[tor-project] Tails report for February, 2019

[intrigeri]

Hi,

Here is a summary of what happened in Tails land in February, 2019.

Online version with additional links:

  https://tails.boum.org/news/report_2019_02/

This month has seen the highest number of Tails boots per day ever:
27% more than a year ago! This is motivating: it confirms that Tails
is useful and relevant.

Releases
========

* Tails 3.12.1 was released on February 13.
  A critical vulnerability in the Skia library, used by Firefox
  and Chrome to render graphics, prompted this emergency release.

* Tails 3.13 is scheduled for March 19.

Code
====

- We have coordinated with the Tor Browser team wrt. the scope and
  timeline of upcoming big changes that will impact our work.

- We have implemented a potential fix and a mitigation measure for
  a longstanding bug: `persistence.conf` sometimes becomes empty.

- We have prepared a number of updates for Tails 3.13:
  - Debian Stretch 9.8, merged
  - Linux 4.19.20, merged
  - Tor 0.3.5, in progress

- We released new versions of the verification extension to fix usability
  and security issues:

  - Download page is not refreshed when verification extension is
    installed.
  - Verification extension should not be detectable as per Sjösten, and
    al.
  - Updated to Forge 0.8.0.


Documentation and website
=========================

- We improved the known issue about clock going backwards.


User experience
===============

- We published 3 personas that describe the target audience of
  Tails: https://tails.boum.org/contribute/personas/

- We contracted visual artists to work on a video to explain how to start Tails
  (and use the boot menu key).

- We analyzed why some people are wiping their persistence while
  upgrading with USB images.

- We investigated outgoing network connections initiated by
  Etcher and researched how to solve the privacy concerns
  we have with them.

Hot topics on our help desk
===========================

1. Electrum users are complaining about the fact that it may need to be upgraded.

2. Some people are affected by a regression with some Intel graphics
   cards (Braswell, Kaby Lake).

3. Partially applied automatic upgrades still cause trouble to some users.

Infrastructure
==============

- We took one more step towards making our CI feedback loop shorter:
  we've ordered sample candidate hardware. Next step is to benchmark it.
- The sysadmin team met a few times to update our plans for next year.
- We've helped upstream a solution to the dreaded ikiwiki PO vs. inlines bug.
- As part of our effort to migrate to better maintained Puppet modules,
  we've switched to the puppetlabs/mysql module.
- We fixed the remaining known regressions that were introduced where we
  migrated our website from _Apache_ to _nginx_.
- We started discussing our strategy and timeline towards migrating to
  GitLab.

Funding
=======

- The 2 applications that we submitted to the NLnet NGI Zero
  PET project got rejected.

Outreach
========

Past events
-----------

- emmapeel and sajolida attended FOSDEM in Brussels.

Upcoming events
---------------

- Estrella Soria will organize a Tails workshop at the Cyborgrrrls
  technofeminist gathering:
  https://twitter.com/tecnochamana/status/1103659283449819137
  on Thursday March 14 in MedialabMX, Ciudad de México.

- sajolida and emmapeel will be at the Internet Freedom Festival on
  April 1-5 in Valencia, Spain.

  sajolida will hold there a workshop on creating usable tools from
  day one with paper prototyping:
  https://platform.internetfreedomfestival.org/en/IFF2019/public/schedule/custom/975

Press and testimonials
======================

- schabenstolz explains how to hide a Tails USB stick
  *inside* a ThinkPad X230
  and connect it to an invisible switch to start on either the hard disk
  or the internal Tails USB stick:
  https://steempeak.com/blog/@schabenstolz/a-hidden-usb-stick-in-the-laptop-or-how-i-installed-tails-os-internally

Translations
============

All the website
---------------

  - de: 47% (2634) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 43% words translated
  - es: 54% (3015) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated
  - fa: 34% (1876) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 35% words translated
  - fr: 93% (5176) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 93% words translated
  - it: 35% (1939) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 30% words translated
  - pt: 27% (1516) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 23% words translated

Total original words: 59517

Core pages of the website
-------------------------

  - de: 71% (1248) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 73% words translated
  - es: 80% (1412) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 81% words translated
  - fa: 34% (615) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
  - fr: 98% (1745) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 99% words translated
  - it: 63% (1107) strings translated, 17% strings fuzzy, 65% words translated
  - pt: 45% (794) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated

Total original words: 16467

Metrics
=======

* Tails has been started more than 725 034 times this month.
  This makes 25 894 boots a day on average, which is an all
  time record :)
* 10 065 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of a Tails USB image or
  ISO from our website.
* 71 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.

(How do we know this? https://tails.boum.org/support/faq/#boot_statistics)

Cheers,
-- 
intrigeri