Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine
112 points
2 hours ago
| 9 comments
| ft.com
| HN
timoth3y
16 minutes ago
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Palantir is clearly a mind-boggling on-the-nose, but terrible name to those familiar with the book.

The Palantiri consistently provided their users technically accurate intelligence that lead to disastrous strategic decisions.

Denethor committed suicide out of despair, after a palantir showed him the black fleet approaching, but he did not know that it was actually Aragorn who had captured the fleet and was coming with reinforcements.

We don't know specifically how the palantir deceived Saruman, but it's pretty clear it was one of the key factors in his corruption and downfall.

And even Sauron himself was misled in this way! The palantir showed him, correctly, that a hobbit and Aragorn were at Helm's Deep, and he concluded that Aragorn had the ring. So he prematurely moved his armies out of Mordor and left the plains and Mt Doom unguarded, which permitted the destruction of the ring.

I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.

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WhatIsDukkha
8 minutes ago
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Saruman was already rotted by lust for the ring when he began to use the Palantir and then came into the presence of a dominating and corrupting will.

So yeah... plenty of real world versions of that.

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tremon
1 hour ago
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> “We welcome that the Zurich Commercial Court confirmed our right to publish a counterstatement”

Well that certainly is one way to spin having 22 of your 23 counterstatement requests dismissed by the court.

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saghm
29 minutes ago
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Their right to publish multiple counterstatements is left unsettled by current law
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mentalgear
3 minutes ago
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To all investigative Journalists: Thank you for your hard work, and for being an inspiration and beacon of hope in these dark techno-feudalistic times.
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holistio
1 hour ago
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Anyone who has read The Lord of The Rings has exactly zero reasons to trust Palantir.
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emptybits
58 minutes ago
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Indeed. The corporation name is literally (in literature!) an example of all-seeing surveillance tools causing harm when (not if) they fall into evil hands.
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DoktorDelta
1 hour ago
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Crazy that there's a weapons company called Anduril as well
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nickff
56 minutes ago
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Why? Naming a weapons company after Aragorn's sword makes sense. "The Daily Beast" on the other hand is a rather cynical name...
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goldenarm
16 minutes ago
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Anduril is quite a positive name, it is a broken sword reforged later to save humankind. Quite a metaphor about western reindustrialization.
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scns
54 minutes ago
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Creative people seem to be rather pacifistic. Warmongers seem less so, they have to "borrow" from the creative ones.
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Yokohiii
35 minutes ago
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Wait europe doesn't want to buy spy tech that spies on europe? Shocking.
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baobabKoodaa
20 minutes ago
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Fine. Thiel will just fund a Hulk Hogan lawsuit against the Swiss magazine, then.
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sschueller
2 hours ago
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catlikesshrimp
1 hour ago
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If Cannot resolve archive.ph host

Access the .is domain https://archive.is/lXw7j

internet archive cannot resolve either

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tremon
1 hour ago
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archive.ph works fine for me. Resolves to

  168.222.241.49 archive.ph
  2a09:b280:fe00:5a:d197:eab6:9aa0:f22 archive.ph
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akerl_
1 hour ago
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Archive.ph returns different results to Cloudflare’s resolvers intentionally, preventing Cloudflare DNS users from resolving it correctly.
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zzzeek
43 minutes ago
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> Palantir, whose software is widely used by US defence and intelligence agencies, has faced growing scrutiny in parts of Europe as governments reassess their dependence on American technology companies.

I think it's great. Europe and other regions will be building out their own tech stacks, decreasing global dependence on big US players like AWS and Palantir, creating lots more jobs for programmers and much broader ecosystems for doing things.

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mistrial9
1 hour ago
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> officials in Denmark and the Netherlands have similarly expressed a desire to uncouple from the US-based software group

oh that is clever writing

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tokai
1 hour ago
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I wonder which Danish official they are talking about. Lots of voices against it, but not from officials. The danish state is going full steam ahead. Just yesterday the Greenlandic police was integrated with Grotham from Palantir.
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