indeed, and he has apparently already been walking the walk
>"Burnham did not grant the US tech company any contracts during his nine years as Greater Manchester mayor, and is minded to take the same approach in Downing Street."
I do agree blocking Palantir is a good move but the Spanish government is doing it for the wrong reason. Spain is storing all sort of data on Chinese servers, including their Intelligence, and Judicial wiretaps.
It's expensive to home-grow your own solutions and if you try transitioning too many services at once the cost will be outrageous and you'll probably open other security holes. I am glad Spain is taking this step and I hope they continue this trend - but outright refusing to use any software built abroad requires a massive investment in domestic tech. That investment would likely pay economic dividends but it is a cost that needs to be measured against other investments Spain needs to make and in Spain's case resilience against global warming is especially important.
The original saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I think an intellectually honest take is that it's advantageous and prudent to depend on allies and neighbors; leveraging each party's strengths for efficiencies over strategic autonomy. This trade-off is commonly debated with depending on US military hardware in favor of EU military hardware (e.g. France's long standing position for EU strategic autonomy), or vendor lock-in with AWS vs cloud-independent offerings.
The problem is when an ally becomes inconsistent and/or uncooperative; a high stakes version of prisoner's dilemma. At which point do you replace an ally's offerings with more expensive, and often inferior, alternatives? The general populace rarely has the appetite for the short-term economic pain required to achieve long-term strategic independence.
> Spain is “making a big mistake,” said Bart Groothuis [...] “Spain is now dependent on the country with the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program directed against us.”
I highly doubt he's naive enough to believe the "against us" qualifier exempts the operator of the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program ever.
And Israel is attacking various countries - okay not in quite in Europe, but pretty close to the southeastern EU member states.
So you have one country which is in a very loose alliance with a country that's attacking a country around the periphery of the EU, and another country that's joined at the hip with a country that's attacking another country around the periphery of the EU, just slightly further away.
Don't be fooled. Israel is also attacking countries in Europe
They did when being caught messing with elections in Scotland, Europe, for example. Whom Europeans vote are none of the Israel business. And there is a reasonable suspicion that they were sending sex traps for decades to blackmail European elites, left and right. This is not how a real friend behave.
china has no political agenda outside of their country (that includes taiwan from their pov). all they care about is staying in power at home and keeping up the economy. they only sell to russia because its a good way to make money.
belt and road, deals with african dictators, selling cars and phones to europe, temu and alibaba, open source llms, all of that is for higher tax revenue. a lot of chinese companies are part state owned so thats another way it directly benefits the government.
even the illegal police stations only exist to make sure overseas chinese communities dont support opposition movements back home. is it a good thing? definitely not, but its also not a threat to the host country as a whole.
the spying they do is either economic espionage thats good for the world (trade secrets should not exist, thats what patents are for) or good old state on state action like everybody else is doing. i bet russia and america each have more spies in europe than china.
There is no reason for chinese elite overproduction other than to wage war by other means. They performed acts such as naval blockade of Australia as a show of force when such a thing was deemed necessary.
Europe is bled dry and will cease to exist rather soon if nothing chnages.
In addition to the more well-known stuff, China DDoSed Github because they were mad that two projects let Chinese citizens read non-propaganda news in 2015.
except for all of the hacking and industrial espionage, e.g. Salt Typhoon
let's be clear: MAGA is doing everything they can per Dugan-esque playbooks on how to destroy US-EU relations, but don't pretend for a second that China is some magical bastion of human rights or fair, competitive practices.
would be better to be on spanish servers, but decoupling from american tech remains a public good, especially if using american tech bans american competitors
You are literally wrong, the data is stored in Spain on their servers and managed by their government. The risk as stated by EU and US is allowing Chineese nationals to *enter* the data storage facilities (direct quote from the article you shared).
Yes, it's still bad but they are not as stupid to just have their servers located in China for this.
Define doing. The government is completely block from legislating since the coalition parties will not approve any law, only those that can help their separatist movements. The national budget hasn't been renewed since 2023, affecting new projects.
What we have is a corrupt president and party he'll bent on remaining as long as possible to not face the polls
There are two takes here (and I'm impartial because I no longer live in Spain):
- The government lost their trust and should resign.
- The coalition parties are sabotaging the government even when none had the majority (even if together they do).
Politicians and governments like to introduce crap like blacklisting when they have a good excuse to (a target the public agrees with) so that later it's easier for them to use against arbitrary targets.
I know I’m a conspiracy theorist but I’m looking out for random scandals, random high profile deaths, random infrastructure issues and random large scale accidents.
They seem to have been granting contracts to manage all kinds of critical data to Huawei's Palantir equivalent lately, so it's probably less about security risks and more about the current source of the bribe money.
If they cared about security they would not outsource this kind of stuff to foreign companies. Spain is not Somalia, why not let Indra do it?
Odd take. 99.99999% of citizens will never travel to China, so it matters not that the Chinese govt holds their data.
A local company losing the data screws everyone. Palantir getting the data screws everyone, because while foreign, that data will eventually be fed into global systems like VISA, Mastercard, etc, and affect your travel in numerous countries that will be outsourcing their systems to Palantir.
You can't predict the future. By your own reasoning, you can't say with any degree of certainty that it will never matter if China has a citizen's data just because that person will never travel there.
I'm not sure what "travel" even does here. Possessing citizen's info opens possibilities for influence ops, blackmailing, unfair advantage in business and much more. And non-democratic countries are always better at these games, cause they need not be afraid of the next government leaking, investigating, selling whatever they did.
Meanwhile gov't losing info on one citizen screws said citizen, but losing all of it screws the gov't itself, and generally rebalances power in favor of citizens. Which one may say isn't bad.
foreigners are a bit more likely to be loyal to the government and not some separatist opposition? or at least the companies corruption will be quite separate from what impacts the local government
this also came up with the 6th gen fighter designs between france and germany. it works when theres a non-european driving, because both trust the non-europe option more than any fellow european. the local lords are too powerful to be trusted, and too competitive against eachother
>foreigners are a bit more likely to be loyal to the government
Yes, to their own government! Both China and USA have laws to force companies to insert backdoors. These laws have been enforced numerous times. If you think this is a smaller risk than doing things nationally, then indeed you're basically arguing that Spain is Somalia, there are separatist forces roaming around, the country can't enforce its own laws and the government needs to sell everything to foreign governments to stay in power. This is not the case (for now).
The contract with Huawei was about buying storage servers [1], which would then be managed by the Interior Ministry. They were not outsourcing anything.
Canary Islands are part of Spain and probably unaffected from climate change - we have 19-22°C all year round. If it raises to 25° still pretty livable.
Climate change affects places where more people live in the sense that more suffer from it, resources get depleeted fast but the wild temperature fluctuations won’t spare much of the planet in various ways from wet bulb effects, costal erosion, air major currents changing, glaciers melting and so on.
Islands are extremely vulnerable to climate change all over, as they are completely dependent in near-term precipitation for all their water (no rivers, no aquifers).
No rivers and no water is reality here for quite a while already. The islands rely a lot on desalination, and there is a big EU-funded project going on to create a desalination plant that not only is used to supply tap water, but the water basin of a new hydroelectric plant [0]. Desalination pretty much solves water issues, IF you have the energy (ideally renewable).
It isn't that simple, Canary Islands already counts with 2.2 million + tourists people and the fresh water is a highly risk resource even when desalinization plants are widespread, the groundwater aquifers are severely compromised.
The mild weather heavily depends on the trade winds. But models predict that due to fact of being so close to Africa heat waves are prone to be more and more frequent compromising the water resources.
The two capitals (Santa Cruz and Las Palmas) are pretty good spot to live in.
Tourism focuses on the south on both islands. Las Palmas has a beach with a bit touristic activity, but its not drinking tourism like Mallorca or Benidorm. Combined with nice weather all year round overall a greaet place to live. Very walkable cities, you can do without a car. Due to nice weather, you can always go by bike or scooter. Taxis are cheap. Thanks to the tourists, cheap flights all year round, every day, to all major european cities.
But yeah, if you come with kids, factor in private schools. The public system here is broken. As for internet, I pay less than 10€/month for 500Mbit fibre - I couldn't even get that in Germany and if could it would be north of 80€.
> If you live there you're either fully remote, or you work in the tourist industry.
Or you are a doctor, a teacher, an architect or a bananas farmer. Some of the richest families in the islands just export/import commodities since three generations.
Much of Spain is indeed getting very unpleasant in the summer with climate change, but in the north there are still regions that are quite fine at the moment. Where I am, we recently beat the all time temperature record with 35 degrees, but that was a single day. Most days these weeks it isn't going over 25, and I don't think we hit 30 in June except for that single day and maybe one other day.
The problem is that the right is poised to win the next election and will probably undo all the policies you like. They're pretty much against everything that has been done in the last 7 years. I still have some hopes that Sanchez might clinch another term because he's a political survivor, but prospects are not great.
He just put the last nail in the coffin when he gave citizenship to millions of migrants while Spanish has one of the highest unemployment rate of Europe.
I'm not a fan of that, but it's not like the opposition is going to be different in that respect (or like they have been different in the past). It's the companies and elites who are demanding those migrants to keep wages low, so the right will happily provide.
We will get the same migration policy (maybe with some purely aesthetic changes for show), but with the whole kit of fawning over Trump and the US, denying or minimizing climate change, cutting taxes for the wealthy, privatizing public services and so on.
> he gave citizenship to millions of migrants while Spanish has one of the highest unemployment rate of Europe.
This is an interested propaganda
First: This people are not just migrants and some aren't even migrants. They are the grandsons of Spaniards that had to flee the country in the dictatorship and Civil War to avoid being murdered. The parents of this people should have dual-Spanish citizenship yet, unless they voluntarily refused to it.
The idea that the grandsons of Jews from Germany should have some legal path to reclaim German citizenship if they want it, looks 100% reasonable to me. Their families inhabited Germany for generations, much before the mustache disgrace was born. Who was Hitler or Franco to claim "you can't live here because I don't like you"?
And, just for the record, Spain, the country that Nuts calls "antisemite" every two weeks, has granted citizenship also to 72,000 Sephardic descendants since 2015 for a similar reason.
------------
Second: The migrants aren't stealing the jobs from anybody. They were forced to work illegally in conditions that Spaniards wouldn't accept, but still need to compete with.
Prosecuting people that keeps migrant slave workers sewing for 20 hours a day in a dark basement is of top priority to Spanish workers, because this breaks and poison the job market (lowering wages for everybody); and puts the legal workers that do pay taxes on an unfair disadvantage.
Most Spanish workers able to think are very happy with that move to heal the market; And those that aren't should think twice, because this move massively benefits them in their objective to keep their small family business open.
As long as a migrant didn't commit serious crimes before, this grants them a permit to work legally and pay taxes, but is not the same as citizenship. They can't vote.
Ventless temperature control units are extremely popular there so it's probably not an unwise investment but you're not really ahead of the curve. The construction of most European buildings[1] lends itself poorly to anything that requires knocking a hole in a wall but the systems that can exhaust heat through water lines are usually quite reasonable to set up.
1. Though this is significantly less prevalent in Spain due to a lot of reconstruction happening after the civil war - that isn't to say buildings there are perfect, they just have different problems than the classic German 30cm thick stone wall.
The price of AC gases had skyrocketed by EU laws, and more than half of the bill are just taxes.
Some gases, like ammonia are easy to manufacture, other are being banned by environmental concerns, and other depend on international trade nets that can be shocked at any time if somebody trumped that morning. Investing in AC should depend heavily on the kind of refrigerant used in your product.
And then you'll have to choose another country after the next elections. Or even before, cause liking politicians from afar somehow much easier than when living in the same country.
Climate change is going to affect everywhere, and yes, a lot of Spain will experience desertification over the course of my lifetime. I am moving from Texas to Spain, though, so I am used to heat from a pure personal comfort perspective.
One interesting point is that Spain is well-situated in terms of its energy mix: it's a leader of renewables in Europe. It was also able to negotiate a carve-out from collective energy pricing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_exception), so Iberian energy markets are generally cheaper than broader European markets. This will have downstream economic effects for the country and makes it easier to afford using AC. I will always install AC wherever I live. There are far too many avoidable heat deaths in Europe in particular given their level of economic development. I don't blame them at all given the need is relatively new, but it's really a sad phenomenon.
If you are a true climate doomer (realist?), also, Spain is going to fare as well as one can in Europe should the AMOC collapse. It's not the best place to be globally in a scenario like that, though, to say the least.
For me, with everything going on in terms of world events, life choices are basically just placing bets about the future. There is no truly safe or best choice in a lot of scenarios.
They also have colder beers than Germany probably for the same reason. Nothing beats the culture acclimation of wincing while sipping lukewarm beer under the July sun in 100+ degrees Berlin.
Nice. I don't know what your comfort with swimming is but battling extreme heat also happens to be much easier when you have large welcoming bodies of water for humans to wade in, and with easy and cheap access for the common man. It boggles the mind that for all its coast line the only place the US has that's comparable is Hawaii pretty much.
Sure extreme heat might ruin the seas too eventually (there is already talk of Asian jellyfish species being spotted in record warm sea temperatures) but the amount of due dilligence needed is non-existent compared to the US, Australia, or far east Asia.
People in the comments here are praising the move, so presumably something is public. I've googled but I can't see some specific breach or documented misuse. Is the objection to Palantir strictly political?
There's been a lot of recent scandals going public against the social democratic party ruling on spain now (PSOE) and its previous dirigents. See Zapatero case. leaked by US agencies recently once Spain put some kind of friction to the Rota south spain bases getting involved on anything vs Iran.
The president P. Sanchez, has been clearly antagonizing Trump in these and other intl issues (even if only visible in spain, as he is not that relevant internationally, etc)
But anyways, this seems like deepstate fighting vs current US admin and current Spain admin, one can infer "Palantir" is basically a gag order away from giving the US govt anything it wants, so as an antagonist. to its current admin, it seems smart to avoid having them as critical providers.
why choose china? Makes no sense, but probably the only other big bro Spain can rely on if the US isn't it anymore
well it could be limited to companies who are entirely dedicated to surveillance and massive data collection on citizens like palantir. particularly with that and how ideology based palantir appears to be.
i’m sure they wouldn’t be nearly as concerned about a US company that manufactured screwdrivers or nike or something similar.
It is possible and this in particular is a decision that I'm sure the US will pressure the government to reverse. However, it's misguided to see the entire world through the US political lens where reversing policy decisions is seen as a free win by the voting base. Spain's current democracy is only about fifty years old and extremism is viewed very negatively so outright undoing is generally less common then gradual undermining.
> Anybody here think that Palantir is not a security risk for Spain?
It boggles the mind a bit, but I’ve seen a few comments on here with people defending them to the tune of “what’s the big deal, they just help governments with their data! They're innocent” which is uh, either aggressively naive, or just paid PR behaviour.
Palantir is profoundly untrusted in Europe in part because of Alex Karp. He is viewed as a dangerous neo-nationalist (not incorrectly).
Never really sure why Anduril doesn't catch the same grief; they are maybe even creepier. Perhaps Palmer Luckey is just a less visible obvious Bond villain crackpot.
yeah, he seems to have the same issue a lot of these guys have. i’m convinced we’re going to find out at some point they’re all on some kind of modern meth type drug that entirely breaks their reality. the similarities between so many of their shifts are too striking.
Someday, the US will be just a bubble where no other country gives their data to.
We continue this decent into fascism to the point that nobody likes us.. or values us. Is this their idea of Utopia?
Why don't you stop using American sites and services now then? I see comments like this a lot but no one wants to be personally inconvenienced to stop using hn/youtube/reddit/whatever.
It's what heritage foundation, elon and all the other billionaires want. This is not what most americans wanted, is it? How much of the population voted for orange man?
The Spanish government trusting the CCP over Palantir is wild.
The CCP's intolerant, cruel and authoritarian nature is a direct threat to humanity in ways that Peter Thiel could barely imagine in his darkest dreams.
The lack of perspective on show here is astonishing. They are destroying trust with vital Western allies -- trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets -- and Lurch and his dodgy friends are clearly out of their element.
> is a direct threat to humanity in ways that Peter Thiel could barely imagine
Care to outline a few of those threats? The ones that Thiel allegedly cannot imagine?
I'm American, I get why Spain's feeling trepidation. I can't trust my own government with data if it could be used against me. I actively seek out Chinese translation, AI and search engines when I want privacy from the US. It's safer with the CCP than the geriatric nutjobs that fell off the Overton window.
please, compared to thiel & co., the ccp are basically choir boys. and they worked well for china. they cleaned their cities of unbreathable air and reduced poverty in a very short time span. we cannot say the same for the americans robber barons and their political wing, like trump&co. how can you deny the most basic reality and evidence?
You are mixing apples and oranges. The infamous Huawei deal was buying tons of HDD servers. Any deal with Palantir is handling all your data to the NSA.
> The firm holds a €16.5 million contract signed in 2023 with the Armed Forces Intelligence Center (CIFAS), which is scheduled to expire this upcoming November.
> Military leadership, including the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Navy, has lobbied Defense Minister Margarita Robles to renew the contract, citing the platform's operational superiority.
Palantir wins contracts because they are better at what they do. If Europe wants to maintain digital sovereignty while not being left behind they need to have a heart-to-heart conversation about how to fix that.
For context: The former Spanish president in the socialist party is being investigated with corruption activities related with Venezuela, happening in the years after he quit the presidency. It is not looking good for him.
On Mars 2026, US Homeland Security played a prominent role in providing sensible info that lead to the prosecution. Apparently they obtained that info after spying on a phone from [person of interest] in Venezuela.
Helping Spain to expose corruption is a good thing of course, but when who does it is, what could be the biggest stronghold of MAGA in US government, we can suspect that they don't do this out of sheer generosity. Trump keeps saying that "is not happy" with Spain, and this corruption scandal greases the path to power for the Spanish equivalent to MAGA party on the forthcoming 2027 elections so... hum
Palantir could be, or not be, related with the leak. In any case blocking it just right now, by the socialist party, would be the logical reaction if they are involved.
I find it unbelievable that the current chief of Nato (Rutte) is basically an extension of Palantir. He is making sure countries are signing contracts with this extreme company that on pair with the Nazi ideology. They would support mass extermination camps. You probably think this is over exaggerated. But no its not. This company is evil.
You're out of your mind -- and politically radicalized -- if you think that Palantir is on part with the Nazis. And this kind of facile comparison is offensively trivializing those who died in the holocaust.
“offensively trivializing those who died in the Holocaust” - calling someone nazi or fascist is not trivializing Holocaust. These are clear terms and both Palantir and Karp often publish texts with fascist ideological elements and views. Read something they published like Technological republic. They are not hiding it.
You're moving the goalposts. The original poster wrote that Palantir is on par with the Nazis. (Typos notwithstanding.) That's what I'm responding to.
And yes, it is offensive and trivializing to the millions that were murdered to suggest that that their murderers were on the same moral footing as a modern government software consultancy. (The views that you read into some of their executives are, in fact, not equivalent to actions such as exterminating millions of people.)
So you are saying that using term nazi or fascist can be used only for people that do holocaust and more. Okay so I guess we shall just wait and see?
What the CEO says and writes in their book to promote the company suddenly doesn't matter? Palantir is suddenly just some run of the mill software consultancy? Their founders/CEO meddling in politics I assume also doesn't count?
The ceo of the company supports mass termination of people. It's pretty obvious to me. This is the type of company that build ways to achieve evil ideology
Yes palantir is fascist organization. They did not done the murders only because they dont have power yet. That is claim of CEO, I am just listening to what he says and writes.
Jews complained about nazi long before holocaust, btw. So did opposition.
Spain is really going in the right direction, I wonder why no one countries inspire from what they are doing
Looks like we’re doing this in the UK soon too.
Edit: not sure what the downvotes are. Burnham literally said he’ll do it today.
indeed, and he has apparently already been walking the walk
>"Burnham did not grant the US tech company any contracts during his nine years as Greater Manchester mayor, and is minded to take the same approach in Downing Street."
But how many did he deny?
I do agree blocking Palantir is a good move but the Spanish government is doing it for the wrong reason. Spain is storing all sort of data on Chinese servers, including their Intelligence, and Judicial wiretaps.
https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-huawei-contract-judici...
If the data is encrypted before the upload I see no problem
Huawei is the complete data custodian. They are the ones doing the encrypting.
Maybe Spain has people on the inside (of Huawei.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now,_decrypt_later
As opposed to what? American servers with Isreali backdoors?
How about Spanish servers?
I will never understand this helplessness that comes from these European countries. They are choosing to be dependent on foreign powers.
It's expensive to home-grow your own solutions and if you try transitioning too many services at once the cost will be outrageous and you'll probably open other security holes. I am glad Spain is taking this step and I hope they continue this trend - but outright refusing to use any software built abroad requires a massive investment in domestic tech. That investment would likely pay economic dividends but it is a cost that needs to be measured against other investments Spain needs to make and in Spain's case resilience against global warming is especially important.
You know, we all thought you were allies. But you tricked us well.
> Fool me once, shame on... shame on you
— George Bush, 2002
The original saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I think an intellectually honest take is that it's advantageous and prudent to depend on allies and neighbors; leveraging each party's strengths for efficiencies over strategic autonomy. This trade-off is commonly debated with depending on US military hardware in favor of EU military hardware (e.g. France's long standing position for EU strategic autonomy), or vendor lock-in with AWS vs cloud-independent offerings.
The problem is when an ally becomes inconsistent and/or uncooperative; a high stakes version of prisoner's dilemma. At which point do you replace an ally's offerings with more expensive, and often inferior, alternatives? The general populace rarely has the appetite for the short-term economic pain required to achieve long-term strategic independence.
That is rather disturbing but this had me lol:
> Spain is “making a big mistake,” said Bart Groothuis [...] “Spain is now dependent on the country with the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program directed against us.”
I highly doubt he's naive enough to believe the "against us" qualifier exempts the operator of the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program ever.
espionage is a lot less bad than conquering by force.
the US properly fucked up by very publicly declaring intent to conquer greenland and canada
Can’t form a COMINTERN if the US is watching.
The Spanish public overwhelmingly trusts China over the US, so from their perspective, this is not necessarily a bad move.
Obviously, the best move would be to keep the data in Europe instead.
It makes no sense at all to trust either.
>Obviously, the best move would be to keep the data in Europe instead.
While 80% of Europe is subservient to the US?
Or just keep it in Spain? It's not exactly a developing nation. Can they simply not build a server and find people willing to take care of it?
Ghana can host their own IT infra. Why not Spain?
They deliver part of hardware but the data itself is hosted in Spain and operated by the interior ministry.
Right now you either give it to China or to the US.
China is not publicly threatening to invade the EU.
I think the EU needs to produce this themselves but right now they don’t and they don’t have any large, trustworthy allies.
so.. hand over your data to china to spite orange man. yes excellent move.
It’s not spite it’s just logical - US/Israel are a known bad actor.
China is also probably bad, but currently there’s no evidence they’re as bad as US/Israel
China is supplying Russia, which is attacking an European country.
Thus, from my POV that sentiment is BS.
China is an adversary in a panda costume.
And Israel is attacking various countries - okay not in quite in Europe, but pretty close to the southeastern EU member states.
So you have one country which is in a very loose alliance with a country that's attacking a country around the periphery of the EU, and another country that's joined at the hip with a country that's attacking another country around the periphery of the EU, just slightly further away.
It's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the US
Don't be fooled. Israel is also attacking countries in Europe
They did when being caught messing with elections in Scotland, Europe, for example. Whom Europeans vote are none of the Israel business. And there is a reasonable suspicion that they were sending sex traps for decades to blackmail European elites, left and right. This is not how a real friend behave.
Israel has its back to the wall and needs every advantage, since literally everyone else around them hates them.
they have the US congress and a few cats-paws in Europe, and if that runs out, they die
China is also supplying Ukraine and the countries that supply Ukraine.
Maybe you meant North Korea?
Germany is also supplying Russia, should Spain exit the mostly-Germany-controlled EU?
What?
china has no political agenda outside of their country (that includes taiwan from their pov). all they care about is staying in power at home and keeping up the economy. they only sell to russia because its a good way to make money.
belt and road, deals with african dictators, selling cars and phones to europe, temu and alibaba, open source llms, all of that is for higher tax revenue. a lot of chinese companies are part state owned so thats another way it directly benefits the government.
even the illegal police stations only exist to make sure overseas chinese communities dont support opposition movements back home. is it a good thing? definitely not, but its also not a threat to the host country as a whole.
the spying they do is either economic espionage thats good for the world (trade secrets should not exist, thats what patents are for) or good old state on state action like everybody else is doing. i bet russia and america each have more spies in europe than china.
There is no reason for chinese elite overproduction other than to wage war by other means. They performed acts such as naval blockade of Australia as a show of force when such a thing was deemed necessary.
Europe is bled dry and will cease to exist rather soon if nothing chnages.
In addition to the more well-known stuff, China DDoSed Github because they were mad that two projects let Chinese citizens read non-propaganda news in 2015.
except for all of the hacking and industrial espionage, e.g. Salt Typhoon
let's be clear: MAGA is doing everything they can per Dugan-esque playbooks on how to destroy US-EU relations, but don't pretend for a second that China is some magical bastion of human rights or fair, competitive practices.
still not the worst of reasons.
would be better to be on spanish servers, but decoupling from american tech remains a public good, especially if using american tech bans american competitors
So? And other countries are storing their data in the US, not covered by gdpr
You are literally wrong, the data is stored in Spain on their servers and managed by their government. The risk as stated by EU and US is allowing Chineese nationals to *enter* the data storage facilities (direct quote from the article you shared).
Yes, it's still bad but they are not as stupid to just have their servers located in China for this.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1w21gn340xo
At this point, can you tell me one non corrupt government?
At least they are doing stuff for the people
Define doing. The government is completely block from legislating since the coalition parties will not approve any law, only those that can help their separatist movements. The national budget hasn't been renewed since 2023, affecting new projects.
What we have is a corrupt president and party he'll bent on remaining as long as possible to not face the polls
There are two takes here (and I'm impartial because I no longer live in Spain):
- The government lost their trust and should resign. - The coalition parties are sabotaging the government even when none had the majority (even if together they do).
Either way, fuck Palantir
Politicians and governments like to introduce crap like blacklisting when they have a good excuse to (a target the public agrees with) so that later it's easier for them to use against arbitrary targets.
This prevents palantir being used against people, what are you talking about? How will blacklisting military tech affect you?
I know I’m a conspiracy theorist but I’m looking out for random scandals, random high profile deaths, random infrastructure issues and random large scale accidents.
This seems ridiculously short-sighted and backwards.
Is your assumption that palantir is a good thing?
Sure Palantir has plenty of allegations. But giving same contract to China is insanity.
They seem to have been granting contracts to manage all kinds of critical data to Huawei's Palantir equivalent lately, so it's probably less about security risks and more about the current source of the bribe money.
If they cared about security they would not outsource this kind of stuff to foreign companies. Spain is not Somalia, why not let Indra do it?
>Spain is not Somalia, why not let Indra do it?
The data may be safer with the CCP, at least they won't lose it.
Dunno, losing it maybe safer from a citizen's POV.
Odd take. 99.99999% of citizens will never travel to China, so it matters not that the Chinese govt holds their data.
A local company losing the data screws everyone. Palantir getting the data screws everyone, because while foreign, that data will eventually be fed into global systems like VISA, Mastercard, etc, and affect your travel in numerous countries that will be outsourcing their systems to Palantir.
You can't predict the future. By your own reasoning, you can't say with any degree of certainty that it will never matter if China has a citizen's data just because that person will never travel there.
I'm not sure what "travel" even does here. Possessing citizen's info opens possibilities for influence ops, blackmailing, unfair advantage in business and much more. And non-democratic countries are always better at these games, cause they need not be afraid of the next government leaking, investigating, selling whatever they did.
Meanwhile gov't losing info on one citizen screws said citizen, but losing all of it screws the gov't itself, and generally rebalances power in favor of citizens. Which one may say isn't bad.
One in a million?
Right up until some kid named "Bobby Tiananmen" makes the whole database delete itself ;)
> Spain is not Somalia, why not let Indra do it?
foreigners are a bit more likely to be loyal to the government and not some separatist opposition? or at least the companies corruption will be quite separate from what impacts the local government
this also came up with the 6th gen fighter designs between france and germany. it works when theres a non-european driving, because both trust the non-europe option more than any fellow european. the local lords are too powerful to be trusted, and too competitive against eachother
>foreigners are a bit more likely to be loyal to the government
Yes, to their own government! Both China and USA have laws to force companies to insert backdoors. These laws have been enforced numerous times. If you think this is a smaller risk than doing things nationally, then indeed you're basically arguing that Spain is Somalia, there are separatist forces roaming around, the country can't enforce its own laws and the government needs to sell everything to foreign governments to stay in power. This is not the case (for now).
The contract with Huawei was about buying storage servers [1], which would then be managed by the Interior Ministry. They were not outsourcing anything.
[1] Concretely these: https://support.huawei.com/enterprise/en/flash-storage/ocean...
I really like what Spain is doing recently. If it weren't for climate change, I'd consider moving there.
The current government has little chance to get re-elected, and the next one will revert most of these decisions.
It could be worse can only take a government so far. Eventually, just preaching to the choir catches up with you.
Canary Islands are part of Spain and probably unaffected from climate change - we have 19-22°C all year round. If it raises to 25° still pretty livable.
No place is unaffected.
No, but the island's climate will still be chill.
Most places will be unaffected. It'll only affect places where humans are, and we're not even close to filling up the planet
> It'll only affect places where humans are
What?
I think he meant to say the "planet" where humans are
Climate change affects places where more people live in the sense that more suffer from it, resources get depleeted fast but the wild temperature fluctuations won’t spare much of the planet in various ways from wet bulb effects, costal erosion, air major currents changing, glaciers melting and so on.
Islands are extremely vulnerable to climate change all over, as they are completely dependent in near-term precipitation for all their water (no rivers, no aquifers).
No rivers and no water is reality here for quite a while already. The islands rely a lot on desalination, and there is a big EU-funded project going on to create a desalination plant that not only is used to supply tap water, but the water basin of a new hydroelectric plant [0]. Desalination pretty much solves water issues, IF you have the energy (ideally renewable).
[0]: https://renewablesnow.com/news/construction-starts-on-200-mw...
Desalination solves water issues for tap water. Islands may be short on surface area.
I would also never use the word "solve", as this is just for human usage. The ecosystems themselves are irreversibly destroyed.
It isn't that simple, Canary Islands already counts with 2.2 million + tourists people and the fresh water is a highly risk resource even when desalinization plants are widespread, the groundwater aquifers are severely compromised. The mild weather heavily depends on the trade winds. But models predict that due to fact of being so close to Africa heat waves are prone to be more and more frequent compromising the water resources.
Ok but most of the populated areas of the Canary Islands are a tourist shithole, not somewhere you would want to live.
The two capitals (Santa Cruz and Las Palmas) are pretty good spot to live in. Tourism focuses on the south on both islands. Las Palmas has a beach with a bit touristic activity, but its not drinking tourism like Mallorca or Benidorm. Combined with nice weather all year round overall a greaet place to live. Very walkable cities, you can do without a car. Due to nice weather, you can always go by bike or scooter. Taxis are cheap. Thanks to the tourists, cheap flights all year round, every day, to all major european cities.
But yeah, if you come with kids, factor in private schools. The public system here is broken. As for internet, I pay less than 10€/month for 500Mbit fibre - I couldn't even get that in Germany and if could it would be north of 80€.
There's very little decent work though. If you live there you're either fully remote which is rare these days, or you work in the tourist industry.
Yes, you must bring your remote job unless you want to work for less-than minimum wage in a restaurant.
> If you live there you're either fully remote, or you work in the tourist industry.
Or you are a doctor, a teacher, an architect or a bananas farmer. Some of the richest families in the islands just export/import commodities since three generations.
Canary Islands will be affected (severely) for any change on the sea currents. Because the marine trophic chains will change.
A warmer ocean means much bigger storms over the islands. This has both positive and negative aspects.
Much of Spain is indeed getting very unpleasant in the summer with climate change, but in the north there are still regions that are quite fine at the moment. Where I am, we recently beat the all time temperature record with 35 degrees, but that was a single day. Most days these weeks it isn't going over 25, and I don't think we hit 30 in June except for that single day and maybe one other day.
The problem is that the right is poised to win the next election and will probably undo all the policies you like. They're pretty much against everything that has been done in the last 7 years. I still have some hopes that Sanchez might clinch another term because he's a political survivor, but prospects are not great.
He just put the last nail in the coffin when he gave citizenship to millions of migrants while Spanish has one of the highest unemployment rate of Europe.
You're far better off having a million new young workers than having a million undocumented young people hidden in the shadow economy.
They were already there. Flicking a switch and turning them into participants in the economy and society at large is a positive move.
they were already there? they came in the last 3 years. and who let them in? and what is being done to prevent another illegal million from arriving
Please only worry about the USA. That's enough insanity the world can handle at a time.
the only ones that were already there are celtiberians, who have been in spain for 3 millenia and are being wiped out in a generation
And tax payers of course! It's not a bad idea at all.
I'm not a fan of that, but it's not like the opposition is going to be different in that respect (or like they have been different in the past). It's the companies and elites who are demanding those migrants to keep wages low, so the right will happily provide.
We will get the same migration policy (maybe with some purely aesthetic changes for show), but with the whole kit of fawning over Trump and the US, denying or minimizing climate change, cutting taxes for the wealthy, privatizing public services and so on.
He didn't give citizenship, but legalised their status as immigrants.
> he gave citizenship to millions of migrants while Spanish has one of the highest unemployment rate of Europe.
This is an interested propaganda
First: This people are not just migrants and some aren't even migrants. They are the grandsons of Spaniards that had to flee the country in the dictatorship and Civil War to avoid being murdered. The parents of this people should have dual-Spanish citizenship yet, unless they voluntarily refused to it.
The idea that the grandsons of Jews from Germany should have some legal path to reclaim German citizenship if they want it, looks 100% reasonable to me. Their families inhabited Germany for generations, much before the mustache disgrace was born. Who was Hitler or Franco to claim "you can't live here because I don't like you"?
And, just for the record, Spain, the country that Nuts calls "antisemite" every two weeks, has granted citizenship also to 72,000 Sephardic descendants since 2015 for a similar reason.
------------
Second: The migrants aren't stealing the jobs from anybody. They were forced to work illegally in conditions that Spaniards wouldn't accept, but still need to compete with.
Prosecuting people that keeps migrant slave workers sewing for 20 hours a day in a dark basement is of top priority to Spanish workers, because this breaks and poison the job market (lowering wages for everybody); and puts the legal workers that do pay taxes on an unfair disadvantage.
Most Spanish workers able to think are very happy with that move to heal the market; And those that aren't should think twice, because this move massively benefits them in their objective to keep their small family business open.
As long as a migrant didn't commit serious crimes before, this grants them a permit to work legally and pay taxes, but is not the same as citizenship. They can't vote.
I still think it will be a coalition and not a full right government.
How is the AC situation now is Spain? Has the country mass adopted AC in homes and offices?
Most homes and public spaces have AC installed, but it doesn't help as soon as you set your foot on the street.
Galicia is supposed to be nice
Will face the same oceanographic problem that Canary Islands. Galicia is richer than they should be, thanks to the Artic. And also thanks to Ethiopy.
I imagine there will be a lot of AC retrofitting across Europe in the coming years. Investment opportunity?
Ventless temperature control units are extremely popular there so it's probably not an unwise investment but you're not really ahead of the curve. The construction of most European buildings[1] lends itself poorly to anything that requires knocking a hole in a wall but the systems that can exhaust heat through water lines are usually quite reasonable to set up.
1. Though this is significantly less prevalent in Spain due to a lot of reconstruction happening after the civil war - that isn't to say buildings there are perfect, they just have different problems than the classic German 30cm thick stone wall.
The price of AC gases had skyrocketed by EU laws, and more than half of the bill are just taxes.
Some gases, like ammonia are easy to manufacture, other are being banned by environmental concerns, and other depend on international trade nets that can be shocked at any time if somebody trumped that morning. Investing in AC should depend heavily on the kind of refrigerant used in your product.
And then you'll have to choose another country after the next elections. Or even before, cause liking politicians from afar somehow much easier than when living in the same country.
I'm moving there.
Climate change is going to affect everywhere, and yes, a lot of Spain will experience desertification over the course of my lifetime. I am moving from Texas to Spain, though, so I am used to heat from a pure personal comfort perspective.
One interesting point is that Spain is well-situated in terms of its energy mix: it's a leader of renewables in Europe. It was also able to negotiate a carve-out from collective energy pricing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_exception), so Iberian energy markets are generally cheaper than broader European markets. This will have downstream economic effects for the country and makes it easier to afford using AC. I will always install AC wherever I live. There are far too many avoidable heat deaths in Europe in particular given their level of economic development. I don't blame them at all given the need is relatively new, but it's really a sad phenomenon.
If you are a true climate doomer (realist?), also, Spain is going to fare as well as one can in Europe should the AMOC collapse. It's not the best place to be globally in a scenario like that, though, to say the least.
For me, with everything going on in terms of world events, life choices are basically just placing bets about the future. There is no truly safe or best choice in a lot of scenarios.
The no AC in Europe thingy is mostly central and north Europe, where, in fairness, it didn't use to get very hot but now have heat waves fairly often.
Spain, Portugal, Italy and other southern European countries have very wide spread AC usage.
>southern European countries
They also have colder beers than Germany probably for the same reason. Nothing beats the culture acclimation of wincing while sipping lukewarm beer under the July sun in 100+ degrees Berlin.
Nice. I don't know what your comfort with swimming is but battling extreme heat also happens to be much easier when you have large welcoming bodies of water for humans to wade in, and with easy and cheap access for the common man. It boggles the mind that for all its coast line the only place the US has that's comparable is Hawaii pretty much.
Sure extreme heat might ruin the seas too eventually (there is already talk of Asian jellyfish species being spotted in record warm sea temperatures) but the amount of due dilligence needed is non-existent compared to the US, Australia, or far east Asia.
"The decision stems directly from growing official concern over the potential misuse of classified information linked to national security."
What are the specific concerns?
I imagine that’s classified.
People in the comments here are praising the move, so presumably something is public. I've googled but I can't see some specific breach or documented misuse. Is the objection to Palantir strictly political?
There's been a lot of recent scandals going public against the social democratic party ruling on spain now (PSOE) and its previous dirigents. See Zapatero case. leaked by US agencies recently once Spain put some kind of friction to the Rota south spain bases getting involved on anything vs Iran.
The president P. Sanchez, has been clearly antagonizing Trump in these and other intl issues (even if only visible in spain, as he is not that relevant internationally, etc)
But anyways, this seems like deepstate fighting vs current US admin and current Spain admin, one can infer "Palantir" is basically a gag order away from giving the US govt anything it wants, so as an antagonist. to its current admin, it seems smart to avoid having them as critical providers.
why choose china? Makes no sense, but probably the only other big bro Spain can rely on if the US isn't it anymore
OK so this is not specific to Palantir, but about entrusting sensitive Spanish data to any US based company. If so, that makes sense.
well it could be limited to companies who are entirely dedicated to surveillance and massive data collection on citizens like palantir. particularly with that and how ideology based palantir appears to be.
i’m sure they wouldn’t be nearly as concerned about a US company that manufactured screwdrivers or nike or something similar.
As the contracts are going to a chinese company. The officials making the decisions likely like their bribes wery much.
Unfortunately this order will probably be revoked in 2027/2028, we'll see.
It is possible and this in particular is a decision that I'm sure the US will pressure the government to reverse. However, it's misguided to see the entire world through the US political lens where reversing policy decisions is seen as a free win by the voting base. Spain's current democracy is only about fifty years old and extremism is viewed very negatively so outright undoing is generally less common then gradual undermining.
why not simply make it illegal? why make it a ban specific to one company, are they trying to make their own copy?
They didn't ban any company, they just ordered public services and public companies not to use what has been classified as a security risk.
Anybody here think that Palantir is not a security risk for Spain?
> Anybody here think that Palantir is not a security risk for Spain?
It boggles the mind a bit, but I’ve seen a few comments on here with people defending them to the tune of “what’s the big deal, they just help governments with their data! They're innocent” which is uh, either aggressively naive, or just paid PR behaviour.
> Anybody here think that Palantir is not a security risk for Spain?
why is THAT your take and not "WTF WHY ARE THOSE CAMERAS LEGAL IN GENERAL?"
they could be attached to non-US-owned-tiktok which is clearly the biggest security threat to have ever existed
jesus fuck, biggest security threat is that IT SPIES ON ALL CITIZENS
it doesn't matter where the data go - THE VERY COLLECTION OF IT IS BAD
Palantir is profoundly untrusted in Europe in part because of Alex Karp. He is viewed as a dangerous neo-nationalist (not incorrectly).
Never really sure why Anduril doesn't catch the same grief; they are maybe even creepier. Perhaps Palmer Luckey is just a less visible obvious Bond villain crackpot.
I mean.. just take a minute and listen to the CEO. The guy is having a hard time time. Clearly out of touch imo.
https://youtu.be/0A3sGymV6kY
Interview is gold, he is right.
yeah, he seems to have the same issue a lot of these guys have. i’m convinced we’re going to find out at some point they’re all on some kind of modern meth type drug that entirely breaks their reality. the similarities between so many of their shifts are too striking.
> i’m convinced we’re going to find out at some point they’re all on some kind of modern meth type drug that entirely breaks their reality
It's called being out-of-touch obscenely wealthy coupled with a massive ego.
You are probably thinking about ketamine.
Great news for Spain. I hope more European countries wake up to what's going on.
sad to see usage of this word. blocklist is easy to write.
Larry Ellison: « We are always glad to help ! »
[… Plus the fact that I need another boat!]
Someday, the US will be just a bubble where no other country gives their data to. We continue this decent into fascism to the point that nobody likes us.. or values us. Is this their idea of Utopia?
Unfortunately, yes. The American right has looked at Russia as a model for what they want America to be for some time.
Its what the US wants, and honestly at this point we should just completely cordon off the US from the rest of the world and give it to them.
Why don't you stop using American sites and services now then? I see comments like this a lot but no one wants to be personally inconvenienced to stop using hn/youtube/reddit/whatever.
>Why don't you stop using American sites and services now then?
So it is what you want.
I honestly don't care. I just push back on some of this rhetoric by challenging those who say this to actually practice what they preach.
It's what heritage foundation, elon and all the other billionaires want. This is not what most americans wanted, is it? How much of the population voted for orange man?
The Spanish government trusting the CCP over Palantir is wild.
The CCP's intolerant, cruel and authoritarian nature is a direct threat to humanity in ways that Peter Thiel could barely imagine in his darkest dreams.
The lack of perspective on show here is astonishing. They are destroying trust with vital Western allies -- trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets -- and Lurch and his dodgy friends are clearly out of their element.
I take the ccp over thiel any day
> is a direct threat to humanity in ways that Peter Thiel could barely imagine
Care to outline a few of those threats? The ones that Thiel allegedly cannot imagine?
I'm American, I get why Spain's feeling trepidation. I can't trust my own government with data if it could be used against me. I actively seek out Chinese translation, AI and search engines when I want privacy from the US. It's safer with the CCP than the geriatric nutjobs that fell off the Overton window.
please, compared to thiel & co., the ccp are basically choir boys. and they worked well for china. they cleaned their cities of unbreathable air and reduced poverty in a very short time span. we cannot say the same for the americans robber barons and their political wing, like trump&co. how can you deny the most basic reality and evidence?
The people who raised concerns about the awful things the Chinese Communist Party has done in the process are unfortunately unavailable for comment.
You are mixing apples and oranges. The infamous Huawei deal was buying tons of HDD servers. Any deal with Palantir is handling all your data to the NSA.
The NSA have Congressional oversight and are held accountable for their (mis)deeds, more or less.
The Chinese MSS and the Chinese Communist Party itself aren't even accountable to God.
Look, this is not a bad thing per se, but the US reaction will tell you everything you need to know.
Every country needs to do this now
> The firm holds a €16.5 million contract signed in 2023 with the Armed Forces Intelligence Center (CIFAS), which is scheduled to expire this upcoming November.
> Military leadership, including the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Navy, has lobbied Defense Minister Margarita Robles to renew the contract, citing the platform's operational superiority.
Palantir wins contracts because they are better at what they do. If Europe wants to maintain digital sovereignty while not being left behind they need to have a heart-to-heart conversation about how to fix that.
clearly not better if they cant win a spanish contract?
?
They won the contract, the military wants to keep it, the politicians are threatening to blanket kill all palantir contracts.
Alex Karp is clearly off his rocker. This is a good move.
He cannot stop talking about murdering people.
Anything short of declaring them a proscribed organization is insufficient.
For context: The former Spanish president in the socialist party is being investigated with corruption activities related with Venezuela, happening in the years after he quit the presidency. It is not looking good for him.
On Mars 2026, US Homeland Security played a prominent role in providing sensible info that lead to the prosecution. Apparently they obtained that info after spying on a phone from [person of interest] in Venezuela.
Helping Spain to expose corruption is a good thing of course, but when who does it is, what could be the biggest stronghold of MAGA in US government, we can suspect that they don't do this out of sheer generosity. Trump keeps saying that "is not happy" with Spain, and this corruption scandal greases the path to power for the Spanish equivalent to MAGA party on the forthcoming 2027 elections so... hum
Palantir could be, or not be, related with the leak. In any case blocking it just right now, by the socialist party, would be the logical reaction if they are involved.
I find it unbelievable that the current chief of Nato (Rutte) is basically an extension of Palantir. He is making sure countries are signing contracts with this extreme company that on pair with the Nazi ideology. They would support mass extermination camps. You probably think this is over exaggerated. But no its not. This company is evil.
Pretty sure he would do unspeakable things if it meant getting a pat on the head, and a Good Boy, from the real head of nato.
You're out of your mind -- and politically radicalized -- if you think that Palantir is on part with the Nazis. And this kind of facile comparison is offensively trivializing those who died in the holocaust.
They're already helping run ICE's concentration camps. If Trump asked them for help with extermination camps they'd agree immediately.
“offensively trivializing those who died in the Holocaust” - calling someone nazi or fascist is not trivializing Holocaust. These are clear terms and both Palantir and Karp often publish texts with fascist ideological elements and views. Read something they published like Technological republic. They are not hiding it.
It's not even some radical view.
You're moving the goalposts. The original poster wrote that Palantir is on par with the Nazis. (Typos notwithstanding.) That's what I'm responding to.
And yes, it is offensive and trivializing to the millions that were murdered to suggest that that their murderers were on the same moral footing as a modern government software consultancy. (The views that you read into some of their executives are, in fact, not equivalent to actions such as exterminating millions of people.)
millions isnt really all that many people anymore.
it would not be at all surprising for palantir to be involved inunited health killing millions
most nazis dodnt kill millions themselves, they instead helped measure and optimize the killing of millions - a goal that palantir shares
So you are saying that using term nazi or fascist can be used only for people that do holocaust and more. Okay so I guess we shall just wait and see?
What the CEO says and writes in their book to promote the company suddenly doesn't matter? Palantir is suddenly just some run of the mill software consultancy? Their founders/CEO meddling in politics I assume also doesn't count?
Seems like somebody has lot of $$$ in PLTR
The ceo of the company supports mass termination of people. It's pretty obvious to me. This is the type of company that build ways to achieve evil ideology
Yes palantir is fascist organization. They did not done the murders only because they dont have power yet. That is claim of CEO, I am just listening to what he says and writes.
Jews complained about nazi long before holocaust, btw. So did opposition.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48748392
Get rid of this pestilence! Fark Palantir