11598, #12455).

• We have fixed a longstanding bug that made the UX of our CI system confusing when deleting a branch in Git (#15069).

• We have set up a local email server on every Jenkins node that runs automated ISO tests, as a first step towards making our automatic Thunderbird tests more robust (#12277).

• We have tuned our servers to get a little bit better performance out of our CI system (#15054).

• We have extended the blueprint about upgrading the hardware for automated tests.

Outreach

Past events

• 34c3: A fair number of Tails developers and contributors attended the 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34c3) in Leipzig. During this event, we set up a table to meet with interested parties- users, contributors, or anyone interested. We were able to reach both newcomers and long-time users of Tails, answer questions, help, exchange stickers, give away USB keys and t-shirts in exchange of donations, get feedback or just chat. It was, of course, also a great opportunity to meet people in person, discuss, work, and have fun both within the project and with friend projects.

Upcoming events

• We will have a booth at FOSDEM in Brussels on February 3–4.

• sajolida will be at the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia on March 5–9.

Translation

All the website

• de: 54% (2846) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated
• fa: 39% (2076) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 41% words translated
• fr: 91% (4786) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 88% words translated
• it: 36% (1919) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 32% words translated
• pt: 23% (1216) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 19% words translated

Total original words: 56302

Core pages of the website

• de: 76% (1454) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 77% words translated
• fa: 33% (640) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
• fr: 97% (1848) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 96% words translated
• it: 71% (1342) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 71% words translated
• pt: 41% (784) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 41% words translated

Total original words: 17235

Metrics

• Tails has been started more than 637276 times this month. This makes 20557 boots a day on average.
• 9215 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
• 66 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.