Welcome to Tails monthly report for November 2018! A lot has happened in the last month, but first of all, we want to point you to our ongoing donation campaign! If everyone using Tails today donated $6, our fundraiser would be done in just one day!

Upcoming releases

Very soon, we will drastically simplify the installation for Windows and macOS and improve support for UEFI computers! To this aim, with the Tails 3.12 release scheduled for January 29, we will start distributing USB images in addition to ISO images.

Code

We've been working hard since a few months on our USB image project (#15292) and will soon send a call for testing. The main remaining challenge is to build the USB image reproducibly (#15985).

We resumed work on porting Tails to Debian 10 (Buster). Our Foundations Team will have a sprint focused on this topic next month and should publish a first beta release by the end of April.

We identified and fixed one root cause for a major problem some users face when upgrading Tails: part of the user interface that provided feedback about the progress of the upgrade was broken, which lead users to restart Tails before the upgrade was fully applied. While we were at it, we improved the user experience of the upgrade process, which will now require user confirmation before shutting down the network connection. (#14754, #15282)

Tails 3.11, scheduled for December 11 and released on time fixed a great number of long-standing problems and recent regressions.

Infrastructure

We made good progress on adjusting our infrastructure to upcoming changes at our previous providers:

We now host our website on our own infrastructure. An unintended but welcome side-effect is that browsing our website is snappier than it used to. (#14588)

We renamed our Redmine instance from https://labs.riseup.net/ to https://redmine.tails.boum.org/. This avoids confusion about who is responsible for this service and it will allow our Riseup friends to set up single sign-on (SSO) for their own services.

We built a plan to migrate our Schleuder mailing lists to different servers, depending on their privacy, security and availability requirements. We will implement it in December.

Funding

We continued working on our yearly donation campaign:

We added to our donation banner a counter for the total amount. We reached 23% of our fundraising goal in the first half of the campaign.

We got 64% more donors, which is amazing! Thanks a lot for your support :) But so far we raised 51% less in amount compared to last year. More people are donating but we are missing the big donors that we had in the past.

Outreach

We published an extensive summary of our achievements in 2018 and also announced that in addition to bitcoins, you can now donate using four new cryptocurrencies. By the way, donations! Have you already met our donation campaign site? Cryptocurrencies are only one way to donate, but wouldn't it be interesting to try to donate in every way possible?

Upcoming events

At the monthly meeting, the idea of attending FOSDEM came up

sajolida pointed out the Internet Freedom Festival, which will happen in April next year.

Translation

All the website

de: 50% (3112) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated

es: 56% (3459) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy, 47% words translated

fa: 30% (1864) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated

fr: 86% (5273) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 86% words translated

it: 32% (1986) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 28% words translated

pt: 25% (1541) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 21% words translated

Total original words: 64362

de: 81% (1544) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 82% words translated

es: 95% (1813) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy, 95% words translated

fa: 31% (591) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 31% words translated

fr: 96% (1835) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy, 97% words translated

it: 68% (1308) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 69% words translated

pt: 44% (836) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 47% words translated

Total original words: 17343

Metrics

Tails has been started more than 695 882 times this month. This makes 23196 boots a day on average.

7 668 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.

66 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.

How do we know this?

Oh, it's already the end of the monthly report! So now is probably the good time for whose of you who can donate to head over to our donation campaign page!