Spanish government 'quietly bans use of Palantir' in critical state systems | Hacker News Reader

Spanish government 'quietly bans use of Palantir' in critical state systems

lbc.co.uk

94 pointsdonpott24 comments

Palantir should be completely banned from any EU government contracts. We cannot keep handing over our most core systems and data to non-EU entities, especially given the US’s adversarial stance towards EU.

Do you know why EU has a history of outsourcing core systems to non-EU entities?

Is it just because it is (or was) more cost effective? I mean EU has tons of talent, so it's hard for me to believe it's a lack of resources

Maybe it is too costly or too difficult to start up in the EU?

I haven't done too much research myself. I don't know the stories of anyone who tried to compete against palantir/google/boeing/etc

It is quite puzzling to me though as to why.

We have plenty of talent here to build stuff ourselves, and frequently do.

If I’m honest I’d guess lobbying and/or trade deals where we often agree to buy smth from the US.

A recent one is NHS (UK healthcare system) and Palantir, which makes no sense to hand over core medical data to an outsider. That seemed a clear lobbying case.

If this is true, who is the EU-equivalent of Palantir?

Ideally European countries would ban all US tech companies and actually invest in home grown solutions. Already some good pro open source policies. Just take it a step further and take a stance on digital sovereignty

We should ease tensions and bring back globalism, capitalism efficiency, and drop those lame nationalistic and protectionist policies.

We have nothing to gain, anywhere on the planet, from more and more closure.

It's so sad that we're still stuck globally with so many dictatures and non-representative quasi democracies like presidential and semi presidential republics, all waiting for the right strong man to push it.

America's founders fucked up with their presidential approach of making a single, hard to remove person, hold executive power.

Say what you want, but it hasn't been since Sri Lanka 50 years ago that a parliamentary republic turned authoritarian. Every single others have been presidential and semi presidential ones.

Electing kings seems worse than having ereditary ones, they can even claim popular mandate...

I’m 100% for globalism, but you cannot outsource your sovereignty. The US has proven time and time again that it is fine with using its embedding into nations as a bargaining chip, and has proven highly unreliable.

Meanwhile the Dutch news just has a headline that NATO fully embraced Palantir’s Maven Smart System, so I wonder how true this ban is.

Why would dutch doing something make you cast doubt about Spain announcement?

The two nations have a bit of history.

Assume because Spain is part of Nato. Though the two aren't mutually exclusive, the Goverment is banning it from parts, not necessarily everywhere.

I was more alluding to potential for a Neo 80 Years' War (or else a Neo War of Spanish Succession).

Smart.

Ole, que viva España

Totally appropriate. Their C-suite seem like psychopaths.

I fucking wish the UK government would do the same.

Same for Germany and other EU members

Andy Burnham (supposed incoming PM) is currently busy promising the world, and one of those is reducing their tentacles in the NHS, which would be a start.

By that, they mean they don't want Palantir to see what is going on in those systems. Palantir has an unmodifiable blockchain to track all additions, changes and modifications, and deletions and by whom. No way to cheat. In many ways, Palantir is so much safer than any other system. But my guess is there are things they don't want the Trump DSI/NSA/CIA/Military Intelligence to see.

> unmodifiable blockchain

Ahhh, this old trope. Fork it - trivial to do when you have consensus.

I don't even understand what an "unmodifiable blockchain" held by a single private entity could mean.

They

- have the data of yesterday

- have backups of the data of yesterday

- are going to write today's data on top of it to continue the chain

(insert magic here)

- somehow we are super sure, tomorrow, that today's data has not been tampered with

If somebody can shine some light on the magic part, I'm interested

The point isn't that you can't add bad data: obviously you can.

The point is that if the hashes of the blocks are published, you can't later go back and tamper with that data.

> But my guess is there are things they don't want the Trump DSI/NSA/CIA/Military Intelligence to see.

You don't have to guess, that's exactly what the headline says: "...over fears of national security leaks". And several times in the body of the article.

Correct. Why should any country want its sensitive government data to be visible to other countries, and to Trumps government at that?

Why doesn't the Trump admin open up it's data to inspection by European, Chinese, Russian etc auditors? What does it have to fear?

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