TELUS Sovereign AI Factory named Canada’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 17, 2025 by itnerd

TELUS today announced that the TELUS Sovereign AI Factory in Rimouski, Quebec has been named Canada’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer by the prestigious TOP500 list, which ranks the world’s 500 most powerful computing systems, making TELUS the only telecom provider in Canada to receive this distinction. This recognition marks a groundbreaking achievement for Canadian technology innovation – proving that Canadian-owned and operated infrastructure can deliver world-class computational power while keeping data, innovation and economic benefits firmly within Canadian borders.

The TOP500 list is the global standard for high-performance computing and evaluates a supercomputer’s ability to solve complex sets of mathematical equations. It employs the High-Performance LINPACK (HPL) to measure how many calculations a system can complete per second, with results expressed in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).

The TELUS Sovereign AI Factory, designed and implemented in partnership with HPE and powered by NVIDIA H200 GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand, achieved a performance score of 22.74 petaFLOPS, ranking 78th overall by demonstrating exceptional capability in solving complex mathematical equations and performing floating-point operations, calculations involving very large or very small numbers common in scientific and engineering applications, at extraordinary speeds. Representing 22.74 quadrillion calculations per second, the immense processing power delivered by its Sovereign AI Factory positions TELUS at the forefront of organizations capable of handling the most demanding computational tasks in scientific research, artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics.

The supercomputing infrastructure will enable Canada to accelerate breakthroughs across multiple domains, such as:

  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning: Training, fine-tuning and inferencing advanced AI models for enhanced customer experiences and business solutions
  • Healthcare innovation: Supporting complex medical research, drug discovery and genomic analysis
  • Climate modeling: Contributing to environmental sustainability through sophisticated climate prediction and analysis
  • Network optimization: Enhancing telecommunications infrastructure and service delivery through advanced computational modeling

Since 1993, the TOP500 project has provided a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high performance computing. Twice a year, it publishes a list of the world’s 500 most powerful computer systems, providing the most accurate and historically consistent ranking of general-purpose HPC systems used for high-end applications.

This achievement underscores TELUS’ dedication to advancing Canadian technology leadership and creating opportunities for researchers, businesses, and institutions to access world-class computational resources, fostering collaboration and innovation across the country.

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Early Black Friday Tech Deals Already Live – Powered by Intel

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 17, 2025 by itnerd

Black Friday is already heating up in Canada, and several major retailers – including Best Buy, Staples, Memory Express, and Canada Computers – have gone early with discounts of up to $500 on Intel-powered laptops across budget, gaming, and premium categories. These limited-time offers are live now through end of day November 20, making them strong candidates for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Top Live Black Friday Deals – Powered by Intel

Under $1,299: Budget + Entry Gaming Deals Now Live 

MSI THIN 15.6″ Gaming Laptop — Intel Core 5-210H 

  • Black Friday Price: $899 (save $400) — Staples 
    A rare sub-$900 RTX gaming laptop with a 144Hz display and 1TB SSD. Strong pick for “best affordable gaming laptops” and entry-level esports coverage. 
  • Sales link: Staples 

Acer Nitro V 15 — Intel Core i7-13620H 

  • Black Friday Price: $1,299 (save $300) — Memory Express 
    Great value for RTX 4060 performance. Ideal for guides featuring “best gaming laptops under $1,500.” 
  • Sales link: Memory Express 

Lenovo Slim 7i Copilot+ — Intel Core Ultra 7 

  • Black Friday Price: $1,399 (save $300) — Best Buy 
    OLED touchscreen, Wi-Fi 7, AI-powered features — a standout for creator-friendly and productivity-focused gift guides. 
  • Sales link: Best Buy Canada 

Mid- to High-End Picks: $1,799–$1,999 

ASUS Zenbook S 14 — Intel Core Ultra 7 

  • Black Friday Price: $1,799 (save $400) — Best Buy 
    A premium ultraportable perfect for lifestyle, travel, or business-tech roundups. 
  • Sales link: Best Buy Canada 

Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 — Intel Core Ultra 9 

  • Black Friday Price: $1,699 (save $500) — Canada Computers 
    Major discount on a powerhouse gaming system with an Ultra 9 processor and RTX 5060. Great inclusion for “best midrange gaming laptops.” 
  • Sales link: Canada Computers 

Lenovo Legion Pro 5i 16″ OLED — Intel Ultra 9-275HX 

  • Black Friday Price: $1,999 (save $400) — Canada Computers 
    OLED gaming display + high-end performance make this ideal for creator/gamer crossover guides. 
  • Sales link: Canada Computers  

Premium Tier: $2,299+ 

Lenovo Legion Pro 5i — Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX + RTX 5070 

  • Black Friday Price: $2,299.99 (save $300) — Memory Express 
    High-end OLED gaming paired with AI-accelerated performance — strong pick for “premium gaming laptop” lists. 
  • Sales link: Memory Express 

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2026 Cyber Predictions From Forta

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 17, 2025 by itnerd

The Fortra Intelligence and Research Experts (FIRE) team have released 2026 predictions that uncover the darker side of AI and the next evolution of cyber defense.

John Grancarich, Chief Strategy Officer

Brand protection will expand the attack surface. The attack surface as it stands now includes an organization’s brand, its executives and its online reputation. By 2026, protecting trust beyond the network – across the open web, social platforms and dark web – will become as critical as protecting the network itself.

Tyler Reguly, Associate Director, Security R&D

Companies that over invest in AI and put emphasis on AI over humans will start to struggle. As everyone likes to say, ‘Today, AI is the worst it will ever be.” With that said, AI isn’t great. It is costly and limited in capabilities. While some tasks are performed amazingly, others demonstrate the real weakness in reliance on AI. AI is a tool and should be treated as such. It can increase productivity, but it can’t be productive on its own. That requires human expertise and companies that realize that early and retain their experts will prosper over those that adopt AI-only strategies. 

Josh Taylor, Lead Security Analyst, Fortra

Attacks on critical infrastructure will accelerate. Nation-state and criminal actors will target energy, healthcare, and transportation systems with cyber-physical impacts, turning outages and disruptions into strategic weapons. Enterprises in these sectors must treat cybersecurity as a safety imperative and plan for worst-case operational scenarios.

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OVHcloud unveils its Quantum Platform: the first European solution for accessing quantum computers in the cloud

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 17, 2025 by itnerd

At Choose France – France Edition, OVHcloud, a global player and the European Cloud leader, announces the launch of its Quantum Platform, the first European Quantum-as-a-Service solution (QaaS). It will provide access to at least eight of the most advanced quantum computers, including the Pasqal Orion Beta QPU, available now. By facilitating access to quantum technologies, OVHcloud is now enabling organisations to prepare for the most complex technological challenges.

The platform that facilitates the adoption of quantum technology by businesses

Quantum computing can solve problems and use cases that are far too complex for traditional approaches. The cloud is key in making these advanced technologies accessible, democratizing quantum computing and facilitating its adoption without specialized infrastructure. With the launch of its Quantum Platform, OVHcloud now offers businesses and public organisations access to quantum technology from Pasqal, a pioneer in neutral atom computing, giving customers the opportunity to benefit from a 100-qubit system.

An ecosystem offering an innovative range of quantum technologies

This announcement is part of OVHcloud’s commitment to contributing to the creation of a European quantum ecosystem. As early as 2022, the Group laid the groundwork by launching its first quantum emulator, available in a specialised environment. Today, no fewer than nine quantum emulators are available on OVHcloud infrastructures, representing the widest range of European quantum emulators, with nearly a thousand users. With the launch of the first European Quantum-as-a-Service solution using Pasqal’s QPU, OVHcloud is expanding its offering to include both emulators, enabling users to try out different quantum computing models, and real quantum computers accessible on demand. After Pasqal, OVHcloud plans to integrate eight other QPUs, including seven from European suppliers, by the end of 2027.

Learn more about OVHcloud Quantum offer

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Hammerspace Announces Latest Version of its Data Platform Software

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 17, 2025 by itnerd

Hammerspace, the high-performance data platform for AI Anywhere, today announced the upcoming release of Hammerspace v5.2, delivering performance, security and ecosystem enhancements that help organizations unify, automate and accelerate their AI and high-performance workloads across any on-premises, hybrid or cloud-based infrastructure.

With v5.2, Hammerspace raises the bar on standards-based parallel file system performance, particularly for AI and HPC workloads, continuing the trajectory demonstrated in public benchmarks earlier this year. The new release achieved a 33.7% higher IO500 overall score than results on the previous version published five months ago, with total bandwidth doubling and individual sub-tests showing dramatic improvements — including an over 800% gain in IOR-Hard-Read.

A key component of these performance improvements is Hammerspace’s continued contribution of significant client-side NFS performance enhancements to the standard Linux kernel, improvements specifically designed to accelerate AI and HPC workloads. By tightly integrating Hammerspace software with these upstream kernel advancements, the Data Platform delivers dramatic performance gains without requiring customers to install proprietary software on application servers or trap their data into vendor-locked silos.

This standards-based approach means Hammerspace is compatible with any storage platform, enabling customers to adapt and deliver the performance and low latency needed for new workloads such as training, inference or RAG with existing infrastructure and data sets. This approach eliminates the cost and complexity of migrating data to net-new storage silos to launch AI projects.

To support extreme scale, v5.2 adds Share Referrals, a transparent mechanism that distributes the namespace across as many metadata servers as are needed to accommodate extreme file counts. This enhancement ensures linear scalability, so performance and responsiveness remain steady even as data estates for AI and HPC environments explode. 

The release also strengthens security options with the addition of Kerberos authentication and Labeled NFS support. By enabling SELinux and other Mandatory Access Control (MAC) systems to transport and enforce security labels across NFS, organizations gain consistent, fine-grained control over data access, which is essential for sensitive research, government and regulated industries.

Hammerspace v5.2 will further expand the platform’s reach by adding support for running Hammerspace in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).  New shapes, including bare metal, will be supported, and support for OCI dedicated Regions will follow, providing a critical option for customers that must maintain strict data sovereignty across distributed environments.

This tight OCI integration extends Hammerspace’s multi-site, multi-cloud and multi-protocol capabilities, including its unique S3-connector technology, so customers can seamlessly bridge on-premises environments to cloud-based GPU-accelerated compute clusters in OCI, AWS and Azure. In this way, NFS-based applications gain native, transparent access to cloud compute resources without workflow changes or moving data into new silos.

This seamless hybrid cloud flexibility is what enables organizations such as Meta to burst extreme-performance AI workloads between on-premises data centers and GPU clusters in OCI, with data movement orchestrated among storage types and locations transparently in the background. At the same time, Hammerspace’s global namespace maintains consistent access for users and applications.

Availability

Hammerspace v5.2 will be generally available in December. To learn more or request early access, visit www.hammerspace.com.

In addition to the baseline performance gains, v5.2 introduces Tier 0 affinitization, adding locality-aware intelligence to Tier 0 deployments. By automatically aligning data placement with the optimal servers within a GPU cluster, Tier 0 affinitization reduces east-west network traffic to accelerate throughput and simplifies Tier 0 deployments by eliminating the need for manual configuration. The feature is automatic, transparent and enabled by default.

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AI-powered Black Friday scams are Evolving Fast: Forcepoint X-Labs

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 14, 2025 by itnerd

Here’s a timely piece of research just published by Forcepoint’s X-Labs team and authored by Lydia McElligott, Security Researcher, titled “How AI is Fueling a New Wave of Black Friday Scams” 

Given the upcoming holiday sales surge, this one (with a number of visual examples included) hits at the intersection of cybersecurity, retail behavior and the AI threat landscape.

Three key take-aways from the research:

  • AI is raising the stakes. Scams this year don’t look like the old “cheap deal” bait—they’re polished, coherent and realistic: phishing emails that mirror brand templates, cloned retail websites spun up in minutes, fake social-media ads. 
  • Trusted brands are primary targets. Attackers are leveraging familiarity with brands like Amazon, Temu and luxury labels to build trust and urgency in their scams. 
  • Defensive behaviours still work—but they require discipline. The article outlines actionable red flags: inspecting sender domains, hovering rather than clicking links, really questioning “too-good-to-be-true” discounts and using secure payment methods. 

The post is at: https://www.forcepoint.com/blog/x-labs/black-friday-scams-ai-phishing-guide

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TELUS launches quantum-safe VPN to protect businesses against future cyber threats

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 14, 2025 by itnerd

TELUS has announced the launch of its Quantum-Safe VPN service, reinforcing the company’s position as a cybersecurity leader by offering commercial Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) protection to Canadian businesses. The innovative service aims to address future cyber threats from quantum computing technology, delivering next-generation security solutions today.

Recognizing that quantum computers may eventually be powerful enough to break current encryption methods, posing a significant future threat to data security, TELUS is proactively delivering a solution today that aims to protect customers tomorrow. The new service uses advanced encryption technology integrated with the TELUS Managed Next Generation Firewall service, empowering businesses to stay ahead of evolving cyber threats.

The global cybersecurity consensus confirms that the transition to a post-quantum world is a matter of ‘when,’ not ‘if’. This new service provides a crucial solution for government agencies and businesses that need to defend against these future threats.

TELUS’ Quantum-Safe VPN service delivers three key benefits:

  • Enhanced Customer Security: Provides enhanced customer data protection against future cyber attacks, meeting requirements from global security organizations
  • Future-Proofed Business Continuity: Provides long-term protection for intellectual property and sensitive data, supporting businesses secure growth 
  • Simplified Compliance: Helps customers prepare for new cybersecurity regulations and standards

Leveraging Palo Alto Networks technology, TELUS’ service uses advanced encryption methods recommended by leading security organizations and offers flexibility to adapt as new security standards emerge. This approach protects sensitive information from being captured today and potentially decoded by future quantum computers. Learn more about TELUS Quantum-Safe VPN service here.

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Hammerspace to Showcase Latest Software Release, New AI Data Platform Solution and Latest Performance Achievements at SC25

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 14, 2025 by itnerd

Hammerspace today announced it will showcase its latest capabilities at Supercomputing 2025 (SC25), taking place at the America’s Center Convention Complex in Saint Louis from November 17-20. At its booth #3523, Hammerspace will demonstrate its AI solution, aligned with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, to streamline data access for agentic AI applications. The solution enables seamless data access and orchestration across hybrid environments, ensuring that AI workloads always have instant access to the right data, without manual intervention or complex integration.

Through automated data objectives and tight integration with AI agents, Hammerspace’s platform intelligently tags, tiers and places data where it’s needed most, optimizing for both performance and cost. This automation ensures that AI models can train and infer faster, with data continuously in motion to meet the needs of high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

Hammerspace will also highlight its Tier 0 solution, which transforms the local NVMe storage within GPU clusters into a shared, high-performance storage tier. This capability delivers the ultra-low latency and high throughput demanded by AI training, checkpointing, inference and agentic AI workloads, all while maximizing existing GPU investments.

To schedule a meeting with Hammerspace executives during SC25, click here.

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The Threat Actors That I’ve Been Tracking Have Moved To Using TD For Their Phishing Campaign

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 14, 2025 by itnerd

Let me get you up to speed in case you’re tuning in for the first time.

I’ve been tracking a group of threat actors who started using Questrade and then Wealthsimple along with TD and finally the National Bank on two occasions to try and phish credentials from unsuspecting users in order to drain their bank accounts dry. And whomever is behind this campaign has got some degree of skill as for the most part, they have sent convincing phishing emails and have built convincing websites to back up those emails.

It now seems that the threat actors are back to using TD to try and pull off their scam based on this email that my honeypot got:

If this email looks familiar, that’s because it’s the same text that was used by the last National Bank phishing email. Only now it’s branded for TD. Which means that it’s the same threat actor at work here. Now when I tried to access the phishing website, it had already been shut down. But it was hosted by the same Chinese hosting company that hosted the second phishing attempt made by these scammers. Now to be clear, just because it is hosted by a Chinese company does not mean that the threat actors are Chinese. Though it would not surprise me if they were.

This likely means that my honeypot will see some more action. Though I have to wonder how long this campaign will continue. I guess I will find out.

UPDATE: A few minutes after posting this, my honeypot this email claiming to be from National Bank. Clearly the threat actors are flipping back and forth between banks in hopes of getting more victims.

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CISA warning: Patch actively exploited Cisco flaws ASAP

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 13, 2025 by itnerd

The CISA issued an urgent warning that federal agencies must immediately patch two actively exploited Cisco ASA and Firepower vulnerabilities, CVE-2025-20362 and CVE-2025-20333. The flaws allow unauthenticated access to restricted endpoints and remote code execution, and when chained, give attackers full control of affected devices. Although Cisco patched the bugs in September after observing zero-day exploitation tied to the ArcaneDoor campaign, after many agencies incorrectly believed they had updated to safe versions. 

Gunter Ollmann, CTO, Cobalt had this to say:

“The ongoing exploitation of these Cisco flaws highlights how attackers increasingly rely on chaining weaknesses to gain rapid, unauthenticated control over perimeter devices. These types of edge-network compromises are particularly attractive because they create a launch point that bypasses many downstream defenses. The challenge is that organizations still struggle to validate their exposure in real-world terms, even when patches exist. Offensive testing helps reveal whether the environment behaves as expected after updates and whether an attacker could still traverse overlooked paths. Mature programs treat patching as the starting point, not the finish line, and use adversarial validation to catch residual gaps before threat actors do.”

Wade Ellery, Chief Evangelist and IAM Strategy Officer, Radiant Logic follows with this:

“When firewalls or VPN gateways are compromised, attackers often pivot quickly into identity systems because credentials remain one of the most reliable pathways to deeper access. Incidents like this reveal how perimeter flaws can cascade into identity-based risks when agencies lack unified visibility across accounts, entitlements, and authentication patterns. The limitation is that many organizations still operate with fragmented identity data, making it hard to detect suspicious changes that follow network intrusions. Strengthening identity observability provides the context needed to spot anomalies early and contain lateral movement before privileges accumulate. Agencies that unify and observe identity data will be better positioned to absorb these infrastructure-level shocks and maintain Zero Trust resilience.”

Once again it’s time to patch all the things because of an actively exploited threat. The “fun” never ends in this business.

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