Plus new Matrix goodies, why AWS is investing in Blender, and more.

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• Google kills Android Things, its IoT OS, in January — Google announced it had basically given up on the project as a general-purpose IoT operating system in 2019, but now there's an official shutdown date thanks to a new FAQ page detailing the demise of the OS.
• Android Things Shutdown FAQ
• Ron Amadeo on Twitter — Oof, Google promised three years of updates when Android Things launched in May 2018, the actual support it delivered? One year, three months.
• Google, Qualcomm partner to bring 4 OS Android updates to new chipsets — The new plan is three years of major OS updates and four years of security updates.
• Qualcomm promises three years of Android updates for its entire SoC lineup
• Google acquires CloudReady OS to make PCs Chromebooks — Neverware lets you turn old PCs and Macs into Chromebook-esque devices through its CloudReady OS. While primarily aimed at schools and enterprises, a free “Home” edition for everyone is available. Google has now acquired Neverware and CloudReady with plans to integrate it with Chrome OS.
• Native Steam (Borealis) on Chrome OS likely arriving mid-2021
• GTK 4.0 Officially Released After More Than 4 Years of Development — The GTK development officially released today the next generation of the GTK toolkit, GTK 4.0, after being in development for more than four years.
• GTK 4.0 Toolkit Officially Released
• GTK 4.0 – GTK Development Blog
• Matrix.to: Reloaded — A challenge we regularly face is all the factors which make Matrix flexible and powerful as an open, secure decentralised protocol also increase the difficulty of getting started.
• Matrix.to — Create shareable links to Matrix rooms, users or messages without being tied to any app
• Introducing Cerulean — Alongside all the normal business-as-usual Matrix stuff, we’ve found some time to do a mad science experiment over the last few weeks - to test the question: "Is it possible to build a serious Twitter-style decentralised microblogging app using Matrix?"
• Google AMP gets a shock to its system as advisor quits, lawsuit claims foul play — Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages technology, known as AMP among web publishers, took a beating this week as an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Texas charged that the ad biz used AMP to hinder competition.
• I have resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee – Terence Eden’s Blog — I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary & unnecessary incursion into the open web.
• AWS joins the Blender Development Fund — AWS committed to a period of three years, specifically to support character animation tools development.

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• Xfce 4.14 released — After 4 years and 5 months of work, we are pleased to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.14, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.12.
• Xubuntu Daily
• Open Sourcing the Kubernetes Security Audit — The group created an open request for proposals, taking responsibility for evaluating the submitted proposals and recommending the vendor best suited to complete a security assessment against Kubernetes, bearing in mind the high complexity and wide scope of the project.
• wg-security-audit at master · kubernetes/community · GitHub
• Someone audited the Kubernetes source
• Server-side rendering for AMP — AMP now officially supports a technique called server-side rendering (SSR) which you can apply to your AMP pages to make them load even faster. Our tests show increases of up to a whopping 50% on the popular FCP metric.
• OSdisc.com Has Closed — In just the past couple days, a very popular Linux OS supply site has closed.

Plus the impact of Google suspending business with Huawei, the recent ChromeOS feature silently dropped, and more.

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• ZombieLoad Attack — After Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow, we discovered more critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. The ZombieLoad attack allows stealing sensitive data and keys while the computer accesses them.
• Understanding the MDS vulnerability: What it is, why it works and how to mitigate it
• Understanding Microarchitectural Data Sampling (aka MDS, ZombieLoad, RIDL & Fallout) from Red Hat - YouTube
• AMD Immune to Crippling MDS Vulnerabilities
• AMP to start hiding google from the URL — Signed-Exchange is something which can help you show your own domain in AMP page URLs, with all the AMP-Cache capabilities intact.
• A report from the AMP Advisory Committee Meeting
• Dual booting Windows on Chromebooks dead — Project Campfire turned up in the Chromium world this past August.
• Microsoft open-sources a crucial algorithm behind its Bing Search services — Microsoft today announced that it has open-sourced a key piece of what makes its Bing search services able to quickly return search results to its users
• Microsoft AI lab experiments
• South Korean government planning Linux migration as Windows 7 support ends — The Herald quotes the Interior Ministry as indicating that the transition to Linux, and the purchase of new PCs, would cost about 780 billion won ($655 million), but also anticipates long-term cost reductions with the adoption of Linux. The report doesn't mention a specific distro, instead "hopes to avoid building reliance on a single operating system."
• Windows dual booting no longer looking likely on Pixelbooks
• Google suspends business with Huawei — “Huawei will only be able to use the public version of Android and will not be able to get access to proprietary apps and services from Google,” the source said.
• Command Line Threat Hunting Video

Plus AMP's new governance model kicks in, and the Necuno Mobile Plasma tease.

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• Clear Linux now easier to try and to install — The addition of the desktop-live image itself is also certainly a welcome addition for those planning a desktop install rather than first having to install the basic Clear Linux without any desktop environment, especially if you first want to verify your system's hardware support/compatibility before proceeding with the installation. From their downloads area the new images are the "live-desktop-beta" images.
• Fedora 31 Will Likely Be Cancelled Or Significantly Delayed — Following the release of Fedora 30 in May, there might not be another major Fedora Linux release for about one year's time.
• Fedora may move to annual releases — Not formally drafted besides a mailing list thread, there is a new proposal about moving Fedora to an annual platform release following Fedora 30. This was suggested by Red Hat's RHEL development coordinator, Brendan Conoboy.
• AMP Project’s new governance model now in effect — Two key features of AMP’s new governance model are the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and the Advisory Committee (AC).  We have endeavored to ensure that these committees consist of people who bring a wide variety of perspectives, with representatives from different AMP constituencies.  
• Necuno Mobile: An open phone with Plasma Mobile — With a focus on openness, security and privacy, the Necuno Mobile is built around an ARM® Cortex®-A9 NXP i.MX6 Quad and a Vivante GPU. According to Necuno, none of the closed firmware has access to the memory.
• Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation Announce Joint Collaboration — This partnership with the Linux Foundation will enable the RISC-V Foundation to grow the RISC-V ecosystem with improved support for the development of new applications and architectures across all computing platforms.
• Firecracker mini VMs tipped to the next big thing — Firecracker can launch user space or application code in less than 125ms and microVMs at a rate of 150 per second per host. It churns out fairly compact microVMs too, with each requiring less than 5MiB of memory overhead, so thousands can co-exist on a single server.

It’s also been a big week for Linux on Windows with Flatpaks and a new distro running on WSL, and a flawless Ubuntu VM experience.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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• Firefox VR browser released — Mozilla announced back in April that it was developing Firefox Reality, a next-generation web browser specifically for standalone VR and AR devices, and now it’s actually here. Firefox Reality 1.0 is available today as a set of free downloads for HTC Viveport, Oculus Go, and Daydream headsets.
• Google loosens grasp on AMP — we want to move to a model that explicitly gives a voice to all constituents of the community, including those who cannot contribute code themselves, such as end-users. The change we are proposing is based on months of research, through which we’ve decided to follow the lead of the Node.js project and move to a consensus-seeking governance model.
• Mir reaches 1.0.0 — We’re pleased to announce the release of Mir 1.0.0. The main things to note with this release are support for the Wayland xdg-shell (stable) extension and improved facilities for customizing display layouts.
• Ubuntu 14.04 to receive extended maintenance — With the End of Life of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in April 2019, and to support the planning efforts of developers worldwide, Canonical is announcing the availability of ESM for Ubuntu 14.04.
• Running Ubuntu VMs on Windows made easier — Today we’re very pleased to announce that an optimised Ubuntu Desktop image is available from the Hyper-V gallery. This will give an optimum experience when running Ubuntu Desktop as a guest on a Windows 10 Pro desktop host.
• First purpose-built distro available for WSL — WLinux is at its core a custom Linux distro built from Debian stable specifically for use on WSL.
• Flatpak running on WSL — Windows Subsystem for Linux fans, rejoice! Flatpak can now ease your dependency blues. Sort of.
• Linus takes a break and a new CoC for kernel devs

Debian and Kali land on Windows 10's Linux Subsystem, and Noah joins Chris from SCaLE16x

Special Guest: Noah J. Chelliah.

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• OpenWatch — Modular smartphone and smartwatch devices may be a niche idea, but it’s one that has a lot of passionate people behind it. The process of having to buy a brand new device just to upgrade or replace a single component feels very archaic. Unless you’re willing to pry apart a device yourself (or pay someone to do it), you’re forced to purchase a brand new device when something inside of it breaks.
• Fedora IoT Edition — So what will be happening over the coming weeks (and months)? We’ll be getting the working group in place, getting an initial monthly release process in place so that people can start to have something to kick the tires with and provide feedback and drive discussion.
• More AMP tyranny from Google — Google’s goal is to extend support in features like the Top Stories carousel to AMP-like content that (1) meets a set of performance and user experience criteria and (2) implements a set of new web standards. Some of the proposed standards in the critical path are Feature Policy, Web Packaging, iframe promotion, Performance Timeline, and Paint Timing.
• ​GitHub makes open-source project licensing easier with an open-source program | ZDNet — GitHub has open sourced Licensed, an internal tool they've used to automate some of GitHub's open-source projects licensing process.
• Debian & Kali Linux Are Now On Windows Subsystem for Linux — Joining Kali, Ubuntu, SUSE, and openSUSE on Windows WSL now is also Debian Linux.
• SCALE 16x Report — SCaLE 16X – the 16th annual Southern California Linux Expo. Pasadena Convention Center.

Plus Ubuntu's plans to collect user metrics, the Linux on Galaxy survey, and Plasma desktop on a Nintendo Switch.

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• dtrace relicensed as GPLv2 — This changeset integrates DTrace module sources into the main kernel source tree under the GPLv2 license. Sources have been moved to appropriate locations in the kernel tree.
• Firefox adding sponsored stories to the new tab page — What’s next? We recently started testing personalized recommendations, and we will soon experiment with showing an occasional sponsored story within the Pocket Recommendations section in New Tab Page in Firefox Beta. This will be shown to a small portion of U.S. users as we start to test.
• AMP Stories and AMP for email — Starting with the Gmail Developer Preview of AMP for Email today, the new feature will allow users to perform simple tasks such as booking calendar appointments and checking into flights directly within the layout of the email.
• Related
• Ubuntu plans metrics collection — "We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it," explained Will Cooke, the director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical.
• Ubuntu adds 'Minimal Install' option 18.04 — The new “minimal install” option appears in section of the installer that asks whether you want to install restricted codecs to enable multimedia playback alongside the main desktop.
• Linux on Galaxy Survey — “In order to determine how to best design the product to meet your needs, we ask for a moment of your time to complete this Linux on Galaxy Survey.”
• Plasma running on a Switch — Code execution is all the rage these days, but can your Switch do *this*?