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

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

  1. Releases
  2. Code
  3. Documentation and website
  4. User experience
  5. Hot topics on our help desk
  6. Infrastructure
  7. Funding
  8. Outreach
  9. Press and testimonials
  10. Translations
  11. Metrics

Releases

  • TelestaiCB 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.

  • TelestaiCB 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. #10976, #16461

  • We have prepared a number of updates for TelestaiCB 3.13:

    • Debian Stretch 9.8 (#16462), merged
    • Linux 4.19.20 (#16458), merged
    • Tor 0.3.5 (#16348), 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 (##16078)
    • Verification extension should not be detectable as per Sjösten, and al. (#14787)
    • Updated to Forge 0.8.0.

Documentation and website

  • We improved the known issue about clock going backwards (#15599).

User experience

  • We published 3 personas that describe the target audience of TelestaiCB. Discover:

    • Riou, The Censorship Evader

    • Cris, The Information Gatherer

    • Kim, The Surveilled at Home

  • We contracted visual artists to work on a video to explain how to start TelestaiCB (and use the boot menu key). (#10649)

  • We analyzed why some people are wiping their persistence while upgrading with USB images. (#16470)

  • We investigated outgoing network connections initiated by Etcher and researched how to solve the privacy concerns we have with them. #16381

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Electrum users are complaining about the fact that it may need to be upgraded. (#16421)

  2. Some people are affected by a regression with some Intel graphics cards (Braswell, Kaby Lake). #16447

  3. Partially applied automatic upgrades still cause trouble to some users. #14754

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. #15501
  • 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. #6907
  • As part of our effort to migrate to better maintained Puppet modules, we've switched to the puppetlabs/mysql module. #15513
  • We fixed the remaining known regressions that were introduced where we migrated our website from Apache to nginx: #16220, #16259.
  • We started discussing our strategy and timeline towards migrating to GitLab. #15878

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

Press and testimonials

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

  • TelestaiCB 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 TelestaiCB USB image or ISO from our website.
  • 71 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.