Microsoft quietly cuts off Win7 support for older Intel computers

If you have a Pentium III, for example, you may no longer be able to install Win7 Monthly Rollups or Security-only patches, in spite of Microsoft's promise to support you until January 2020. It’s all about SSE2 and some retroactively fudged documentation. Will anybody notice?

Tracy Rosenberg on ICE’s Corporate Collaborators, Patty Lovera on the Undercovered Farm Bill

This week on CounterSpin: “As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border,” the global tech company declared in a statement. “Family unification has been a fundamental tenet of American policy and law since the end of World War II.” The same Microsoft bragged a few months ago about ICE’s use of its Azure cloud computing services to “accelerate facial recognition and identification” of immigrants, though the post has since been altered to omit the phrase “we’re proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud.”

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Announced As a Modular Operating System for Businesses

SUSE announced the release of the long-anticipated SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 operating system for businesses and organizations of all sizes, bringing new features, updated components, and state-of-the-art GNU/Linux technologies.

Fedora To Deprecate YUM in Fedora 29 Release

Many Linux users familiar with Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are familiar with YUM, but are oblivious to its origins in the much lesser known Yellowdog Linux, a now discontinued PowerPC variant of CentOS. And now, it seems, YUM is heading in the same direction.

Fourth GSoC Report

As announced in the last report, i started looking into SSO solutions and evaluated and tested them. At the begining my focus was on SAML integration, but i soon realized that OAuth2 would be more important.

I started with installing Lemonldap-NG. LL-NG is a WebSSO solution writting in perl that uses ModPerl or FastCGI for delivering Webcontent. There is a Debian package in stable, so the installation was no problem at all. The configuration was a bit harder, as LL-NG has a complex architecture with different vhosts. But after some fiddling i managed to connect the installation to our test LDAP instance and was able to authenticate against the LL-NG portal. Then i started to research how to integrate an OAuth2 client. For the tests i had on the one hand a gitlab installation that i tried to connect to the OAuth2 providers using the omniauth-oauth2-generic strategy. To have a bit more fine grained control over the OAuth2 client configuration i also used the python requests-oauthlib module and modified the web app example from their documentation to my needs. After some fiddling and a bit of back and forth on the lemonldap-ng mailinglist i managed both test clients to authenticate against LL-NG.

Automation & Risk

Linaro created the LAVA (Linaro Automated Validation Architecture) project in 2010 to automate testing of software using real hardware. Over the seven years of automation in Linaro so far, LAVA has also spread into other labs across the world. Millions of test jobs have been run, across over one hundred different types of devices, ARM, x86 and emulated. Varied primary boot methods have been used alone or in combination, including U-Boot, UEFI, Fastboot, IoT, PXE. The Linaro lab itself has supported over 150 devices, covering more than 40 different device types. Major developments within LAVA include MultiNode and VLAN support. As a result of this data, the LAVA team have identified a series of automated testing failures which can be traced to decisions made during hardware design or firmware development. The hardest part of the development of LAVA has always been integrating new device types, arising from issues with hardware design and firmware implementations. There are a range of issues with automating new hardware and the experience of the LAVA lab and software teams has highlighted areas where decisions at the hardware design stage have delayed deployment of automation or made the task of triage of automation failures much harder than necessary.

Some More Very Satisfying Graphs

The power of cleaning up old code: removing 150kb from the average “main” ping sent multiple times per day by each and every Firefox Nightly user.

Ad-blocker-blockers hit a new low. What's the solution?

It may be the wrong day to slam the local newspapers, but this was what greeted me trying to click through to a linked newspaper article this morning on Firefox Android. The link I was sent was from the Riverside Press-Enterprise, but this appears to be throughout the entire network of the P-E's owners, the Southern California News Group (which includes the Orange County Register, San Bernardino Sun and Los Angeles Daily News):

This week in Mixed Reality: Issue 11

This week, we're making great strides in adding new features and making a wide range of improvements and our new contributors are also helping us fix bugs.

Python unit tests now running with Python 3 at Mozilla

Thirty-Five Organizations From Tech, Finance, Energy, and Biotech Join The Linux Foundation and Invest in Open Source Technology

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the addition of 32 Silver members and 3 Associate members. Linux Foundation members help support development of the shared technology resources, while accelerating their own innovation through open source leadership and participation. Linux Foundation member contributions help provide the infrastructure and resources that enable the world's largest open collaboration communities.

Cloud East Meets Cloud West: Google and Tencent Go for Linux Foundation Platinum

Tencent makes a splash in open source community by becoming a Linux Foundation platinum member

Tencent has become the latest platinum member of the Linux Foundation, and the only one from China. The move suggests the increasing importance of open source to the company’s IP strategy, which is becoming more and more global in scope.

IAM reached out to Tencent, and found out that this is merely the latest in a long line of open source initiatives at the Shenzhen-based software giant. Roger Xu, executive director of Tencent’s Open Source division, tells us that Tencent launched its open source programme back in 2010, but has started to speed up projects since 2017.

Linux Driver Indicates AMD Vega 20 Graphics Could Support PCIe 4.0

The PCI-Express 3.0 interface has been around for quite some time now. Strangely enough, the eight-year-old standard has been holding up strong. Not even the current graphics cards on the market come close to saturating a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot. Nevertheless, the next-generation of graphics cards could possibly change that--or at least that's what AMD might be trying to tell us.

AMD Linux Driver reveals Vega 20 GPUs Support PCI-Express 4.0

All eyes are set on the release of AMD’s new 7nm Vega 20 GPUs and now we have a solid proof that AMD engineers are working on the AMD Linux Driver. The driver has given us physical proofs that it has been updated with PCI-Express 4.0. The high speed interface was imminent and long longed for, and this driver has confirmed that AMD is going to give what was expected from them.

AMD Vega 20 To Get PCIe 4.0 Support on Server Graphics Cards – PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 Roadmap Reveals Consumer Platform Adoption Still Far Away

Talks about AMD using the latest PCIe standard for their next-generation Vega 20 GPUs don’t seem so far-fetched. The latest details from Videocardz show that the upcoming Vega 20 parts for servers and HPC (Deep Learning / Datacenter) market are going to adopt new standards.