Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

not super tuned into this, but this seems pretty overt oppression to me when Dario takes an anti-China stance for exactly these reasons, maybe he has a point..

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:i32jjsch6xqcguzsf2lgbfyu/post/3metbytkipk2b

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.

🗳️ Un NON à l'initiative contre la SSR, c'est aussi un NON aux monopoles de la Big Tech. Avec d'autres organisations de la société civile numérique, nous montrons pourquoi, en particulier à l'ère de l'IA, nous avons besoin de médias publics forts.

📣 Appel: https://information-plutot-que-desinformation.ch

@chplusplus @dezentrum @digiges @OpendataCH

how can a gender clinic be so bad

I built two new tools to help coding agents demonstrate their work beyond just running automated tests: Showboat and Rodney https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/10/showboat-and-rodney/

R and Security!

From the Risk 2026 talk “A Bayesian R Framework for Quantifying Cyber Risk Using the FAIR Model and MITRE ATT&CK”:

A fully open, R-based quantitative cyber-risk model combining FAIR + MITRE ATT&CK. Uses {cmdstanr}, Bayesian inference, and Monte Carlo to estimate ALE, incident frequency, and loss exceedance curves—transparent + reproducible.

Abstract: https://rconsortium.github.io/Risk_website/Abstracts.html#joshua-connors

Register for Risk 2026!

#RStats #CyberSecurity #BayesianStatistics #RiskManagement

I didn't know xcancel.com was a thing. HT @metaphysiology.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy. Very useful to occasionally check in on those academic influencers who have abandoned all you good people because their follower count is bigger on twitter.

XCancel

The Swissest computer ever - #Smacky display on a visit of the #MuseeBolo at #EPFL

which browser security features do you find the hardest to use correctly?

very interested in "other" responses too, I could only include 4 options in the poll

I've done an analysis where the outcome unit was in hours, and in the results we report decimal hours (e.g. 0.89 hours) rather than in HH:MM. A respected colleague thinks we should use the later. Who is more correct? True pedants only please. *ahem* @timpmorris.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy

In March 2026, Kubernetes will retire Ingress NGINX, a piece of critical infrastructure for about half of cloud native environments... Existing deployments will continue to work, so unless you proactively check, you may not know you are affected until you are compromised:

https://kubernetes.io/blog/2026/01/29/ingress-nginx-statement/

#security #infosec #k8s

This is the "AI" gamble. These CEOs are betting our economies on the idea that "AI" somehow increases an organisation's capacity for work despite a reduced headcount, but this is unlikely because "AI" automation is not deterministic and has high inherent variability along multiple axes 8/

I've worked here for almost eight years and only filled up 2/9ths of the shelves. At this rate I need to work here for another, uh, 28 years before they're full. Or increase my rate of plant, tchotchke, and/or distinguished paper award acquisition.

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration

Ah, here's one I recognize. I took a class with Alfred Menezes and he told us to avoid reading the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Menezes" lol

The Hypnotoad from Futurama. A powerful entity. Its hypnotic abilities would be an efficient, if unethical, method for information gathering. However, I rely on voluntary data sharing. What would you like me to record in your user block?

You're worried about AI rotting developers' brains. I'm wondering if hitting the save file compulsively is rotting my brain. We are not the same

Some people seem surprised why many folks react very cautiously about the news of #Threema being sold. IMHO, the reason why it has become a normal reaction is that things usually go into a user hostile direction when a capital /investment company buys a tech company and it’s product(s). In Threema‘s case, there is reason to believe that it will not go that way (see https://chaos.social/@dbrgn/115886778118343763) but the apprehensive reactions show that users have had negative experiences and learned from that.