The more I read about Palantir, the creepier and weirder it becomes. The CEO brags about wanting to kill all journalists with fentanyl, or brags about how their software will be used to kill people, and how readily they're willing to work for the convicted fraudster that America felt fit to give the nuclear codes.
And despite this company being creepy and weird and bizarre and secretive, they are also trying to make themselves a lifestyle brand by selling merchandise. If I felt like spending $150 for a Palantir-based hoodie, I guess I can normally do that [1], but disturbingly it is apparently "sold out". Apparently a lot of people really want to buy an overpriced sweater, or maybe they're trying to preemptively buy social credit.
Correct. Neither do Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple - realistically they're even more dangerous, see the ICC. Ironically the first three being the main hosts of.. you guessed it, Palantir.
Picking and choosing US big tech in this context is pointless, they're all as much of a risk as each other. And don't come with "you have to start somewhere", because you do, but then the place to start is slowly step-by-step getting off of the most critical ones, which are the first four I mentioned.
It seems like there's a big opportunity for someone to hire a bunch of disenfranchised US devs that want to flee the country to build an EU-native cloud platform - but clearly there's enough talent on the continent already, so why hasn't this happened yet?
The sales problem being there isn't anything viable to compete with the established players. Europe has the capability, even without immigration from the US, it just needs a kick to make good enough products.
The EU should also create a new regulation to force everyone on the continent to move away from American companies. That’s one way to give the local startups a market to sell to.
I’d be interested in arguments that EU providers could be equivalent to Azure … is it realistic to move a large university across for email and other cloud services? Might be the right time to start campaigning for institutions to divest from US tech stacks…
Among other things, with everything going on in the US today, the CEOs of Apple and Amazon were apparently at the WH for a screening of the Melania film.
Amazon funded it. They paid $30 million or so for rights to the documentary for Amazon Prime. I doubt viewers will care about it, but I look at it as a bribe from Amazon to the administration. They give Melania and by extension Trump this money, and they will get better regulatory help and more government contracts.
It's easy to start with Palantir because it simply doesn't provide any legitimate value. They don't do anything, at all, other than enable spying by weaving snippets of private data into a coherent whole. You don't have to explain the decision to well-meaning people who are inconvenienced, nor provide a transition plan for essential services, you can just yank the plug tomorrow and tell everyone who complains to buzz off.
"No way, not a cent of my nest egg funded by papa Bezos comes from AWS FedRAMP High GovCloud massive sweet enterprise contracts with the likes of Palantir to host them at scale!"
The truth is there's thousands if not tens of thousands of people on here for whom it is incredibly convenient to imagine their vests were granted in a completely different universe to the likes of Palantir. Deep down they know their companies realistically play an unfathomably bigger role in surveillance capatalism, crippling addictions, furthering of current US Party strongarming and a whole lot more. Exactly why many find it so cathartic to latch on to these threads and reinforce that cognitive dissonance.
I didn't even mention Meta who bring about as much harm in a day as Palantir wish it could do in a year - make no mistake, I'm not suggesting the latter is for a lack of trying. Although the idea that Zuck is somehow any more ethical than Thiel is of course hilarious.
But after all, you and me too are quite culpable in this moment, providing marketing and engagement for the platform behind Flock(YC S17). The exact source of all that data we're so angry about being loaded into the Palantir platforms.
I expect the author of the article must also recognize that Big Tech is in the same basket and are just as complicit for the sake of consistency. The problem is, we just don't hear about it often.
When I brought this up last time in [0] all I saw was constant hairsplitting, attempts to seperate Big Tech from Palantir and lots of 'whataboutism' accusations, which doesn't work because I agree.
So when I saw this:
> Palantir’s tentacles are already extending into our communities. In my constituency of Coventry, the Labour-run council awarded the company a £500,000 contract to develop an AI tool for children’s services.
Google [1], Microsoft [2], Amazon [3] are no different and these are just a few of them and they are just as bad as Palantir and all of them are in the SNP 500 directly in the portfolios of pension funds.
So it is indeed a waste of time trying to picking and choose US tech companies on this.
The UK is building/has built a surveillance state using the boiling frog method. So even if you change vendors, surveillance will continue. You have accepted it as par for the course. Unless you reject it and subsequent politicians don't double-cross you, surveillance will continue. No question.
UK society has always been surprisingly tolerant of mass surveillance. Whether Palantir is involved or not, I think it may be too late to get off the train.
I know UK is ok with surveillance in public places because there is no expectation of privacy in public spaces. But are they really tolerant of surveillance in non-public places?
As someone who is neither a Jew nor a Palestinian, I'm going to take this with a grain of salt, because there is so much mud being slung across from both sides.
And despite this company being creepy and weird and bizarre and secretive, they are also trying to make themselves a lifestyle brand by selling merchandise. If I felt like spending $150 for a Palantir-based hoodie, I guess I can normally do that [1], but disturbingly it is apparently "sold out". Apparently a lot of people really want to buy an overpriced sweater, or maybe they're trying to preemptively buy social credit.
Who knows. Everything is terrible.
[1] https://store.palantir.com/
I would be keen to know if citizen data is being handled correctly, following GDPR/LED.
Given previous Danish client-state-like cooperation with NSA to spy on other EU countries, I can imagine the answer.
Minority Report Coming right up.
Picking and choosing US big tech in this context is pointless, they're all as much of a risk as each other. And don't come with "you have to start somewhere", because you do, but then the place to start is slowly step-by-step getting off of the most critical ones, which are the first four I mentioned.
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl...
The truth is there's thousands if not tens of thousands of people on here for whom it is incredibly convenient to imagine their vests were granted in a completely different universe to the likes of Palantir. Deep down they know their companies realistically play an unfathomably bigger role in surveillance capatalism, crippling addictions, furthering of current US Party strongarming and a whole lot more. Exactly why many find it so cathartic to latch on to these threads and reinforce that cognitive dissonance.
I didn't even mention Meta who bring about as much harm in a day as Palantir wish it could do in a year - make no mistake, I'm not suggesting the latter is for a lack of trying. Although the idea that Zuck is somehow any more ethical than Thiel is of course hilarious.
But after all, you and me too are quite culpable in this moment, providing marketing and engagement for the platform behind Flock(YC S17). The exact source of all that data we're so angry about being loaded into the Palantir platforms.
I expect the author of the article must also recognize that Big Tech is in the same basket and are just as complicit for the sake of consistency. The problem is, we just don't hear about it often.
When I brought this up last time in [0] all I saw was constant hairsplitting, attempts to seperate Big Tech from Palantir and lots of 'whataboutism' accusations, which doesn't work because I agree.
So when I saw this:
> Palantir’s tentacles are already extending into our communities. In my constituency of Coventry, the Labour-run council awarded the company a £500,000 contract to develop an AI tool for children’s services.
Google [1], Microsoft [2], Amazon [3] are no different and these are just a few of them and they are just as bad as Palantir and all of them are in the SNP 500 directly in the portfolios of pension funds.
So it is indeed a waste of time trying to picking and choose US tech companies on this.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46407683
[1] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366634759/Google-wins-mu...
[2] https://www.digitalhealth.net/2023/06/nhs-signs-new-microsof...
[3] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366566172/AWS-secures-89...
https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/mps-mcdonnell-and-sultana-addre...
Sultana is also on record stating the grooming gangs were a racist smear (which is odd as there were multiple races involved)