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Palantir might be an American company, but if you hire them it's not like a bunch of Americans come and take over your IT systems. There entire business model i

by XorNot 1y ago

Palantir might be an American company, but if you hire them it's not like a bunch of Americans come and take over your IT systems. There entire business model is "forward deployed engineers" who by necessity are locals and come help setup things on your own infrastructure.

red-iron-pine 1y ago
unless those engineers know about, and can shut off, backdoors in code, then their locality is meaningless. 10 guys in Northern VA are making those calls, not the forward deployed engineers and not your infra. palantir dials home at some point to verify a license, right?
- XorNot 1y ago
  It does not. In fact most of the big enterprise software doesn't because enterprise won't allow it, or it's running airgapped. Enterprise software is licensed based on support contracts and audits. "trust" is actually more present because a large company or the government can't just vanish if they're in license compliance breach and can later be sued to recover costs. This is basically Oracle and IBMs business model: let people install whatever they want, then request a spot check if usage and discover the license breaches which can be rectified by buying more of whatever now that it's business critical.
  - AndriyKunitsyn 1y ago
    I have never been a big enterprise integrator, and I thought exactly like this. Then in 2024 the CrowdStrike BSOD screw up happened, and I was surprised to learn that no, not everything is airgapped. Apparently, businesses are okay with untrusted, unvetted, self-updating pieces of code that run in kernel mode.
    - u_sama 1y ago
      From my experience in Europe, this comes to being the least bad choice amongst a large series of bad choices. They install CrowdStrike in legacy devices running in critical industries like manufacturing because a lot of devices are legacy (think Windows 2000 and XP in 2025) which cannot be changed because either the company is bankrupt, the machine change would cost millions or the company is strapped for cash and/or labor to actually update all of the necessary (and not supported) industrial computers. This + corporate shit policies from departents disconnected from the needs on the terrain.

by XorNot 1y ago

red-iron-pine 1y ago

unless those engineers know about, and can shut off, backdoors in code, then their locality is meaningless. 10 guys in Northern VA are making those calls, not the forward deployed engineers and not your infra. palantir dials home at some point to verify a license, right?

XorNot 1y ago
It does not. In fact most of the big enterprise software doesn't because enterprise won't allow it, or it's running airgapped. Enterprise software is licensed based on support contracts and audits. "trust" is actually more present because a large company or the government can't just vanish if they're in license compliance breach and can later be sued to recover costs. This is basically Oracle and IBMs business model: let people install whatever they want, then request a spot check if usage and discover the license breaches which can be rectified by buying more of whatever now that it's business critical.
- AndriyKunitsyn 1y ago
  I have never been a big enterprise integrator, and I thought exactly like this. Then in 2024 the CrowdStrike BSOD screw up happened, and I was surprised to learn that no, not everything is airgapped. Apparently, businesses are okay with untrusted, unvetted, self-updating pieces of code that run in kernel mode.
  - u_sama 1y ago
    From my experience in Europe, this comes to being the least bad choice amongst a large series of bad choices. They install CrowdStrike in legacy devices running in critical industries like manufacturing because a lot of devices are legacy (think Windows 2000 and XP in 2025) which cannot be changed because either the company is bankrupt, the machine change would cost millions or the company is strapped for cash and/or labor to actually update all of the necessary (and not supported) industrial computers. This + corporate shit policies from departents disconnected from the needs on the terrain.