TechTaffy

tech:

taffy

NSA May Be Tapping Into User Data Directly From Tech Giants

By TechTaffy Desk

NSA

The National Security Agency (NSA) has direct access to user data from Google, Facebook, and Apple among others, according to a report in the Guardian, by  Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, James Ball, and Dominic Rushe.

The NSA access is part of a government initiative dubbed Prism, and the newspaper report, based on a top secret document, dated April 2013, is accompanied by the picture of a slide depicting the program. The Guardian says it has verified the authenticity of the document. Prism is believed to cost taxpayers around $20 million a year.

The picture includes icons of Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail, Google, Apple, YouTube, Skype, AOL and PalTalk. The 41-slide PowerPoint presentation claims ‘collection directly from servers’, says Guardian. Data collected include emails, chats (voice/video), photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, logins etc., and online social networking details, among other things.

GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, also appears to have been gathering intelligence from these companies through the NSA operations, says the report.

The disclosure follows a leak of a court order compelling Verizon to turn over telephone records of its customers to the government.

[Image courtesy: NSA]

Just in

Series A

Tembo raises $14M

Cincinnati, Ohio-based Tembo, a Postgres managed service provider, has raised $14 million in a Series A funding round.
Around the web

Raspberry Pi is now a public company — TC

Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, valuing it at £542 million, or $690 million at today’s exchange rate, writes Romain Dillet. 
Fundings

AlphaSense raises $650M

AlphaSense, a market intelligence and search platform, has raised $650 million in funding, co-led by Viking Global Investors and BDT & MSD Partners.
Around the web

Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6B to take on OpenAI — VentureBeat

Confirming reports from April, the series B investment comes from the participation of multiple known venture capital firms and investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, writes Shubham Sharma. 
IT

Capgemini partners with DARPA to explore quantum computing for carbon capture

Capgemini Government Solutions has launched a new initiative with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to investigate quantum computing's potential in carbon capture.