1. Releases
  2. Code
  3. Documentation and website
  4. Infrastructure
  5. On-going discussions
  6. Press and testimonials
  7. Translation
  8. Metrics

Releases

Tails 2.5 was released on August 2. It includes a number of fixes for bugs and security holes.

Code

  • We updated our roadmap, listing our priorities for the next years.

  • Use a dedicated homepage for Tor Browser in Tails to be able to customize what we are showing when people start Tails (#11725).

  • We enabled address space layout randomization in the Linux kernel (kASLR) to improve protection from buffer overflow attacks.

  • We installed rngd to improve the entropy of the random numbers generated on computers that have a hardware random number generator.

  • Upgrade to Linux 4.6. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.)

  • Improved the automatic configuration of Icedove for some use cases (#11536), and started writing automated tests for Icedove.

  • We've successfully provided an AppArmor profile to Debian's Icedove package and started integrating it into Tails (#10750).

  • We started porting Tails to Debian 9 (Stretch).

Documentation and website

  • We documented how to install Tails Installer in Ubuntu 16.04 (#11570). Unfortunately, this has to be done on the command line since Tails Installer is not listed in the new Ubuntu Software yet. But we are working on fixing this (#11569).

Infrastructure

  • 658 ISO images were automatically built and tested by our continuous integration infrastructure.
  • We started porting Tails to Debian 9 (Stretch). Adjusting our test suite to make it able to provide feedback about our early Tails 3.0 ISO images is a critical part of this project. To do so, in the past we had to go through a tedious process of updating the dozens of pictures that we ask Sikuli to recognize; but this time, thanks to the work we recently did to support Dogtail in our test suite, we are able to remove many such pictures, and replace them with higher-level means of interacting with graphical user interfaces. So far we could remove 31 such images. This change brings two major benefits: it makes our test suite more robust, and it makes our project more sustainable, by decreasing the cost of porting Tails to future versions of Debian.
  • Until recently, the parts of our test suite that rely on emulated USB storage devices were fragile on our Jenkins setup. This prevented us from running a number of tests there, e.g. those involving persistence. We kept working on it, as reported last month, both in Tails Installer itself and in our test suite (#11588, #11582). As a result, we were able to re-enable these tests on production branches in August.

On-going discussions

See the August 2016 online meeting minutes.

We've had a great Tails contributors summit, attended by almost 20 people.

Press and testimonials

Translation

All the website

  • de: 57% (2880) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 51% words translated
  • fa: 46% (2344) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 52% words translated
  • fr: 79% (3987) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 78% words translated
  • it: 17% (885) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 18% words translated
  • pt: 31% (1593) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 29% words translated

Total original words: 50832

Core pages of the website

  • de: 85% (1569) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 85% words translated
  • fa: 39% (724) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 40% words translated
  • fr: 90% (1662) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 91% words translated
  • it: 47% (871) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 53% words translated
  • pt: 51% (947) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 52% words translated

Total original words: 16995

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 589774 times this month. This makes 19025 boots a day on average.
  • 10921 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
  • 111 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.