February 1, 2021 | Page 9 of 13

The Linux Foundation Announces the Election of Renesas’ Hisao Munakata and GitLab’s Eric Johnson to the Board of Directors

Today, the Linux Foundation announced that Renesas’ Hisao Munakata has been re-elected to its board, representing the Gold Member community. GitLab’s Eric Johnson has been elected to represent the Silver Member community. Linux Foundation elected board directors serve 2-year terms.

Directors elected to the Linux Foundation’s board are committed to building sustainable ecosystems around open collaboration to accelerate technology development and industry adoption. The Linux Foundation expands the open collaboration communities it supports with community efforts focused on building open standards, open hardware, and open data. It is dedicated to improving diversity in open source communities and working on processes, tools, and best security practices in open development communities.

Hisao Munakata, Renesas (Gold Member)

Renesas is a global semiconductor manufacturer that provides cutting-edge SoC (system-on-chip) devices for the automotive, industry, and infrastructure. As open source support became essential for the company, Munakata-san encouraged Renesas developers to follow an “upstream-first” scheme to minimize gaps from the mainline community codebase. The industry has now accepted this as standard practice, following Renesas’ direction and pioneering work.

Munakata-san has served as an LF board director since 2019 and has reflected the voice from the embedded industry.

Renesas, which joined the Linux Foundation in 2011, has ranked in the top twelve kernel development contributor firms in the past 14 years. Munakata-san serves pivotal roles in various LF projects such as the AGL (Automotive Grade Linux) Advisory Board, Yocto Project Advisory Board, Core Embedded Linux Project, and OpenSSF. In these roles, Munakata-san has supported many industry participants in these projects to achieve harmony.

As cloud-native trends break barriers between enterprise and embedded systems, Munakata-san seeks to improve close collaboration across the industry and increase contribution from participants in the embedded systems space, focusing on safety in a post-COVID world.

Eric Johnson, GitLab (Silver Member)

Eric Johnson is the Chief Technology Officer at GitLab, Inc. — the first single application for the DevSecOps lifecycle. GitLab is a free, open core software used by more than 30 million registered users to collaborate, author, test, secure, and release software quickly and efficiently.

Eric Johnson

At GitLab, Eric is responsible for the organization that integrates the work of over a hundred external open source contributors into GitLab’s codebase every month. During his tenure Eric has contributed to a 10x+ increase in annual recurring revenue and has scaled Engineering from 100 to more than 550 people while dramatically increasing team diversity in gender, ethnicity, and country-of-residence. He’s also helped turn GitLab, Inc. into one of the most productive engineering organizations in the world, as evidenced by their substantial monthly on-premise releases.

Eric is also a veteran of 4 previous enterprise technology startups in fields as varied as marketing technology, localization software, streaming video, and commercial drone hardware/software. He currently advises two startups in the medical trial software and recycling robotics industries.

Eric brings his open source and Linux background to the Foundation. In his professional work, he has spent 17 years hands-on or managing teams that develop software that runs on Linux systems, administrating server clusters, orchestrating containers, open-sourcing privately built software, and contributing back to open source projects. Personally, he’s also administered a Linux home server for the past ten years.

As a Linux Foundation board member, Eric looks forward to using his execution-focused executive experience to turn ideas into results. Collaboration with the Linux Foundation has already begun with Distributed Developer ID and Digital Bill of Materials (DBoM). As a remote work expert with years of experience developing best practices, Eric will use his expertise to help the board, the Foundation, and its partners become more efficient in a remote, asynchronous, and geographically distributed way.

The post The Linux Foundation Announces the Election of Renesas’ Hisao Munakata and GitLab’s Eric Johnson to the Board of Directors appeared first on Linux Foundation.

Smash a Button

[Total: 0 Average: 0]

Get PDF Print This

About Me: I'm just some retired dude with a little bit more free time on my hands. If you want to support the site, why not help yourself out too by ordering some inexpensive web hosting so that you can start your own site?

USN-4736-1: Thunderbird vulnerabilities

Multiple security issues were discovered in Thunderbird. If a user were
tricked into opening a specially crafted website in a browsing context,
an attacker could potentially exploit these to cause a denial of service,
obtain sensitive information, or execute arbitrary code. (CVE-2020-26976,
CVE-2021-23953, CVE-2021-23954, CVE-2021-23960, CVE-2021-23964)

It was discovered that responses received during the plaintext phase of
the STARTTLS connection setup were subsequently evaluated during the
encrypted session. A person in the middle could potentially exploit this
to perform a response injection attack. (CVE-2020-15685)

Smash a Button

[Total: 0 Average: 0]

Get PDF Print This

USN-4735-1: PostgreSQL vulnerability

Heikki Linnakangas discovered that PostgreSQL incorrectly leaked values of
denied columns when handling certain errors. A remote attacker could
possibly use this issue to obtain sensitive information.

Smash a Button

[Total: 0 Average: 0]

Get PDF Print This

How To: Enable Root User In Ubuntu

This article is just a really simple article. In it, I’m going to tell you how to enable the root account in Ubuntu (and related derivatives) by assigning a password to the account.

First, if I may, I’d like to express some displeasures.

If you were to go ask this question on a number of sites, the people there would treat you as though you were a leper or a child. They’ll respond with things like, “You don’t need to use the root account, that’s what sudo is for.” Then, they’ll helpfully link you to a long-winded explanation of why using sudo is better.

Truth be told, they’re correct. They’re right. You shouldn’t be using the root account when it can be avoided – and it can pretty much always be avoided.

But, it demonstrates one of my pet peeves. See, they didn’t answer the question. It doesn’t matter that doing so may cause you untold horrors. What matters is that you asked a question and they opted to not answer you. It shouldn’t matter to them that you’re gonna do something stupid. What should matter to them is giving you the answer to your damned question!

So, when someone asks me how to enable the root account – I tell them. Of course, I also mention that doing so is absolutely a bad idea, but I actually answer the question. This applies to other questions. If you ask a question, I do my best to answer it – if I am indeed taking the time to answer it. Maybe you just want to know how to do something? Maybe you have a good reason for it? It doesn’t matter to me, I answer the question to the best of my ability. Included in that is the appropriate warning, but I at least answer the question.

Linux is about freedom, and that freedom should include doing things that go against the grain. That freedom should include doing things like hosing your operating system. That freedom should include doing the ‘wrong’ things and doing them the ‘wrong’ way.

So, keep that in mind when you’re answering questions – and not just this specific question. The person asking the question should get a real answer to their question, even if they’re asking the wrong question. If you can see it’s an X-Y problem, ask them for more information – but don’t be snide or aloof. If you’re not going to answer the question, just click that X in the upper right corner and close the tab. Sure, give them a warning – but also give them an answer.

So, on that note, here’s how you enable the root account in Ubuntu and distros derived from Ubuntu.

CTRL + ALT + T to open your terminal and enter:

sudo passwd root

Now, don’t get confused, it’s going to ask you for your password. Enter that, your normal account password, and press the enter button.

Next, it’s going to ask you to enter your new password for root. So, type that in and press enter. Then, it’s going to ask you to type that same password again, and again you’ll press enter when you’re done.

That’s it. Root is now enabled and you could login as root via TTY (this does not allow you to login as root via the GUI login during boot, that’s for a different article) or whatnot. You just probably shouldn’t. See, root has access to everything. It’s a security risk and it’s increasing the likelihood that you’ll irrevocably ruin your operating system when you fat-finger a command. Seriously, don’t do this. It’s just a bad idea and you can easily use ‘sudo’.

Like always, thanks for reading. Look to the right sidebar and enter a name and email address. That way, you’ll know when I publish something! You want to know that, don’t you?

Smash a Button

[Total: 2 Average: 4.5]

Get PDF Print This

Linux Foundation Newsletter February 2021: IT Training & Certification Sale, Shuah Khan & Mentorship, OpenSSF First Six Months

Click here to read the February 2021 Linux Foundation Newsletter

The post Linux Foundation Newsletter February 2021: IT Training & Certification Sale, Shuah Khan & Mentorship, OpenSSF First Six Months appeared first on Linux Foundation.

Smash a Button

[Total: 0 Average: 0]

Get PDF Print This