Archive for May 19, 2025

UK’s Legal Aid Has Been Pwned

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 19, 2025 by itnerd

Reports have surfaced that a “significant amount” of private data dating back to 2010, including details of domestic abuse victims, has been hacked from Legal Aid’s online system from an April breach.  

More details here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/legal-aid-agency-data-breach

Martin Jartelius, CISO at cybersecurity company Outpost24, commented:

“While described as “the latest in a line of attacks,” it’s important to note that the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) first detected the breach on 23 April 2025 and has been actively managing the incident since then. Under UK data protection laws, a notifiable personal data breach must be reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) within 72 hours, unless it’s unlikely to pose a risk to individuals’ rights. If there’s a high risk, affected individuals must also be informed without undue delay. In this case, the public was not informed until 16 May—nearly three weeks later. While delays can sometimes be justified to assess the situation or support an organized investigation, this timeline falls well outside the expected reporting window.

“Given the sensitivity of the data involved and the scale of the breach, it’s now clear that individuals were placed at risk of further harm, including malicious targeting. Transparency and timely communication are essential—especially when public trust and personal safety are at stake.

“While the UK has recently faced attacks from groups like Scattered Spider, the Legal Aid Agency breach does not currently match their known pattern. This appears to be a targeted compromise of a digital platform, rather than a broader, hands-on infiltration and ransomware operation. This is of course based on the limited data published.”

The UK has been starting to focus more on upping their cybersecurity game. This is an example of what I mean. But this breach shows that they have much more work to do on that front.

Commvault Extends Support to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Workloads for Enhanced, Cloud-Native Cyber Resilience 

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 19, 2025 by itnerd

Commvault, a leading provider of cyber resilience and data protection solutions for the hybrid cloud, today announced it is extending its Kubernetes protection to support virtual machines (VMs) running on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. This new capability enhances cyber resilience for organizations moving to modern application environments. 

Containerized workload adoption is rapidly growing: Gartner predicts 90% of G2000 companies will use container management tools by 20271, and the Containers as a Service (CaaS) market is forecasted to hit nearly $USD 44B by 20342. This surge makes integrated data protection and recoverability critical. Enterprises must mitigate downtime from ransomware and other disruptions while managing complex data protection across hybrid environments. Using disparate tools for VMs and containers ​can ​create overhead, duplicate effort​s​, and heighten risk. These are just some of the reasons a unified cyber resilience strategy is vital for protection against evolving threats, reducing complexity, streamlining operations, and lowering total cost of ownership (TCO​)​. 

Commvault addresses this by enabling customers to automatically discover, protect, and recover VMs running on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization alongside their containerized workloads, all through the Commvault Cloud platform. These capabilities can be particularly valuable for DevOps, SRE, IT/backup admins, and technology leaders (CIOs, CISOs, CTOs) that are managing cloud-native estates.  

For customers, this means: 

  • Robust Cyber Resilience: Commvault offers air-gapped and immutable backups with advanced recovery for VMs on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, enabling improved business continuity in the face of ransomware and other threats. 
  • Faster and More Flexible Recovery: Customers can restore VMs both in-place and out-of-place, including VM configurations, accelerating deployment and minimizing downtime. 
  • Unified Protection for Hybrid Workloads: Customers can simplify operations by managing both traditional and cloud-native workloads through a single platform, reducing tool sprawl and operational silos. 
  • Cost Savings and Operational Efficiency: Customers can eliminate the need for separate backup infrastructure or tools for VMs, lowering TCO and increasing administrative efficiency. 

Availability  

Commvault support for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization will be available for early adopters in early summer and is targeted for general availability by early fall. Pricing is aligned with existing Commvault Kubernetes protection models.  

Starburst Announces Strategic Investment from Citi

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 19, 2025 by itnerd

 Starburst, the data platform for apps and AI, today announced a strategic investment from Citi. 

Starburst’s platform enables organizations to unify access to distributed data, across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, without the need for data duplication or complex migrations.

  • Starburst’s vision is to deliver cutting-edge AI and analytics solutions on an open, hybrid data lakehouse foundation. 
  • The investment strengthens the company’s momentum in enabling global enterprises to build secure, scalable, and intelligent data applications. 
  • By bringing AI “lakeside,” Starburst eliminates the traditional friction between data, governance, and AI. Starburst’s technology is used by 10 of the top 15 banks. 

Starburst continues to expand its reach into high-demand, regulated industries where AI is becoming a cornerstone of transformation.

Other World Computing to Showcase Thunderbolt 5 Solutions at COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2025

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 19, 2025 by itnerd

Other World Computing today announced it will showcase its award winning family of Thunderbolt 5 storage and connectivity solutions, as well as its unparalleled roster of end-to-end workflow solutions – including memory cards and readers, portable SSDs, desktop and shared storage, docks, hubs, and LTO backup and archiving, at COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2025

Attendees visiting OWC Booth #J0527a at 1F of the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, Hall 1 (TaiNEX 1), will experience firsthand how the OWC Envoy UltraOWC Thunderbolt 5 HubOWC ThunderBlade X12, and the newly announced OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock deliver unmatched speed, connectivity, and efficiency to accelerate creative workflows and professional productivity:

  • OWC Envoy Ultra – Boasting ultra compatibility with Macs, PCs, iPad Pros, Chromebooks, and Surface devices, this portable SSD is ready for rugged, on-the-go use, with bus-powered convenience, a built-in cable, and blazing real-world speeds of over 6000MB/s.
  • OWC Thunderbolt 5 Hub – Transforms a single Thunderbolt 5 connection into three additional Thunderbolt 5 ports and one USB-A port, with support for up to 80Gb/s bi-directional data transfer and up to 120Gb/s bandwidth for high-res displays.
  • OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock – With 11 versatile ports, it combines exceptional speed, broad device compatibility, and support for high-res displays into one streamlined solution that makes expanding workflows completely effortless.
  • OWC ThunderBlade X12 – This production shuttle and editing RAID SSD makes seemingly impossible video workflows fast, simple, and seamless, with peak and sustained write speeds of up to 6600MB/s and 5990MB/s, respectively.

OWC will also showcase its full ecosystem of storage, connectivity, and backup/archiving solutions during the COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2025 event. Each is designed to simplify and accelerate every step of the workflow, from capture to completion. That includes everything from high-performance memory cards and portable SSDs to powerful desktop and shared storage, flexible docks and hubs, and reliable LTO archiving.

  • OWC Memory Cards and Readers – Built for photographers, videographers, and content creators, delivering the speed, reliability, and seamless integration, especially with OWC’s Innergize software, to keep workflows smooth from capture to completion.
  • OWC Portable SSDs – Ultra-fast, rugged, and bus-powered storage solutions, like the Envoy Pro FX and Express 1M2, designed for creative professionals who demand top-tier performance, cross-platform compatibility, and durable reliability in the field.
  • OWC Desktop Storage – High-capacity, high-performance storage solutions, like the Mercury Elite Pro and ThunderBay series, with versatile connectivity options and robust RAID support, catering to the demanding needs of creative professionals and businesses.
  • OWC Jellyfish – The OWC Jellyfish is a high-performance, easy-to-use shared storage solution, offering capacities ranging from terabytes to petabytes, designed specifically for video teams. It enables seamless collaboration on 4K, 6K, and up to 12K projects without dropped frames. With intuitive management software, built-in security features, and scalable storage options, the OWC Jellyfish empowers creative professionals to streamline their post-production workflow efficiently.
  • OWC Docks and Hubs – A full range of docks and hubs (in addition to Thunderbolt 5 solutions), including Thunderbolt 4, Thunderbolt 3, and USB-C options, that expand connectivity, power delivery, and workflow flexibility for users at home, in the studio, or on the go.
  • OWC Archive Pro Ethernet – Fast and reliable network-based LTO backup and archiving solution engineered for media and entertainment (M&E) pros, government agencies, and any-sized business that needs to protect large volumes of critical data

Starburst Unveils New AI Platform Capabilities to Accelerate Enterprise AI and Agents

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 19, 2025 by itnerd

 Starburst, the data platform for apps and AI, today announced a comprehensive set of product innovations across its flagship offerings: Starburst Enterprise Platform and Starburst Galaxy. The new Starburst AI Agent and new AI Workflows are designed to accelerate enterprise AI initiatives and support the transition to a future-ready data architecture built on a data lakehouse. By bringing distributed, hybrid data lakeside to power AI, apps and analytics, Starburst enables faster, more secure, and collaborative data access. With native AI tooling, the Starburst Data Catalog, and advancements to data ingestion, table maintenance and governance, enterprises can unlock the full power of the modern data lakehouse.

AI is pushing the limits of existing enterprise data architecture and most organizations are held back by fragmented data spread across clouds, formats, and teams. Building AI workflows often means stitching together brittle pipelines, coordinating across siloed tools, and managing sensitive data without consistent governance. Legacy architectures make it difficult to access the right data, involve the right stakeholders, and enforce the right policies: slowing experimentation, increasing risk, and delaying results.

Introducing Starburst AI Agents: Unlock the Value of All Enterprise Data for Agent Intelligence

At the heart of Starburst’s latest innovations is Starburst AI Workflows, a purpose-built suite of capabilities that speeds AI experimentation to production for enterprises. AI Workflows connect the dots between vector-native search, metadata-driven context, and robust governance, all on an open data lakehouse architecture. Starburst is also launching Starburst AI Agent, an out-of-the-box natural language interface for Starburst’s data platform that can be built and deployed by data analysts and application-layer AI agents to bring faster insights to business stakeholders. With AI Workflows and the Starburst AI Agent, enterprises can build and scale AI applications faster, with reliable performance, lower cost, and greater confidence in security, compliance and control. 

New Starburst Data and AI Innovations include: 

  • Starburst AI Agent – A built-in conversational interface for governed natural language data product documentation and insight generation, in your secure Starburst environment. Availability: In Private Preview
  • Starburst AI Workflows – With the introduction of Starburst AI Workflows, Starburst is addressing a key challenge in AI: unlocking governed, proprietary data fast enough to drive real outcomes. With AI Workflows, teams can search unstructured data, orchestrate prompts and tasks with SQL, and govern model access, delivered through the unified Starburst platform. AI Workflows combine AI Search to transform unstructured data into vector embeddings in Iceberg using your choice of embedding model, AI SQL Functions to run prompts and built-in LLM tasks from SQL, and AI Model Access Management to control usage and enforce governance – all without pipelines or data movement. Availability: In Private Preview
  • Simplify AI Governance and Collaboration – Galaxy’s AI-Powered Auto-Taggingsimplifies governance by using LLMs to detect sensitive data like PII at the column level. With human-in-the-loop review and support for custom user-defined classifiers, teams can confidently scale ABAC policies and enable secure, self-service access to business users, without requiring manual policy enforcement. Availability: In General Availability
  • Interoperability Without Lock-In: Starburst Data Catalog – Starburst also unveiled Starburst Data Catalog, a modern, enterprise-grade metastore solution purpose-built to replace Hive Metastore in Starburst Enterprise. With native Iceberg support, seamless Hive migration, and a flexible foundation for future multi-engine integration, it helps organizations reduce metadata sprawl, improve query performance, and simplify governance – without vendor lock-in. Availability: In Private Preview
  • Fully Managed Iceberg Pipelines – Starburst Galaxy delivers a fully managed, end-to-end Icehouse lakehouse experience on Iceberg, combining automated maintenance and multiple ingestion options to simplify data readiness at scale. Built-in Live Table Maintenance with built-in maintenance features including compaction, snapshot cleanup, and orphan file removal to keep Iceberg tables performant and cost-efficient with no manual tuning required. Customers can choose between Streaming Ingest for near real-time updates from Kafka or File Loader for batch-style loads from S3, all fully managed in Galaxy. File Loader Generally Available in July, Streaming Ingest and Live Table Maintenance Generally Available now
  • Scale Iceberg Workloads – Starburst Galaxy now streamlines large-scale Iceberg operations with Automated Table Maintenance to manage compaction, cleanup, and retention across deployments, to reduce storage costs and improve query performance with minimal operational overhead. Native support for AWS S3 Table buckets unlocks high-performance querying on Amazon’s new auto-managed storage format, while Nanosecond Timestamp Type Support adds precision for time-sensitive analytics. Automated Table Maintenance is Generally Available; AWS S3 Tables and Iceberg Nanosecond Timestamp Type are in Public Preview.
  • Faster, Reliable Query Performance with Starburst-Native ODBC – Starburst enhances analytics performance with a high-performance ODBC driver built for secure, scalable BI access across both Galaxy and Starburst Enterprise. By eliminating third-party dependencies, the Starburst-Native ODBC enables deeper integration with Trino’s spooling extension, OAuth authentication, and Tableau’s generic connector, and ships alongside Enhanced Power BI Support. Availability: Public Preview, GA in June
  • Starburst Enterprise Gets Even Stronger – Iceberg Parity and Operational Simplicity – Starburst continues to deepen its commitment to advanced features on Starburst Enterprise with new Iceberg-powered capabilities, including Automated Table Maintenance, scheduled materialized view refreshes with Iceberg MV Automatic Refresh, and full support for Data Products on Iceberg – providing a streamlined path to a scalable, collaborative Iceberg lakehouse architecture suitable for AI workloads. Availability: Public Preview
  • Drive Efficiency with Automatic Query Routing – Starburst Galaxy now routes queries to the right cluster based on load or user role, improving performance and simplifying access at scale. User Role-Based Routing directs queries to pre-configured clusters based on a user’s role, maximizing price-performance. Deployment Set Routing supports resilient, large-scale deployments by routing queries across a defined set of clusters – ideal for high concurrency and resilient workloads. User Role-Based Routing is Generally Available, Deployment Set Routing is Private Preview beginning May 30th.
  • Starburst: Data-to-AI Readiness Blueprint –  A new services offering designed to help organizations align their data infrastructure with evolving AI strategies. This comprehensive engagement evaluates the readiness of existing data architecture, streamlines access and integration across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and ensures robust security and governance to support scalable AI workloads. Customers receive a tailored solution roadmap, architecture blueprint, and data product design guidance—empowering them to build a future-proof, high-performance data foundation optimized for AI innovation and success. Availability: Now

Register for Starburst Launch Point | May 28 (Virtual)

Join Starburst on May 28th for a virtual event where the company will unveil its vision for AI and walk through several exciting new announcements to its platform for data apps and AI. Attendees will hear from CEO Justin Borgman, Starburst product leadership, customers, and data professionals as they share product innovations and insights.

Register for EMEA/NORAM

Register for APAC

Creative Labs Memorial Day Sale Announced

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 19, 2025 by itnerd

Creative Labs is kicking off the Memorial Sale season with big savings on some of its most popular audio gear. Here is the early word out on the most attractive deals happening from May 26th, 2025 to June 1st, 2025. 

Aurvana Ace 2 – 47% off!

Original Price: $149.99

Memorial Sale Price: $79.99 + Free Shipping

Powered by xMEMS technology, the Aurvana Ace 2 unleashes the full potential of lifelike sound. It offers superior CD-quality clarity and precision, enhanced by Snapdragon Sound with Qualcomm aptX Lossless technology and Qualcomm Adaptive Active Noise Cancellation. These premium features are beautifully complemented by an aesthetically pleasing translucent compact charging case, perfectly blending performance and style.

SXFI CARRIER – 32% OFF

Original Price: $999.99

Memorial Sale Price: $679.99 + Free Shipping

Jointly developed by Creative and Dolby Laboratories, SXFI CARRIER has the same sound signature as the 15.2 Sonic Carrier at less than half the size and at a fraction of the price. Compact yet powerful, the SXFI Carrier delivers room-filling audio, virtual surround, and Creative’s award-winning Super X-Fi® headphone holography—ideal for both movies and gaming.

Outlier Free Pro+ – 33% OFF

Original Price: $149.99

Memorial Sale Price: $99.99 + Free Shipping

Perfect for active lifestyles, these wireless bone conduction headphones come with an IPX8 waterproof rating, a built-in 8 GB MP3 player, and Bluetooth 5.3. The Outlier Free Pro+ makes it easy to enjoy music or podcasts while staying aware of the surroundings—whether running, swimming, or cycling.

Creative Zen Hybrid 2 – 14% OFF

Original Price: $69.99

Memorial Sale Price: $59.99 + Free Shipping

A go-to headphone for work, travel, and everything in between. The Zen Hybrid 2 packs in hybrid ANC, up to 67 hours of battery life, and 40mm drivers—all in a sleek, foldable design. Great for tuning out distractions and staying focused wherever the day takes you.

Sound Blaster G6 – 22% OFF

Original Price: $179.99

Memorial Sale Price: $139.99 + Free Shipping

The Sound Blaster G6 is a compact and powerful gaming DAC and amp designed to take gaming and music to the next level. With 32-bit/384 kHz audio, Dolby Digital support, and Scout Mode for better in-game awareness, it delivers incredible sound on both console and PC—making every gaming session and music playlist sound amazing.

Creative BT-W6 – 10% OFF

Original Price: $49.99

Memorial Sale Price: $44.99 + Free Shipping

Upgrade your wireless connection with this compact Bluetooth 5.3 audio transmitter. Featuring aptX Adaptive, aptX HD, and LE Audio, the BT-W6 ensures low-latency, high-fidelity transmission for gaming, streaming, and music.

To discover more of Creative’s great deals, head over to creative.com/sale