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Welcome back, tech enthusiasts! 🚀

This week’s edition is packed with updates on GitHub, AI security, and cloud best practices. From Copilot improvements and security concerns to Azure disaster recovery and .NET deep dives, there’s plenty to explore.

Here’s what’s in store:

• 🎓 Join the GitHub Copilot Hackathon (NL) and explore the latest updates

• 🔄 Ubuntu 20 GitHub Actions runners are being retired—time to upgrade

• 🤖 Copilot jailbreaks and OpenAI’s o1 model now free for all users

• 🔍 Git credential helper vulnerabilities—check if you’re patched

• ☁️ What happens when an Azure region goes down?

• 💡 Exploring why companies choose C# and how to build a garbage collector

With AI advancements, security threats, and cloud strategies evolving rapidly, this edition will keep you informed. Let’s dive in!

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GitHub Digest

Want to learn about Copilot and have some room in your agenda tomorrow (and live in the Netherlands)? Then join the Copilot Hackathon at Xebia. Read about the event and sign up using the link below.

The Ubuntu 20 runner will be retired on April 1st and you will need to upgrade to 22 or 24 soon. As part of the retirement process, GitHub will fail the usage of the version 20 runner on a certain set of days, so you are aware of any potential issues.

The Workspaces feature of GitHub received some interesting new features. Like auto-validation, where it checks if it actually can build the proposed changes. See what is next for the Workspaces:

Using Copilot in JetBrains IDEs like Rider? Then you might run into the issue with keybindings, where the shortcuts are just different compared to the other tools. My colleague wrote a nice blog post about how to configure this.

Yes, you can jailbreak LLMs, including Copilot. Read the article to see what you can do to get Copilot the answer questions it actually denies to answer.

GitHub Copilot already has a free tier, but now it also has access to the OpenAI o1 reasoning model. Giving you more power and options by using this advanced AI model.

Coding Corner

I’m no lawyer, but according to this article, the data protection between US and EU can change with the new legislation in the White House.

Ai, another set of attacks to get credentials using the git credential helper. Find out what they do and if you have the patched versions already.

AI is everywhere, and so are the risks. Browse through this repository and see how they impact you.

Azure Updates & Insights

It can happen—a data center is hit by a disaster. Luckily, you have a disaster recovery plan, or don’t you?

Right click, deploy or is there a better way to get releases to production? It looks like Microsoft uses a safe way to deploy their applications to Azure.

This is a great example of how to build Time-based one-time passwords using Azure Functions.

.NET Nook

Considering C# for your next project? Tracebit did as well and outlined why they did choice this over other frameworks.

Not sure I ever want to do this; building a Garbage Collector. That is why I like a managed runtime, so I don’t have to do this. But if you are interested in the techniques behind this, then this series is a good start.

Closing Thoughts

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