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.

Plus Void Linux issues a warning, running Linux on ARM laptops built for Windows, and more.

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• Google refocuses Android Things as a ‘platform for OEM partners’ — When Google announced Android Things at its 2015 I/O developer conference, it pitched it as a versatile, embedded, and open operating system designed to run on low-power and memory-constrained internet of things (IoT) devices with support for Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, and the Weave protocol.
• Android Developers Blog: An Update on Android Things
• Now you can run Linux on (some) ARM laptops designed for Windows 10 on ARM — The folks behind the AArch64 Laptops open source project on github have come up with a way to install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on some of the first Windows 10 on ARM laptops.
• aarch64-laptops
• Microsoft Developer: You Still Should Have Anti-Virus With Windows Subsystem For Linux — In CPU/system benchmarks we routinely see Windows 10 WSL with Ubuntu and other distributions performing very well, but when it comes to disk reads/writes, it's drastically slower than bare metal Linux installs and in some cases much slower still than dedicated virtual machines.
• What’s new for WSL in Windows 10 version 1903? – Windows Command Line Tools For Developers — The next Windows update is coming soon and we’re bringing exciting new updates to WSL with it. These include accessing the Linux file system from Windows, and improvements to how you manage and configure your distros in the command line.
• Red Hat Satellite to standardize on PostgreSQL backend — We are going to consolidate and use a single database, PostgreSQL. We began investigating a move to a single database upstream in Pulp as early as 2016.
• [Pulp-dev] Transition from Mongo to Postgre — MongoDB is great at what it does and a good fit for some use cases, but we learned that it's not the best fit for Pulp.
• (Red Hat dropped MongoDB in January)
• Digitalocean launches Managed Databases for PostgreSQL — Starting with support for PostgreSQL, Managed Databases enables developers of all skill levels to quickly and easily spin up a high-performance database cluster that is worry-free and scalable
• Void Linux loses control of .eu domain — We would like to warn people of a domain name that is no longer under Void Linux control. voidlinux.eu lapsed in its original registration, and was purchased by an unknown 3rd party before Void Linux could regain ownership.
• J.P. Morgan Creates Digital Coin for Payments — J.P. Morgan this month became the first U.S. bank to create and successfully test a digital coin representing a fiat currency. The JPM Coin is based on blockchain-based technology enabling the instantaneous transfer of payments between institutional accounts.
• JPMorgan is creating a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar — The new cryptocurrency will be built atop JPMorgan's Quorum blockchain technology, a variant of Ethereum that has been modified to serve the needs of a major financial institution like JPMorgan.
• Don’t Call JP Morgan Chase’s New ‘JPM Coin’ a Cryptocurrency