The tech bros aren’t “saying the quiet part out loud” just now.
They were saying it with the demographics of their teams. They were screaming it with the demographics of leadership. They were being crystal clear when they fired people for pointing out the harms of language models trained on sexist, racist data.
Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/27/palantir-sues-swiss-magazine-for-accurately-reporting-that-the-swiss-government-didnt-want-palantir/
Please note that Palantir would rather that you didn't share this story, it makes them look even more stupid if you do...
If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you’d think someone in the building might have flagged…
Wir verklagen #Meta (für unsere Mandanten).
Warum?
https://www.spiritlegal.com/de/aktuelles/details/pressemitteilung-sammelklage-gegen-meta.html
Commercial users who pay at least 25K/year to OpenSSL already, complain that we don't feed their business for free as we no longer support OpenSSL v1 in the vanilla curl release.
OpenSSL v1 is not available (updated) anymore without paying for it. Why would we serve obviously strictly commercial interests without getting paid?
So, up-to-date curl with support for OpenSSL v1 is only available for paying customers. You can become one right now!
🐺 Neue Konflikte statt echte Lösungen: Wir kritisieren die geplante Aufnahme des Wolfs ins Bundesjagdrecht & somit eine mögliche reguläre Bejagung von Wölfen.
✏️ Jetzt die Petition "Herdenschutz statt Wolfsjagd" unterzeichnen 👉
Let me give an example of how I’m not perfect.
I believe that environmental plastics are a big problem and we should try to cut out plastic packaging. Do I buy products packaged in plastic? Absolutely yes! There are some kinds of product I don’t think it’s possible to find in non-plastic packaging. An example from last week: CR2032 batteries. They’re sold in hard-to-open plastic packages for safety reasons. (They’re also apparently coated in something bitter to discourage kids from swallowing them, which immediately made me want to taste one out of curiosity, but I was able to resist that urge.)
On the other hand, if I’m buying olive oil and there are two bottles on the shelf, and one is plastic and the other is glass, I’ll buy the oil in the glass bottle, even if it’s a bit more expensive, because glass is both recyclable and less harmful in the environment. The canola oil in the kitchen, on the other hand, is in a plastic bottle; I’ve never seen any sold in glass.
So yeah, we can’t be perfect, and I absolutely don’t expect you to be, but let’s all try to be a bit better eh?
The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.
Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.
LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.
Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.
What's going on here? The matplotlib maintainer this story is about correctly notes that all the quotes from his post in the article are made up.
UPDATE: Link was pulled; see below.
The war waged by the tech authoritarian oligarchy against the media has reached a new level:
#Palantir is suing us. Us, the Republik Magazin.
A small Swiss media company, funded by readers, founded in 2018 and free of advertising. I am not aware of any other media company globally that Palantir is currently targeting so aggressively.
What is this about? Together with my wonderful colleagues at the WAV research collective Jenny Steiner, Lorenz Naegeli, Marguerite Meyer, and Balz Oertli, we published a two-part series on Palantir's activities in Switzerland on December 8 and 9.
Using an extensive corpus of documents – which we obtained thanks to the Freedom of Information Act – we were able to trace a sales campaign over a period of seven years. Palantir tried to get in with many federal authorities – and was rejected everywhere.
And we also found out that the Swiss Army Staff evaluated the products and came to the conclusion that the army should refrain from using Palantir products.
Among other risks, they feared that data would be passed on to the US authorities.
Palantir is not just any company. ICE uses its products to hunt down migrants in the US. The Israeli army IDF uses the software in its Gaza offensive. The British health authority NHS has made itself dependent on the products for data analysis during the pandemic. And CEO #AlexKarp displays inhuman and aggressive rhetoric towards Europe, while the company itself advertises the “optimization of the kill chain.”
These are all facts, repeatedly verified and published by renowned media outlets. Our research relating to Switzerland and Zurich is based on this.
In addition to analyzing documents, we also spoke to various sources – including Palantir executives here in Zurich. The quotes used were presented to them and approved. Of course, we always adhered to the high standards of journalistic work. We conducted a thorough fact check before publication.
But the company doesn't want us to write the truth.
After the US company owned by right-wing tech billionaire #PeterThiel dedicated an absurd blog post to us, claiming some misinformation (such as that they had not participated in official tenders with the federal administration, a point we never claimed. On the contrary: we spoke from the outset of attempts to establish contact, sales talks, informal meetings, business as usual), after the Global Director of Privacy & Civil Liberties (PCL) Engineering and contact person for Swiss media Courtney Bowman launched personal attacks against us in LinkedIn comments between Christmas and New Year (“partisan fear-mongering”), Palantir's Swiss lawyers demanded a counterstatement on December 29.
We rejected this demand in its entirety.
In January, they demanded the same thing again. We rejected it again.
And now we see each other in court.
But why all this?
Our research on the Swiss army report caused a huge international media response. The Guardian and the Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported on the Swiss army's rejection. Numerous financial portals and stock market magazines picked up our news (which could have consequences for the overvalued stock market company Palantir).
And Chaos Computer Club spokesperson Constanze Kurz presented our research to a huge audience at the renowned IT conference Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg at the end of December.
All of this is making Palantir nervous.
We have now submitted a comprehensive defense brief. We can substantiate all of our findings with several documents and publicly available media reports.
We trust in the rule of law and freedom of the press in this country.
In keeping with yesterday's event “Zurich, little Big Tech City” at the Gessneralle, where we first announced this news exclusively to the audience on site:
World politics will soon be negotiated in Zurich: freedom of the press, the facts about ICE, Trump, Israel, Karp, tech authoritarianism.
The truth.
All this at the Zurich Commercial Court.
We will not be intimidated. And we will keep you informed.
Wren Reilly
kim_harding ✅
Peter Hense 🇺🇦
daniel:// stenberg://
NABU e.V.
mathew
Reading Recluse
Taggart
Paco Luque 🇵🇸
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