"certainly" is doing a lot of work here. I'm not "certain".
In fact the people I have spoken to who have worked on Palantir platform were deeply suspicious of their users treating data with respect, and so built security and immutable auditability as foundational tech.
Yeah. The data vacuum whose CEO loves to talk about how effectively their software helps the US government kill people is exactly who should have unfettered access to extremely intimate details of many people’s existence, without their permission.
Do you believe the organization that whoops-leaked 500k people’s intimate health data is capable of auditing any complex technical system? Are you asserting that Palantir is no different than any other infrastructure company? Do you think that my criticism would ever apply to the US IC or the DoD? Do you think there’s any way I would approve of the NHS or NIH using Palantir based on my earlier statements? Is there a reason you’re peppering me with tangential rhetorical questions sort of poking around the premise of what I said like a lawyer from palantir talking a deposition while glibly dismissing what I actually said? Dispensing with the rhetorical questions, let’s get concrete: do you have a Palantir logo Coffee Mug? Pajamas? … briefs?
> Do you believe the organization that whoops-leaked 500k people’s intimate health data is capable of auditing any complex technical system?
Yes I believe that it's possible that an organization capable of effective auditing could also leak data
> Are you asserting that Palantir is no different than any other infrastructure company?
For the most part, yes. Palantir is more effective and more "ideological" than most, but in the direction away from your implication that they're vacuuming up data and mixing it across customers
> Do you think there’s any way I would approve of the NHS or NIH using Palantir based on my earlier statements?
No, but the question was whether facts or data adjust your opinion or not, and in which direction if so. Duping one mostly-competent organization on security/privacy posture is much, much harder than duping dozens or hundreds of organizations, including the most security-competent on the planet.
> Is there a reason you’re peppering me with tangential rhetorical questions sort of poking around the premise of what I said
Because the premise of what you said is wrong. The phrase "data vacuum" is clearly meant to imply a fact pattern that just isn't true. The term "unfettered access" is not true either, as data infrastructure companies (Palantir more than most) have significant controls on their exposure to customer data.
The overall implication that people's UK health data would be somehow mixed into a US government effort to kill people is laughably wrong when you actually have to write it out explicitly instead of relying on nudge nudge wink wink.
And yes I do have a Palantir mug actually! Good guess.
Let's get concrete: have you ever actually used Palantir? Ever engaged in contract negotiations with them or set up their access controls on your own data to understand what is or is not allowed, and to what degree you have visibility and control into it?
Sorry buddy but it's you who's speaking in baseless rhetoric here.
But filling a leaky bucket does have an impact. You just have to fill it faster than it empties. Which is probably your point.
My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect.
The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.
No my argument is Monero fails in practice relatively worse than similar 'weight class' crypto currency assets at actually spending 'digital cash' (presumably a desirable quality of 'cash') to make legal purchases from crypto accepting sellers. This is quite evident if you survey available offerings -- vendors are far more likely to accept even the lower cap litecoin than monero (even the 'cryptwerk' website advertised by getmonero shows 2x as many vedors accepting LTC).
I do postulate that the fact it is easier to show chain of custody to the point it satisfies banks and regulated entities as part of this (even if through chain-analysis mumbo jumbo), thus other crypto currencies have lent more towards accessing more purchases in a way cash idealizes to do.
At no point was my argument simply monero fails at the same thing a pile of cash dropped through the sky might fail at and that's the end of it. I think that's a pretty silly portrayal of what I've said, made in bad faith. Although in reality I've had my cex account frozen almost every single time I've tried depositing very low, 3 digit amounts of XMR (including frozen for years) whereas you can somewhat reliably put $200-$1000 in a bank in place like USA and then use that as part of purchase that goes through KYC/AML channels.
Now if you do want to compare, say, a pile of cash falling out of the sky, vs a pile of bitcoin, vs a pile of monero and you wanted to spend it on something big that went through KYC/AML compliance. In order of what would be easiest to spend, assuming the money actually came from a legal source. Bitcoin would be the easiest to spend because you have some chance at showing it came straight from a KYC'd source because of the plaintext blockchain, next would be cash (largely for historical reasons), the hardest to actually spend would be the monero. Now if we presume matheusmoreira point about banks was just a red herring, then your follow on is just one too, since the bit regarding KYC/AML compliance purchases/transactions was a response to that.
Right but isn't the point of Monero that once you have it, you don't have a public, immutable ledger of all subsequent transactions, just waiting there for when you become persona non grata to some entity with significant time or computational resources to fuck you?
The relevant similarity to (unbanked) cash is the post-facto privacy.
And yes, this feature does dramatically increase the KYC posture of institutions that need to be afraid of those same computation-rich entities, but obviously the point of the currency is you don't functionally need them the way you functionally need a bank to do anything similar with cash.
Most basic economics academic reviews show a few main qualities of cash[0][1].
(1)durability
(2)portability
(3)divisibility
(4) uniformity
(5) acceptability
(6) limited supply
Monero beats plaintext chain coins at uniformity, as BTC for example is non-fungible because there are tainted and non-tainted coins. Monero is truly fungible. It loses to even similar weight class coin at acceptability.
I suppose you can argue the gains in uniformity overcome the losses in acceptability. I'm not sure reality has bore that out if you actually want to use your cash. In practice BTC/LTC can shed their taint and public trail by being mixed and this seems to make up for this weakness enough for acceptance while still allowing a public chain for the last few transactions before it enters/leaves the KYC/AML panopticon, which is highly desirable for 'acceptability' (this is probably also why ZCash is far more easier to access than XMR, as it has a feature to disable anonymity so it can go to/from central exchanges and KYC/AML'd vendors).
Note: if you go to some cryptocurrency shilling website, you can find 'anonymity' as a trait, but this deviates from the more common definition.
I don't think they even wanted to punish them. This is more "art of the deal" BS from the chief idiot in charge where you make people think you're going to go to an extreme as a bargaining chip.
I have no idea but this went out to all fed agencies from what I could tell looking at the subreddit for fed employees. I was surprised by the notice because my agency does not have a contract with them and obviously we can’t just use any LLM provider.
Correct. And this quickly expands out into most companies in the US as the federal government uses and buys a huge amount of software. A component that you make and sell to X, that is used in Y, which is bundled up in Z that had Anthropic used on it can't be used by the fed.gov.
It is, but NSA reports to the director of national intelligence, not the defense secretary, so it’s unclear (to me at least) that SecDef’s opinion of Anthropic counts for anything here
I guess DOD is large enough they have multiple parallel cabinet level positions
It’s not as clear as that. The NSA director is also, traditionally, dual-hatted as the Commander of CYBERCOM and thus a flag officer reporting ultimately to the SecDef. The DNI is responsible for coordinating/funding national intelligence activities but ultimately a lot of day to day operational decision making tends to flow through the pentagon. They would definitely need to abide by DoD policy
> They would definitely need to abide by DoD policy
The policy in question is a statement by SecDef being reviewed by courts. I think it’s fair to ask whether DNI is actually constrained by that, or if it’s a judgement call.
Normal military procurement is going to go through process and use the APIs that Anthropic gives them. The NSA just has to has to achieve the goal of getting the weights out of the target computer.
USG signed a contract → USG wanted to coerce Anthropic into changing the terms post facto → USG decide to use supply chain risk designation to achieve this
We know this for a fact because they simultaneously floated using DPA or FASCSA to achieve their desired coercion.
licensing it to researchers allows you to create, monitor, and enforce policies like the one you describe
stealing it does not
reply