In August, we celebrated the 10 years birthday of the first public announcement of amnesia, the project which would eventually give birth to Tails after the merger with Incognito 🎂 :)

This led Edward Snowden to write this testimonial: “In 2013, when a small team of journalists and I went head to head against @NSAGov to reveal the secret system of global mass surveillance, we used @Tails_Live to communicate—to reduce the risk of basic but deadly mistakes.

The NSA only learned of our plan when it hit the news.”

Releases

Tails 4.0~beta1 was released on August 7. This is the first beta for the upcoming version of Tails based on Debian 10 (Buster). Many thanks to everyone who tried it and gave us feedback!

Tails 3.16 and 4.0~beta2 are scheduled for September 3.

Code

Documentation and website

We finished updating all of our documentation to Tails based on Debian 10 (Buster). (#16282)

We improved the troubleshooting section when Tails doesn't start on Mac. (#15127)

User experience

We reworked in depth our plans to improve the user experience of the network connection (configuration and startup).

Infrastructure

We upgraded to Gitolite v3.

We fixed a number of bugs in our web translation platform, thanks to feedback from early adopters. It should soon be officially ready for production usage.

We spent lots of time fighting a DDoS against our Redmine. Not our idea of fun :(

We scheduled the upgrade of our Jenkins (#10068).

Funding

We're working on a joint grant proposal with Tor and the Guardian Project.

Outreach

Past events

carlosm2 organized a testing of Tails 4.0~beta1 at the Rancho Electrónico (Ciudad de Mexico) on Saturday August 17.

Upcoming events

Press and testimonials

2019-08-04: In Attorney for Daniel Hale blasts indictment for leaking classified drone documents, David Gilmour from The Daily Dot explains that the indictment of Daniel Hale for the leaks of the Drone Papers focuses his use of anonymity tools like Tails and Tor. According to Hale's attorneys Jesselyn Radack “These cases are criminalizing both whistleblowing and journalistic best practices like using encryption and protecting source anonymity”.

Translations

All the website

de: 41% (2301) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 38% words translated

es: 52% (2896) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 44% words translated

fa: 31% (1780) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 34% words translated

fr: 90% (5052) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 89% words translated

it: 33% (1849) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 29% words translated

pt: 25% (1436) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 22% words translated

Total original words: 58995

de: 69% (1227) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 71% words translated

es: 79% (1404) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 81% words translated

fa: 34% (607) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 32% words translated

fr: 97% (1733) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 97% words translated

it: 61% (1094) strings translated, 17% strings fuzzy, 64% words translated

pt: 44% (791) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 47% words translated

Total original words: 16629

Metrics

Tails has been started more than 741 964 times this month. This makes 23 934 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?