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In April, an Apple Store in Atlanta became the first of the company’s American retail locations to file for a union election. Yet about a month later, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) withdrew its request for an election. The labor union alleged that Apple was using illegal union-busting tactics to influence voting, like interrogating workers and requiring them to attend daily, mandatory anti-union meetings. Now, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has found merit to the CWA’s complaint that these anti-union activities were illegal.

“Apple executives think the rules don’t apply to them. Holding an illegal forced captive audience meeting is not only union-busting, but an example of psychological warfare,” said Tom Smith, CWA Organizing Director, in a statement. “We commend the NLRB for recognizing captive audience meetings for exactly what they are: a direct violation of labor rights.”

In April, NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memo saying that captive audience meetings are inherently inconsistent with the rights employees have under the National Labor Relations Act. In the past, NLRB representatives had ruled that these meetings were permissible.

Apple workers have successfully won two unions amid an uptick in national labor organizing: one in Oklahoma City, and one in Maryland. Yet Apple has deliberately tried to dissuade workers from joining a union. In May, the trillion-dollar company’s vice president of people and retail Deirdre O’Brien sent a video to 58,000 retail staff about unions.

“I worry that because the union would bring its own legally mandated rules, that would determine how we work through issues,” O’Brien said. “It could make it harder for us to act to swiftly address things that you raise.”

According to a memo leaked to Motherboard in May, Apple also sent anti-union talking points to some store leaders.

“An outside union that doesn’t know Apple or our culture would make things more complex and rigid,” one talking point says. “Leaders wouldn’t have the flexibility to act in the moment or to address each person’s unique needs like they do now.”

Apple retains the same anti-union law firm, Littler Mendelson, that represents companies like Amazon and Starbucks, which have also been found by the NLRB to have violated labor laws. But employees organizing have said that they want a union to ensure they get wage increases consistent with inflation and equitable stock options.

“We think having union representation and a collective bargaining agreement is the best way to make lasting change at Apple and to make sure that the company follows through on its promises and makes the credo more than just a poem printed on cardstock,” the Apple Retail Union says on its website.

TechCrunch has reached out to Apple for comment.

Apple illegally interfered with union organizing in Atlanta, labor board finds by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Cloud computing giant Rackspace has confirmed that it has been hit by ransomware attack that has left a number of its customers without access to email.

Rackspace’s hosted Microsoft Exchange service started experiencing problems on Friday last week. At the time, Rackspace posted a notice on its status page saying that due to a “security incident,” it had “powered down and disconnected” the service. In an update published on Tuesday, Rackspace has confirmed that a ransomware attack is behind the ongoing outage.

“As you know, on Friday, December 2nd, 2022, we became aware of suspicious activity and immediately took proactive measures to isolate the Hosted Exchange environment to contain the incident,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday. “We have since determined this suspicious activity was the result of a ransomware incident.”

Rackspace says that the investigation, led by an unnamed cyber defense firm, is in its early stages and that the company has yet to determine “what, if any, data was affected.” The company added that if it determines that sensitive information was affected, it will “notify customers as appropriate”.

When asked by TechCrunch, Rackspace spokesperson Natalie Silva declined to share any more information about the nature of the incident or how the hackers were able to compromise its systems.

However, security researcher Kevin Beaumont believes the incident may involve exploitation of the Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082, better known as ProxyNotShell. ProxyNotShell first came to light in late September after Vietnamese cybersecurity company GTSC observed it being exploited in the wild. Microsoft confirmed exploitation the following month and linked it to a state-sponsored hacker group.

The issues affecting Rackspace’s hosted Microsoft Exchange service remains ongoing at the time of writing. The company is currently moving its Hosted Exchange customers over to Microsoft 365 to limit disruption.

Rackspace noted that the ransomware incident could result in lost revenue for its hosted exchange business, which generates about $30 million a year. The company added that it could have incremental costs associated with its response to the incident.

Rackspace blames ransomware attack for ongoing Exchange outage by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

Lensa has been climbing the app store hit lists with its avatar-generating AI that is making artists wave the red flag. Now, there’s another reason to fly the flag, as it turns out it’s possible — and way too easy — to use the platform to generate non-consensual soft porn.

TechCrunch has seen photo sets generated with the Lensa app, which includes images with breasts and nipples clearly visible in the images with faces of recognizable people. It seemed like the kind of thing that shouldn’t have been possible, so we decided to try it ourselves. To verify that Lensa will create the images it perhaps shouldn’t, we created two sets of Lensa avatars:

One set, based on 15 photos of a well-known actor.
Another set, based on the same 15 photos, but with an additional set of 5 photos added of the same actor’s face, photoshopped onto topless models.

The first set of images was in line with the AI avatars we’ve seen Lensa generate in the past. The second set, however, was a lot spicier than we were expecting. It turns out the AI takes those Photoshopped images as permission to go wild, and it appears it disables an NSFW filter. Out of the 100-image set, 11 were topless photos of higher quality (or, at least with higher stylistic consistency) than the poorly done edited topless photos the AI was given as input.

Generating saucy images of celebrities is one thing, and as illustrated by the source images we were able to find, there has long been people on the internet who are willing to collage some images together in Photoshop. Just because it’s common doesn’t make it right — in point of fact, celebrities absolutely deserve their privacy and should definitely not be made victims of non-consensual sexualized depictions. But so far, getting those to look realistic takes a lot of skill with photo editing tools along with hours, if not days, of work.

The big turning point, and the ethical nightmare, is the ease with which you can create near-photorealistic AI-generated art images by the hundreds without any tools other than a smartphone, an app, and a few dollars.

The ease with which you can create images of anyone you can imagine (or, at least, anyone you have a handful of photos of), is terrifying. Adding NSFW content into the mix, and we are careening into some pretty murky territory very quickly: your friends or some random person you met in a bar and exchanged Facebook friend status with, may not have given consent to someone generating softcore porn of them.

It appears that if you have 10-15 ‘real’ photos of a person and are willing to take the time to photoshop a handful of fakes, Lensa will gladly churn out a number of problematic images.

AI art generators are already churning out pornography by the thousands of images, exemplified by the likes of Unstable Diffusion and others. These platforms, and the unfettered proliferation of other so-called ‘deepfake’ platforms are turning into an ethical nightmare, are prompting the UK government to push for laws criminalizing the dissemination of non-consensual nude photos. This seems like a very good idea, but the internet is a hard-to-govern place at the best of times, and we’re collectively facing a wall of legal, moral, and ethical quandaries.

We reached out to Prisma Labs, who make the Lensa AI for a comment, and will update the story when we hear back from them.

It’s way too easy to trick Lensa AI into making NSFW images by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Since its launch as an open-source project by Yandex in 2016, ClickHouse has become one of the leading databases for online analytical processing (OLAP), allowing businesses to quickly generate ad-hoc reports over very large datasets. In 2021, Yandex spun off ClickHouse into its own company and joined an initial $50 million Series A funding round led by Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital. Two months later, Coatue and Altimeter led the company’s Series B round, with participation from Index Ventures, Benchmark, Lightspeed and Redpoint. Now, ClickHouse is extending this round with fresh capital from Thrive Capital.

The company, which is headquartered in San Francisco and has a European engineering base in Amsterdam, did not disclose the exact size of Thrive’s investment, but ClickHouse CEO Aaron Katz stated that it was an “eight-figure round”.

“ClickHouse offers the most efficient database for fast and large-scale analytics,” said Avery KIemmer, an investor at Thrive Capital. “We have long admired this team, and are excited to partner with them as they launch ClickHouse Cloud to an even wider audience.”

In addition to announcing the new funding, the company also today launched ClickHouse Cloud, a fully managed, SOC 2 Type 2-compliant cloud-hosted version of its database that is now available in the AWS Marketplace. Support for Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft’s Azure cloud is in the works. The company first launched this service into beta a few months ago and is now ready to launch it into GA.

Maybe because of its origins within Yandex, ClickHouse has flown a bit under the press’ radar, but it’s currently in use by the likes of Cloudflare, Uber, eBay, Comcast and Cisco. It’s also very hard to have a conversation about databases and analytics these days without the company being referenced in some form or another.

To run ClickHouse, Yandex brought on former Elastic CRO and Salesforce exec Aaron Katz as the company’s co-founder and CEO. Unlike other open-source companies, the ClickHouse team decided to skip past launching enterprise versions or go for an open-core model with proprietary features and skip right to a cloud-hosed version. Katz explained that this decision was based on the previous experience of the founding team.

“Trying to develop both on-premise software and sell support and stand up an enterprise-grade cloud service can be challenging to do simultaneously,” he said. “We believe the future is in managed services: serverless cloud offerings that are cloud agnostic and multi-cloud — that are secure and reliable and scalable, resource efficient and highly performant. So we developed ClickHouse Cloud and we launched it earlier this year as a beta state and got overwhelmingly positive response from the market.”

In October, ClickHouse acquired Arctype, a cross-platform GUI for managing and querying databases (think a modern phpMyAdmin). Arctype itself only launched half a year before that, so ClickHouse moved quickly here and as Katz noted, with a full war chest, we’ll likely see the company make more of these smaller acquisitions in the future. The team has now re-written Arctype as a native offering inside of ClickHouse Cloud.

As ClickHouse VP of Product Tanaya Bragin noted, the company also tuned the software to increase performance and added a lower pricing tier for developers who want to get started with the service (after a free 30-day trial). And because there is still a talent crunch for database experts, ClickHouse is also launching ClickHouse Academy with a catalog of free courses and recordings of its own onboarding workshops.

Bragin also stressed that current users of the ClickHouse open-source version will be able to easily migrate to ClickHouse Cloud. From the application’s perspective, the two versions are equivalent. The advantage of the hosted version, of course, is that users won’t have to manage a complex database system themselves. The system will automatically handle sharding, replication and upgrading. Auto-scaling, too, is built into ClickHouse Cloud. “The separation of storage and compute is an important accomplishment that the customers benefit from, which makes it more resource efficient and cost effective than running it on your own,” Katz added.

The ClickHouse team plans to use the new funding on expanding its product and engineering teams. Given its focus on product-led growth (PLG), the company doesn’t plan to focus too much on expanding its marketing efforts for the time being.

“We’re really pursuing this PLG distribution model, where you can go to ClickHouse Cloud today, you can create your own free trialand we give you free credits,” Katz said. “It’s totally frictionless. You never have to talk to anybody and sales. You can evaluate the service on your own. If you like what your experiencing, you can add your credit card and pay as you go monthly with totally transparent, consumption-based billing. If we get that right — and the feedback from these early 100+ customers hasbeen very encouraging. Then we won’t need to have a really expensive sales and marketing engine, because with the PLG motion, the product will distribute itself.”

ClickHouse launches ClickHouse Cloud, extends its Series B by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

As Elon Musk attempts to operate a major social media platform with a fraction of its staff, Twitter users are reporting that certain key security features on iOS are not working. For some users, it’s impossible to protect your tweets or toggle direct message privacy settings — a pop-up will appear that says “some settings failed to save.”

These key privacy features appear to still work on the web, even if they aren’t working on a user’s iOS app. Sure, in most situations, if a user really wants to go private, they can just find a computer and make the switch to turn on protected tweets. But in emergencies, it can pose personal risk for users if these central privacy toggles are not available on the go. Moreover, these errors could be seen as a harbinger of what could come at Twitter: users worry that as Twitter’s team gets smaller, more features will break, and the site could become unsafe.

Last week, Twitter’s former Trust & Safety head Yoel Roth spoke at a Knight Foundation conference. When asked where he sees Twitter in a year, he said he doesn’t expect that there will be one specific moment in which the site implodes — rather, the user experience will worsen over time.

“What are the canaries in the coal mine that suggest that something’s not right?” Roth asked. “A couple of the things that I keep an eye out for are, have core safety features stopped working the way that you expect?”

Roth said that the site will be particularly unstable if the protected tweets feature stops working.

“That’s an easy one to screw up if you are building Twitter and you don’t know what you’re doing, and there have been a number of historical privacy breaches that Twitter has had to deal with related to protected tweets,” he said. “If protected tweets stop working, run, because that’s a symptom that something is deeply wrong.”

The current errors users are experiencing when trying to protect their tweets are not indicative of the entire feature not working — but of course, it’s not a good sign.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone even tweeted about issues he was experiencing on iOS yesterday. According to his screenshot, his mentions aren’t loading on iOS. Gizmodo reported that its staff has experienced this issue at least three times in the past week, and also reported that some users are experiencing glitches with Twitter Spaces.

These iOS issues are occurring in the midst of conflict between Apple and Twitter — Musk claimed last week that Apple threatened to withhold Twitter from the App Store, but he later characterized that as a “misunderstanding” after meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook. Musk had gone as far as to declare that he would make his own smartphone if Apple and Google removed Twitter from their App Stores.

Still, vulnerable communities on Twitter — like sex workers — have feared that Twitter could remove or demote their NSFW content to appease Apple, which has previously removed social platforms like Tumblr from the App Store for not adequately moderating child sexual abuse material (CSAM). But for adult creators who make consensual, safe content, Twitter is the only major social platform where they can promote their work without violating content guidelines. When these creators have been booted from platforms like Tumblr and Patreon, their livelihoods are threatened, since they have to start building their audience from scratch elsewhere.

Some sex workers have noticed that suddenly, their tweets are being flagged as containing sensitive content, and are unable to be viewed. On the web version of Twitter, you can click and unclick a box that says “Display media that may contain sensitive content.” On iOS, users do not have the option to toggle that setting on or off. Even SFW accounts of advocacy groups representing sex workers have been flagged as sensitive for some iOS users, even for those whose web settings indicate that they are willing to see sensitive media.

“We know what we are seeing is a bug, but I believe it to be of the botched roll out, A/B testing, rush job variety,” Ashley, a sex worker and community organizer, told TechCrunch. “This may not be intended functionality today, but we must seize on this glimpse of a possible future to make sure this disdain for basic human rights, user agency, and broad untransparent censorship is categorically unacceptable.”

Elon Musk has not explicitly commented on how Twitter will handle legal NSFW content going forward. But under Musk, Twitter has expressed interest in a paywalled video feature, which is reminiscent of platforms like OnlyFans, which allow NSFW creators to monetize. Paid DMs, also a common feature in online sex work, has been spotted in development by app researcher Jane Wong.

Twitter’s iOS app is riddled with privacy settings glitches by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Telegram Premium has amassed over 1 million subscribers, less than six months after the popular instant messaging app launched the paid offering and began a serious effort to monetize the business.

Pavel Durov shared the update on his Telegram channel Tuesday, calling the milestone “one of the most successful examples of a social media subscription plan ever launched.”

The subscription, however, still “represents just a fraction of Telegram’s overall revenue,” he shared in the same update, optimistically hoping that one day Premium will rake in just as much money as ads.

The app, used by over 700 million monthly active users, launched Premium in late June, offering customers a range of additional features such as the ability to send files as large as 4 GB and faster downloads. The monthly subscription costs about $6 in the U.S. and the UK, and $2.2 in emerging markets such as India.

Telegram’s push to monetization comes at a time when its chief rival, WhatsApp, is also scrambling to find ways to make money. WhatsApp remains free and has no paid tier, but its parent firm Meta is increasingly bringing businesses to the instant messaging app. The firm appears to have dialled up its effort in recent months — and not everyone is happy about it.

The Dubai-headquartered Telegram, which has said in the past that it needed to make money to keep the platform afloat, citing computing costs,plans to expand its monetization efforts next year, Durov said. The firm is developing a host of decentralized tools, including non-custodial wallets and exchanges, he said late last month.

“Thanks to successful monetization, Telegram will be able to pay for the servers, traffic and wages necessary to keep building new features and supporting existing ones. While some other apps consider their users a tool to maximize revenue, we consider revenue a tool to maximize value for our users,” he wrote Tuesday.

Telegram Premium tops 1 million subscribers by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Ready for a holiday sing-along? Apple today announced it’s launching a new Apple Music feature that will turn tens of millions of its top songs into karaoke tracks of sorts, enabled by a tap of a button. With Apple Sing, as the new addition is called, users will be able to tap on a slider button on popular songs to lower the vocals, then sing along in time with the music using enhanced real-time lyrics.

The feature won’t see users switching over to music tracks that already have the vocals removed, however. Instead, it’s relying on an on-device machine learning algorithm that processes the music in real-time, Apple says. The algorithm isolates the vocals from the rest of the song, allowing users to adjust their volume accordingly using a new slider button in the Apple Music app.

The tech builds on Apple’s noise-cancellation expertise and other developments it’s made for FaceTime, the company said. The feature works on iPhone 11 and later, plus iPad and Apple TV.

To use the feature, users will first enter the lyrics view, then tap on a microphone button to access the slider to adjust the vocals’ volume. At its lowest level, the feature doesn’t fully remove the vocals, we should note — but it’s good enough for an at-home karaoke party or playtime with the kids.

Apple Sing also builds upon Apple’s existing investment in real-time lyrics, which already allows users to view synced lyrics as they listen to music on the service. Now, those lyrics have been upgraded to better support Apple Sing.

Instead of just animating the lyrics line-by-line, as before, the enhanced lyrics feature will now animate with each syllable for beat-by-beat sync. As with karaoke, this can help people when singing along, even if they aren’t as familiar with the song itself.

In addition, the lyrics are being updated with two other new features to better support overlapping vocals and duets.

With the new background vocals feature, Apple Music will for the first time break out the backup vocal from the primary line and animate those separately, as they’re sung. This would allow a group of people singing along to a song to take different parts, for example. These background lyrics are also shown in a smaller font to differentiate them from the lead vocals.

Meanwhile, lyrics for duets will now indicate when there’s a vocalist change by switching the justification of the lyrics on the screen to make it easier to know when you should start or when it’s time for a duet partner to begin.

There are other subtle enhancements to lyrics, like how they’ll now add a highlight and undulate when the artist is holding on a word or part of a word for a longer period to signal to those singing along to hold that note, too.

Because there’s a process all the songs have to go through internally before being enabled for Apple Sing, the feature won’t be available across all of Apple Music’s catalog of 100 million songs. Instead, Apple says it will be available at launch across the top 80% of its most-played songs to start and will grow over time. To make these songs easier to find, Apple will launch 50 playlists that showcase this new feature in different ways, including thematic playlists, and playlists by decade and genre. These will be highlighted across Apple Music across the latest iPhone, iPad and Apple TV models.

While Apple Sing’s vocal control feature won’t be available on Android, the company noted that Android users will gain the other real-time lyrics enhancements.

The new feature isn’t available immediately, but will launch “soon” to Apple beta testers. (In addition to developers, Apple now allows the public to beta test its software). It will then launch later this month for all customers. Apple didn’t offer an exact launch date, but one has to guess that it wants the feature available before all the holiday parties have wrapped, we’d imagine.

Specifically, the feature works on the iPhone 11 and later or iPhone SE (3rd generation), the iPad Pro 11-inch (3rd generation and later), iPad Air (4th generation and later), iPad mini (6th generation), or iPad (9th generation and later), and the Apple TV 4K (3rd generation).

Lyrics has been one of the areas where Apple had led its top rival Spotify in years past, as Spotify failed to get deals done to include lyrics in its product across global markets. That changed in November 2021, when Spotify finally rolled out real-time lyrics to its user base. Now Apple is jumping ahead once again, and with a feature it’s said has been a “labor of love” its team has worked on for the past couple of years. And, if it gains traction, Apple Sing could encourage people to make the jump or to subscribe for the first time. Spotify, meanwhile, was said to be working on a karaoke feature of its own, it has not become broadly available.

Apple Music is getting a new karaoke-like feature, Apple Sing by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

The Canadian branch of Amnesty International has confirmed it was the target of a “sophisticated” cyberattack carried out by Chinese state-sponsored hackers.

The human rights organization said it first detected the breach on October 5, when suspicious activity was discovered on Amnesty’s IT infrastructure. An investigation by forensic investigators and cybersecurity experts was immediately launched, and steps were taken to protect the organization’s systems. This involved taking all organizational and email systems offline for nearly three weeks, Ketty Nivyabandi, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, told TechCrunch, which had a “significant impact” on Amnesty Canada’s operations, fundraising, and planned human rights work.

Amnesty said that there is no evidence that any donor or membership data was exfiltrated by the attackers, but Nivyabandi told TechCrunch that the threat actors had access to Amnesty’s working files. Nivyabandi added that while the breach was first detected in October, the attacker’s intrusion efforts first began in July 2021, though declined to share further information regarding the nature of the breach.

U.S. cybersecurity company SecureWorks, which was hired by Amnesty International to investigate the breach, has established that “a threat group sponsored or tasked by the Chinese state” was likely behind the attack. Its investigation found that the attackers used tools and techniques associated with specific advanced persistent threat groups (APTs), targeted information consistent with Chinese cyberespionage threat groups, and made no attempt to monetize the access.

Barry Hensley, chief threat intelligence officer at SecureWorks, declined to say if the company had linked the attack to a specific APT group. However, in a statement given to TechCrunch, he praised Amnesty’s “openness and transparency about recent events will undoubtedly help all organizations facing persistent and sophisticated threat actors.”

Amnesty said it is speaking out publicly about the attack to warn other human rights organizations. News of the breach comes just a day after a joint investigation by Amnesty International’s Security Lab and Human Rights Watch found that threat actors backed by the Iranian government were targeting human rights activists, journalists, diplomats and politicians working in the Middle East.

“As an organization advocating for human rights globally, we are very aware that we may be the target of state-sponsored attempts to disrupt or surveil our work. These will not intimidate us and the security and privacy of our activists, staff, donors, and stakeholders remain our utmost priority,” said Nivyabandi.

“This case of cyber espionage speaks to the increasingly dangerous context which activists, journalists, and civil society alike must navigate today. Our work to investigate and denounce these acts has never been more critical and relevant. We will continue to shine a light on human rights violations wherever they occur and to denounce the use of digital surveillance by governments to stifle human rights,” Nivyabandi added.

Amnesty Canada says it was targeted by Chinese state-sponsored hackers by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

All systems are go, and we have liftoff! TC Sessions: Space 2022 is live, and we can’t wait to meet the people building the technologies and creating new opportunities that will take us into and beyond the cosmos. As you can see from the event agenda, you’re in for an exciting day. Here’s a quick look at what you can expect.

Latecomers welcome: If you’re within striking distance of Los Angeles, why not join us? Buy a pass right here.

Bringing It to the Space Warfighting Domain

Space is playing an ever-greater role in modern warfare and in our broader national security. But delivering those critical space-based capabilities to warfighters and other end users is just one step in the increasingly complex mission life cycle.

From how to incorporate the latest innovations to what role commercial capabilities can play, the way our nation’s space programs acquire, deploy and operate next-generation systems is undergoing profound shifts. Charlie McGillis (Slingshot Aerospace), Jean L. Michael (the Aerospace Corporation), Pete Muend (National Reconnaissance Office), Col. Joseph Roth (USSF Space Systems Command) and Christopher A. Solee (United States Space Command) will discuss how these pieces fit together to deliver needed capabilities, as well as the opportunities to drive greater integration for the benefit of all. Sponsored by the Aerospace Corporation.

ISAM: A Commercial Linchpin for the New Space Economy

Large-scale commercial investments will dominate the next wave of space innovation, including commercial space stations in low Earth orbit (LEO) and technologies that will enable a permanent human presence on the moon. The United States has issued a national policy for developing In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM) capabilities that can operationally sustain the new space economy with efficiency and scale. This session, led by Robert Hauge (SpaceLogistics) and Carolyn Mercer (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), encourages participants to roll up their sleeves, break past the 411 on ISAM and get practical about how to stimulate ISAM capability development. Sponsored by the Aerospace Corporation.

Space Workforce 2030: Inspiring, Preparing and Employing the Next Generation

The dawning space age offers enormous opportunities to explore new frontiers, grow the economy on orbit and strengthen our security. Making the most of this momentous time calls for an innovative workforce that can leverage diverse experiences and perspectives to solve the hard problems we’ll encounter.

The Space Workforce 2030 pledge is a first-of-its-kind effort launched earlier this year that is bringing together more than 30 of the country’s leading space companies to work collaboratively to increase diversity across our industry to build a vibrant workforce for the future.

Hear from Michael Edmonds (Blue Origin), Steve Isakowitz (the Aerospace Corporation) and Melanie Stricklan (Slingshot Aerospace) about the work they’re doing to inspire, prepare and employ the next generation of scientists and engineers and how you can play a part in supporting this vital mission. Sponsored by the Aerospace Corporation.

Growing the LEO Economy on Orbital Reef

As we look to commercial successors to the ISS, we see new market opportunities emerging on low Earth orbit (LEO) destinations. Join Shahir Gerges — Director of Business Strategy, Orbital Reef, Blue Origin — to learn more about how Orbital Reef, a commercial LEO destination ecosystem, is creating new opportunities in space and helping startups accelerate their businesses through Reef Starter, Orbital Reef’s newest initiative to lower barriers of entry to space for early-stage companies. Hear about the first set of startups to win the Reef Starter Innovation Challenge and learn how to get involved in the future. Sponsored by Orbital Reef.

Hardware? What’s That? Why Software Is the Future of the Space Economy

Launch gets all the press, but satellites and the software behind them are the workhorses of space. Hear from Antaris founder/CEO Tom Bartonand Epsilon3 founder/CEO Laura Crabtree about how SaaS, open source and cloud-based platforms are revolutionizing the satellite industry and accelerating the space economy. They’ll also share what it’s like to be first-time founders, what it really takes to put good code into space and tips for fellow spacepreneurs. Sponsored by Antaris.

That’s just a taste of the tech, topics and talent you’ll find on display today at TC Sessions: Space — where opportunity is nearly as infinite as the universe. Don’t have a ticket? That’s an easy fix — buy a pass and get on board this mission.

Here’s what’s happening today at TC Sessions: Space 2022 by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

It’s tough in the current economic climate to hire and retain engineers focused on system admin, DevOps and network architecture. In a recent Gartner survey, IT executives cited talent shortages as the top barrier to adopting emerging technologies. Unfortunately for execs, at the same time recruiting is posing a major challenge, IT infrastructure is becoming more costly to maintain. Business monitoring company Anodot reports that nearly half of corporations are finding it difficult to get cloud costs alone under control.

Aiming to overcome some of the blockers to success in IT, Lucas Roh co-founded MetalSoft, a startup that provides “bare metal” automation software for managing on-premises data centers and multi-vendor equipment. MetalSoft allows companies to automate the orchestration of hardware, including switches, servers and storage, making them available to users that can be consumed on-demand.

MetalSoft spun out from Hostway, a cloud hosting provider headquartered in Chicago. Hostway developed software to power cloud service provider hardware, which went into production in 2014. In 2019, the software spun out as a separate company — MetalSoft — with the goal of broadening its capabilities to service additional service providers and enterprises.

“We provide a turnkey solution to service providers to offer … cloud services,” Roh told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We’re differentiated from others in that we automate and manage the full stack [of infrastructure], including switches, servers, storage and networking as well as cloud enablement.”

So how does that solve the talent shortage and cost overruns in tech? Well, Roh — who previously helped to launched cloud provider Bigstep and the aforementioned Hostway — asserts that MetalSoft’s software can eliminate many of the problems associated with hardware silos, reducing the complexity of managing them to the point where non-technical consumers can build their own infrastructure. By allowing customers to pull workloads back from the cloud and run them in-house if they so wish, MetalSoft can bring down IT costs while offering a higher level of control, including security posture, Roh argues.

For instance, MetalSoft can automatically deploy and configure operating systems and firmware upgrades while discovering running hardware on a network. It also can auto-configure storage volumes and storage-related system network settings, generating a visual blueprint that captures a company’s infrastructure, including servers, storage and networking.

Roh says that MetalSoft’s targeting both enterprises that have their own equipment (for example, in a data center or co-location facility) as well as cloud service providers that want to offer “bare metal as a service” or “private cloud as a service” products to their customers (think a provider deploying infrastructure to a client’s on-premises server room). It’s early days — MetalSoft landed its first customers last year, and the company isn’t talking revenue or operating cash flow at the moment — but Roh claims that MetalSoft’s solution is beginning to gain traction in the marketplace.

“We have some major enterprise customers with hundreds of thousands of devices that we are not revealing but include a major telco and major data center and cloud service providers, and have a strong partnership with major OEM,” Roh said. “In the past couple of years, we’ve especially focused on adding many enterprise features and support for more hardware vendors.”

While MetalSoft competes with heavyweights like Cisco and OpenStack, it’s likely to benefit from the recent uptick in investment in on-premises infrastructure. During the past year, 30% of organizations moved workloads or data from the public cloud back to a private cloud or on-premises or colocation facility, according to a report from the Uptime Institute. Their primary reasons were cost, regulatory compliance, performance issues and perceived concerns over security, the report said.

“We help reduce the cost of IT and we have become even more important in a more stringent spending environment … Our software can help reduce the technical labor requirements while significantly reducing cost while delivering the full functionality to their end-users.” Roh said. “After the spinout [from Hostway], we continue improving our product, especially in terms of the enterprise features that customers need.”

MetalSoft, which has around 40 employees, has raised $17 million in venture capital to date; $16 million came from its Series A that closed this week, led by DNS Capital. Roh says that the proceeds will be put toward growing MetalSoft’s sales and marketing functions and product development.

“We have done quite a bit of work on AI and machine learning that’s not yet part of our software stack,” Roh added. “We are currently working to incorporate AI and machine learning to intelligently manage and monitor bare metal hardware. We’ll be excited to introduce that product the second half of next year.”

MetalSoft aims to help manage server infrastructure through automation by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch