Hacker News

That is rather disturbing but this had me lol:

> Spain is “making a big mistake,” said Bart Groothuis [...] “Spain is now dependent on the country with the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program directed against us.”

I highly doubt he's naive enough to believe the "against us" qualifier exempts the operator of the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program ever.

Right now you either give it to China or to the US.

China is not publicly threatening to invade the EU.

I think the EU needs to produce this themselves but right now they don’t and they don’t have any large, trustworthy allies.

They deliver part of hardware but the data itself is hosted in Spain and operated by the interior ministry.

You are literally wrong, the data is stored in Spain on their servers and managed by their government. The risk as stated by EU and US is allowing Chineese nationals to *enter* the data storage facilities (direct quote from the article you shared).

Yes, it's still bad but they are not as stupid to just have their servers located in China for this.

still not the worst of reasons.

would be better to be on spanish servers, but decoupling from american tech remains a public good, especially if using american tech bans american competitors

The Spanish public overwhelmingly trusts China over the US, so from their perspective, this is not necessarily a bad move.

Obviously, the best move would be to keep the data in Europe instead.

As opposed to what? American servers with Isreali backdoors?

If the data is encrypted before the upload I see no problem

Can’t form a COMINTERN if the US is watching.

So? And other countries are storing their data in the US, not covered by gdpr

At this point, can you tell me one non corrupt government?

At least they are doing stuff for the people

indeed, and he has apparently already been walking the walk

>"Burnham did not grant the US tech company any contracts during his nine years as Greater Manchester mayor, and is minded to take the same approach in Downing Street."

Is your assumption that palantir is a good thing?

This prevents palantir being used against people, what are you talking about? How will blacklisting military tech affect you?

Right up until some kid named "Bobby Tiananmen" makes the whole database delete itself ;)

Dunno, losing it maybe safer from a citizen's POV.

>foreigners are a bit more likely to be loyal to the government

Yes, to their own government! Both China and USA have laws to force companies to insert backdoors. These laws have been enforced numerous times. If you think this is a smaller risk than doing things nationally, then indeed you're basically arguing that Spain is Somalia, there are separatist forces roaming around, the country can't enforce its own laws and the government needs to sell everything to foreign governments to stay in power. This is not the case (for now).

He just put the last nail in the coffin when he gave citizenship to millions of migrants while Spanish has one of the highest unemployment rate of Europe.

I still think it will be a coalition and not a full right government.

How is the AC situation now is Spain? Has the country mass adopted AC in homes and offices?

It isn't that simple, Canary Islands already counts with 2.2 million + tourists people and the fresh water is a highly risk resource even when desalinization plants are widespread, the groundwater aquifers are severely compromised. The mild weather heavily depends on the trade winds. But models predict that due to fact of being so close to Africa heat waves are prone to be more and more frequent compromising the water resources.

    and probably unaffected from climate change

Ok but most of the populated areas of the Canary Islands are a tourist shithole, not somewhere you would want to live.

Canary Islands will be affected (severely) for any change on the sea currents. Because the marine trophic chains will change.

A warmer ocean means much bigger storms over the islands. This has both positive and negative aspects.

Islands are extremely vulnerable to climate change all over, as they are completely dependent in near-term precipitation for all their water (no rivers, no aquifers).

It could be worse can only take a government so far. Eventually, just preaching to the choir catches up with you.

The no AC in Europe thingy is mostly central and north Europe, where, in fairness, it didn't use to get very hot but now have heat waves fairly often.

Spain, Portugal, Italy and other southern European countries have very wide spread AC usage.

Nice. I don't know what your comfort with swimming is but battling extreme heat also happens to be much easier when you have large welcoming bodies of water for humans to wade in, and with easy and cheap access for the common man. It boggles the mind that for all its coast line the only place the US has that's comparable is Hawaii pretty much.

Sure extreme heat might ruin the seas too eventually (there is already talk of Asian jellyfish species being spotted in record warm sea temperatures) but the amount of due dilligence needed is non-existent compared to the US, Australia, or far east Asia.

Ventless temperature control units are extremely popular there so it's probably not an unwise investment but you're not really ahead of the curve. The construction of most European buildings[1] lends itself poorly to anything that requires knocking a hole in a wall but the systems that can exhaust heat through water lines are usually quite reasonable to set up.

1. Though this is significantly less prevalent in Spain due to a lot of reconstruction happening after the civil war - that isn't to say buildings there are perfect, they just have different problems than the classic German 30cm thick stone wall.

The price of AC gases had skyrocketed by EU laws, and more than half of the bill are just taxes.

Some gases, like ammonia are easy to manufacture, other are being banned by environmental concerns, and other depend on international trade nets that can be shocked at any time if somebody trumped that morning. Investing in AC should depend heavily on the kind of refrigerant used in your product.

Will face the same oceanographic problem that Canary Islands. Galicia is richer than they should be, thanks to the Artic. And also thanks to Ethiopy.

People in the comments here are praising the move, so presumably something is public. I've googled but I can't see some specific breach or documented misuse. Is the objection to Palantir strictly political?

> Anybody here think that Palantir is not a security risk for Spain?

It boggles the mind a bit, but I’ve seen a few comments on here with people defending them to the tune of “what’s the big deal, they just help governments with their data! They're innocent” which is uh, either aggressively naive, or just paid PR behaviour.

> Anybody here think that Palantir is not a security risk for Spain?

why is THAT your take and not "WTF WHY ARE THOSE CAMERAS LEGAL IN GENERAL?"

> i’m convinced we’re going to find out at some point they’re all on some kind of modern meth type drug that entirely breaks their reality

It's called being out-of-touch obscenely wealthy coupled with a massive ego.

You are probably thinking about ketamine.

Why don't you stop using American sites and services now then? I see comments like this a lot but no one wants to be personally inconvenienced to stop using hn/youtube/reddit/whatever.

It's what heritage foundation, elon and all the other billionaires want. This is not what most americans wanted, is it? How much of the population voted for orange man?

The NSA have Congressional oversight and are held accountable for their (mis)deeds, more or less.

The Chinese MSS and the Chinese Communist Party itself aren't even accountable to God.

The people who raised concerns about the awful things the Chinese Communist Party has done in the process are unfortunately unavailable for comment.

I thinking OP is worried about China exporting its political influence outside.

In China, the Ministry for State Security has the legal authority to seize and investigate your devices without warrant nor active case, for instance. This can be, legally, motivated by dissident political thought.

?

They won the contract, the military wants to keep it, the politicians are threatening to blanket kill all palantir contracts.

Yes palantir is fascist organization. They did not done the murders only because they dont have power yet. That is claim of CEO, I am just listening to what he says and writes.

Jews complained about nazi long before holocaust, btw. So did opposition.

“offensively trivializing those who died in the Holocaust” - calling someone nazi or fascist is not trivializing Holocaust. These are clear terms and both Palantir and Karp often publish texts with fascist ideological elements and views. Read something they published like Technological republic. They are not hiding it.

It's not even some radical view.

They're already helping run ICE's concentration camps. If Trump asked them for help with extermination camps they'd agree immediately.