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Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact
- chvid 1y agoIt is wild that various European countries keep handling Palantir contracts for work that could have been done by local companies.
- ludicrousdispla 1y agoAre there any others besides UK? I have heard from a reliable source that Austria banned Palantir but I haven't confirmed it.
- chvid 1y agoDenmark. Of all places given that we currently are at a cold war with the US over Greenland.
- oncallthrow 1y agoThis isn’t the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that Palantir is just leagues better than the next best local option. It’s in a completely different category, in fact
- Krasnol 1y agoThis Thiel-Verse product is exactly what privacy concerned people always warned about but worse. We're delivering tools of surveillance to a world where freedom loving countries turn into oppressive regimes. Really ugly times ahead of us...
- exe34 1y agoHydra won at the last election. This is project insight creeping into everyday life.
- ludicrousdispla 1y agoOur tax dollars hard at work.
- Alifatisk 1y agoMore and more are feeding the beast, I am starting to get a bit worried
- Hikikomori 1y agoWait til you find out what Thiel believes about democracy.
- sneak 1y agoProbably pretty similarly to how the people who actually run the world superpowers feel about democracy: a nice illusion for those that live under the military dictatorships that are our current systems.
- Hikikomori 1y agoPresumably most of those you refer to want the system to continue as is, Thiel wants to break it completely.
- mola 1y agoNope. He believes it is a threat to freedom. And not in the way you presented it
- aaa_aaa 1y agoPeople should fear Thiel not because his opinion on democracy but because he has no soul. Besides, democracy is overrrated at best, and terrible if large scale.
- Lio 1y agoThis is a very bad move. Once again the goverment is putting relationships with foreign businesses ahead of domestic firms. It's just more tech we can't independantly rely on.
- gms 1y agoThat's how the world works. No country produces everything.
- jimbohn 1y agoBut not everything has a killswitch or other sovereign-threatening features
- dazc 1y agoIs there a UK-based company offering a comparable service?
- jmclnx 1y agoCrazy, the UK is signing up to what I believe is a scheme to transfer $ from taxpayers to the extreme wealthy in the US. That includes Trump. I personally believe Palantir provides no real benefit except to enrich the fascist rich in the US.
- runlaszlorun 1y agoIf that buggy Java ridden UI thinks it's "enriching the fascist rich", somebody gonna be pissed fr Lol
- espadrine 1y agoDoes Palantir fall under the Cloud Act[0]? I wonder why so many governments sign with a company that, even if the contract says they will not leak information to the US government, is required to yield any information to it if the US requests it, without even being able to notify their client—regardless of the location of the servers themselves. [0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4943/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4943...
- DoingIsLearning 1y agoNot just governments, Europol as an European wide police. [0] Palantir is also likely one of the major lobbyists in pushing for Chat Control to the European Commision. [0] (warning pdf) https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-000951-ASW-ANN02_EN.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-00095...
- meowface 1y agoWhat evidence is there that Palantir is lobbying for Chat Control? I can't find anything online. I know you said "probably", but is your speculation based on anything? To me that would be considerably worse than just selling surveillance and investigation software to governments.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- chuckSu 1y ago[dead]
- chvid 1y agoUsually these laws exclude military and police work. (Meaning the cloud act does not apply here.)
- __natty__ 1y agoHow in practice their products work? For example Palantir Gotham. What for they use it? I wonder if it’s like Tableau for military?
- ashtonshears 1y agoThe military boots on the group consider it a mapping tool, intelligence like ‘bomb here’.
- pests 1y agoThere are demo vids of most their software on YouTube.
- qweiopqweiop 1y agoThe UK already uses palantir. Clearly they value it to continue and extend the relationship. But what do they know? "Jumps into bed" gives a pretty good idea of what the author wants you to think. But I'm going to give the people signing the deal the benefit of the doubt that they might know a bit more.
- notepad0x90 1y agoBefore, they were just fooling around on the couch.
- moogly 1y agoI'm already starting to long for the simpler times of the Cold War; it's pretty clear we're not heading for post-scarcity Star Trek or Culture, but rather technofascism into technofeudalism. Some would argue we're already there, but I say it can (and will) still get a lot worse. Now where did I put that Mutant Chronicles rulebook...
- nyc_data_geek 1y agoFeel like we're doing pretty well on the Star Trek timeline, tbh. Got to get through the Eugenics Wars
- libraryatnight 1y agoI have to remind myself Star Trek TNG starts with the crew being put on trial for the crimes of humanity and the terrible fascist court they're in is from the show's vision of a more immediate future than the one we were watching on the rest of the show.
- nyc_data_geek 1y agoExactly! We don't get luxury space communism until after we defeat the nascent Terran Empire... or else we end up the Terran Empire
- nextworddev 1y agoWere you actually old enough to remember those days? It was a lot scarier
- matthewdgreen 1y agoI see no evidence that we won’t go back there. Our grandparents built an entire world order around curtailing the kind of authoritarian competition that leads to wars between major powers, and we’re already watching it break down. Do you really look at this political world as the harbinger of another 75 years free of major global conflict?
- 34ahdgT 1y agoThe lineage is interesting: Robert Maxwell allegedly sold a backdoored version of the PROMIS software to many governments, including the US government. Christine Maxwell, founder of the Magellan search engine, co-founded the Chiliad data analysis software that was used in the FBI post 9/11. Her co-founder was Alan Wade, who then went to the CIA in the role of CIO when In-Q-Tel founded Palantir. Epstein invested in Thiel's Valar fund after 2008.
- net01 1y agosome leaked emails show they where quite close https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043807
- fidotron 1y agoThis whole US investment round in the UK is dreadful, as Nick Clegg is noting. It's basically we give you money now so you end up paying us back twice and don't develop anything locally either. And we get your data in the mean time. That said, the UK is clearly desperate, as recent discussions on here attest to.
- alephnerd 1y agoIf Nick Clegg really cared about anything, he wouldn't have become the chief lobbyist for Meta. Now that he's out of the states and no longer at Meta, he's most likely rehabilitating his career to re-enter politics, just like Rishi did after his stint in high finance. The Tories are in the midst of a tailspin, and a Nick Clegg-style National Dem candidate has an interesting opportunity to peel away higher income Tories and centrists, as Reform peels away lower income or nativist British voter, and this is a shot at the incumbent Labour party. He's only 57 so he has plenty of time to wait it out and re-enter the scene, as well as the dry powder.
- aftergibson 1y agoYeah, I guess this "transformation" couldn't be more transparent, but I guess most folks have short memories.
- alephnerd 1y agoYep. He's fairly young by political standards, and can wait it out for a political comeback by 2029. Worst case, he'll probably take an appointed peerage eventually.
- net01 1y agoPeter Thiel was very close with Epstein : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043807 so it's unsurprising that the UK, which wants to befriend Pres Trump, would also like to befriend the VP (who owes his entire career to Thiel).
- bix6 1y agothiel and sacks have an old book where they try to make date rape (and intolerance for diversity) sound ok
- jacknews 1y agoNot content with having microsoft at the heart of the airforce's logistics, now they want palantir to do the decionmaking and targeting.
- runlaszlorun 1y agoThe funny thing is that no one realizes that palantir is shitty java that still need Java 1.1 for AWT, etc This should scare you immensely more... #rewrite_it_in_ada
- boxerab 1y ago"jumps into bed" - gotta love that totally unbiased reporting at The Register.
- lifeisstillgood 1y agoI used to push / campaign for all government funded software projects to be OSS by default, and to be small enough in size (millions not billions) that the SME market could still compete. In my view that’s two simple procurement changes …
- willswire 1y agoIt’s for this reason I joined Defense Unicorns[1] last year - the team behind the airgap Kubernetes tool, Zarf[2] (which is OSS). [1]: https://defenseunicorns.com https://defenseunicorns.com [2]: https://zarf.dev https://zarf.dev
- jmyeet 1y agoA lot of Europeans like to (with good cause) laugh at the rapid decline of the US and the rise of fascism, of which they are objectively correct. But there is one person in the UK who is almost singlehandedly responsible for the now near-inevitable rise in fascism in the UK and that's Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer rose to power because Brexit split Labor and Jeremy Corbyn failed to have a good position on Brexit, which opened the door to antisemitic slander against Corbyn (who, as an aside, is Jewish). Starmer's Labor got fewer votes than in either of the 2 previous elections. All that happened was the Conservative vote got split by Reform, which made it an accidental Labor landslide that won't be repeated. Starmer has done nothing to address the cost of living crisis. All he's done is ensure a post-politics career by being Israel's #1 defender and supporter as well as criminalize free speech and protest (as "terrorism") because somebody threw paint on a plane. So yeah, Britian getting in bed with one of the most evil companies on Earth [1][2] is the least surprising thing I've read all week. [1]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ [2]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticias/palantir-allegedly-enables-israels-ai-targeting-amid-israels-war-in-gaza-raising-concerns-over-war-crimes/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticia...
- bgnn 1y agoUK had a really good shot at defying fascism if Labour didn't have these right wing group of people who are afraid to even look like left. Corbyn was really really close and the result could have been a UK without a cost of living problem. Alas..
- foldr 1y agoJeremy Corbyn isn't Jewish in any straightforward sense. He's said that he has some distant Jewish ancestry: https://www.thejc.com/news/jeremy-corbyn-my-jewish-ancestry-jzw08qry https://www.thejc.com/news/jeremy-corbyn-my-jewish-ancestry-... It's not my job to decide who's Jewish or not, but I think it's inaccurate to just describe him as 'Jewish' without qualification.
- jmyeet 1y agoThat's fair but it's also kind of the point. There's an awful lot of people declaring themselves and others to be ethnically Jewish or not Jewish when it suits them or suits some political goal. Russian is the third most common spoken language in Israel for a reason: to change demographics from the refuseniks, many of whom were ethnically and religiously Jewish but many who were not. The character assassination on Corbyn who, in the very least, has Jewish ancestry, was disgusting regardless.
- brap 1y agoI don’t know why Palantir is always singled out as some sort of EvilCorp. There are plenty of companies in the defense sector but those aren’t usually considered “tech” so for some reason they’re out of the discussion. And besides, these US companies build things that the US and US-approved governments buy, so any criticism should be pointed at the governments. Personally I don’t even think that criticism is deserved. What do you expect UK to do for example, not sign any defense contracts?
- dllthomas 1y agoI mean, it was named for fictional spying orbs that could break people's minds based on the will of a powerful individual with access to the system. Maybe that's not them telling on themselves, but I am not surprised that some people wind up suspicious.
- EasyMark 1y agoEverything they sell is related to ending privacy, promoting surveillance, and support of slow frog boil fascism to replace democracy in the west and as a means to enriching Thiel and the other owners of Palantir; how can you not single it out as Evil Corp? As least google and facebook aren't directly aimed at bringing fascism to the fore. They're mostly just doing what they can within their realms that causes general chaos without any concern about the social damage they do; Palantir is planned obsolescence of privacy and democracy