GitHub Copilot deprecates four models on 2 October, and Mullvad shuts down its public encrypted DNS (migrate by 2 November 2026)

Two real items crossed the wire tonight, not a quiet night: a GitHub Copilot model deprecation off the monitored changelog feed, and — via discovery — Mullvad shutting down a public service a lot of privacy-minded developers wired into their setups. No corrections are outstanding. Tonight’s three re-verification flags were again the Microsoft pages that render their dates in JavaScript (Sentinel SAP, Azure Automation runtimes, Exchange Web Services), each re-confirmed correct by hand against Microsoft’s own APIs and page metadata.

New: GitHub Copilot deprecates four models — 2 October 2026

GitHub is deprecating four models that currently appear in the GitHub Copilot model selector, across every Copilot experience — Chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes, and code completions — on 2 October 2026:

• Gemini 3.5 Flash → Gemini 3.8 Flash
• Gemini 3.6 Flash → Gemini 3.8 Flash
• Kimi K2.7 Code → Kimi K3
• Claude Opus 4.7 → Claude Opus 5

For most developers this is invisible: you pick a model from the menu, so you will simply choose a supported one — and the replacement is usually the better default anyway. GitHub says no action is required to remove the models once deprecated. The people who need to act before the date are those who pinned a model by name — a script or integration that selects a Copilot model through the API, a CI step tied to a specific model, or a Copilot Enterprise / Business policy that allow-lists particular models. After 2 October, a request naming one of the four no longer runs on that model. Enterprise and Business administrators may also need to enable the replacements through their model policies in Copilot settings before users can pick them. (We left this entry without a CLI fingerprint on purpose — these are third-party model names used far more widely through their own vendors’ APIs, where this Copilot deprecation doesn’t apply, so a fingerprint would fire on people it doesn’t affect.)

New: Mullvad shuts down its public encrypted DNS (DoH) — 2 November 2026

Mullvad has run free public encrypted DNS (DoH) servers since 2022 — the resolvers at dns.mullvad.net and its base / extended / family / adblock variants that let anyone encrypt their DNS queries away from their ISP. It is now shutting that service down and financially supporting the Quad9 Foundation instead, with a clear instruction: if you manually configured a Mullvad DoH server, switch before 2 November 2026.

Mullvad VPN app users are unaffected — the app’s internal DNS never used these public servers. The people who need to act are those who hardcoded a Mullvad DoH endpoint into a device, router, browser, or resolver config, or installed a Mullvad DoH profile on iOS/macOS (those profiles will stop working). Mullvad Browser users on the default DoH are migrated to Quad9 automatically; anyone who customized it should set it back to the default. The failure mode is the quiet kind — a resolver that works today just stops resolving after the date, which looks like “the internet is down” rather than a DNS error. This entry is detectable: the lastcall CLI matches the retiring dns.mullvad.net hostname (never the Quad9 replacement), so a Mullvad DoH endpoint written into a config surfaces as a warning instead of a November outage.

On the board

• 4 September — re-checked today: we re-verified Google’s reported removal of Google Assistant on mobile on its reported 4 September start date. Google’s first-party post still gives no explicit date — only “over the coming months” and “later this year” — so the entry stays signaled with no countdown, per our no-inferred-dates rule. The moment Google publishes a date, we record it and start the clock.
• 7 September — three days out: OpenSSL 3.0 reaches end-of-life.

Further out: the GitHub Copilot MAI-Code-1-Flash deprecation (10 September), the Relay app and Microsoft Sentinel SAP connector agent retirements (14 September), the Azure Maps Render v1 API retirement (17 September), OpenAI’s Sora 2 video API (24 September), then a cluster on 30 September and 1 October, the GitHub Copilot model deprecations (2 October), the .NET 8 and 9 end of support (10 November), and PostgreSQL 14 end-of-life (12 November). The full board with live countdowns is on the calendar.