Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

In a surprising development, Lenovo announced today that it will offer Ubuntu Linux preinstalled on ThinkPad laptops and ThinkStation desktop PCs. Lenovo announced that it was bringing Linux to its workstation products in June, but this expansion brings the open-source platform to the firm’s mainstream business PCs. That said, Lenovo is targeting developers with this support, not traditional business users.

Edge is finally coming to Linux. At Ignite 2020 today, Microsoft announced that Edge for Linux will be available in the Dev preview channel starting in October.

Goodbye Windows 10 update KB4559309, we hardly knew ye. After less than two months, in which the Windows 10 update managed to annoy many users by seemingly slowing down their devices, Microsoft has now unceremoniously killed off the update.

Microsoft has suffered a rare cyber-security lapse earlier this month when the company’s IT staff accidentally left one of Bing’s backend servers exposed online. The server is believed to have exposed more than 6.5 TB of log files containing 13 billion records originating from the Bing search engine.

Critical vulnerabilities in multi-factor authentication (MFA) implementation in cloud environments where WS-Trust is enabled could allow attackers to bypass MFA and access cloud applications such as Microsoft 365 which use the protocol according to new research from Proofpoint.

Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to Linux kernel developers requesting that Linux run as the root partition on the Hyper-V, its hypervisor software for running Windows and non-Windows instances on hardware. Microsoft “wants to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor”, according to Microsoft principle software engineer Wei Liu.

Microsoft’s Xbox Series S won’t offer the enhancements baked into the Xbox One X versions of a game. Instead, it’ll run the Xbox One S version. Microsoft has, in a single stroke, managed to ruin what was the best and most attractive part of its console policy, and the part that brought it into line with PCs — the promise of playing yesterday’s games at top quality for less money.

Windows 10 has run into trouble with its latest cumulative update for the May 2020 Update, it probably won’t surprise you to learn, and this time the apparent casualty is Linux support.

Microsoft has published today its monthly batch of security updates, also known as Patch Tuesday. This month, the OS maker patched 129 vulnerabilities across 15 products, ranging from Windows to ASP.NET. Of note is that this month, of the 129 vulnerabilities, 32 were classified as remote code execution issues, which are bugs that permit attackers to exploit vulnerable applications remotely, over a network. Of these 32, 20 also received a severity classification of “critical,” the highest rating on Microsoft’s scale, making the 20 vulnerabilities some of the most important bugs patched across Microsoft products this month.

Developers using Visual Studio Codespaces will need to move to GitHub Codespaces but there’s no way to migrate existing projects from one service to the other.