{"id":180185,"date":"2017-06-29T21:22:00","date_gmt":"2017-06-30T02:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/06\/29\/what-part-of-working-with-peter-thiel-dont-you-get\/"},"modified":"2017-06-29T21:22:00","modified_gmt":"2017-06-30T02:22:00","slug":"what-part-of-working-with-peter-thiel-dont-you-get","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/06\/29\/what-part-of-working-with-peter-thiel-dont-you-get\/","title":{"rendered":"What Part Of, “Working with Peter Thiel,” Don’t You Get?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Thiel is a gay bashing gay man<\/a>, an Ayn Rand loving sociopath, and one of the founders of the Big Brother wannabee software company Palantir.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, his history should be a red flag for anyone who would want to do business with him.<\/p>\n

Subscribing to a philosophy which maintains that self-interest is the only form of morality does not imply that they would deal fairly or honestly with clients.<\/p>\n

Case in point, the New York Police are terminating their contract with the firm, and Palantir is refusing to transfer to the department as is required in the contract<\/a>, because supplying an overpriced and difficult to use product, your business model has to be lock in:<\/p>\n

A showdown over law enforcement information \u2014 and who controls it \u2014 is taking place between the New York Police Department and Palantir Technologies, the $20 billion Silicon Valley startup that for years has analyzed data for New York City’s cops, BuzzFeed News has learned.<\/p>\n

The NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract and intends to stop using the software by the end of this week, according to three people familiar with the matter who weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The department has created a new system to replace Palantir, and it wants to transfer the analysis generated by Palantir\u2019s software to the new system. But Palantir, the NYPD claims, has not produced the full analysis in a standardized format \u2014 one that would work with the new software \u2014 despite multiple requests from the police department in recent months.<\/p>\n

Lawyers from each side have gotten involved, showing that this dispute \u2014 which hasn\u2019t previously been reported \u2014 has the potential to escalate into a legal fight. And given the work Palantir does for a host of other government clients, the standoff over a seemingly arcane technical issue has implications for a range of services, from international espionage to battlefield intelligence.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

The NYPD has been a Palantir customer since at least 2012, and Palantir has touted the relationship to help it drum up other business. The software ingests arrest records, license-plate reads, parking tickets, and more, and then graphs this data in a way that can reveal connections among crimes and people. In late 2014, for example, the police department used Palantir’s analysis to plan a sting<\/a> that landed the rapper Bobby Shmurda behind bars, just as his career was taking off, according to an internal Palantir email seen by BuzzFeed News. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

The NYPD quietly began work last summer on its replacement data system, and in February it announced internally that it would cancel its Palantir contract and switch to the new system by the beginning of July, according to three people familiar with the matter. The new system, named Cobalt, is a group of IBM products tied together with NYPD-created software. The police department believes Cobalt is cheaper and more intuitive than Palantir, and prizes the greater degree of control it has over this system.<\/p>\n

The NYPD was paying Palantir $3.5 million a year as of 2015, according to an internal Palantir email that describes a contract to be signed in late 2014. Other Palantir customers \u2014 including Home Depot, which canceled<\/a> late last year \u2014 have also raised concerns about Palantir\u2019s prices.<\/p>\n

The emerging dispute is not over the data that the NYPD has fed into Palantir’s software, but over the analysis that the software has produced \u2014 all the insights like the one that underpinned the Shmurda arrest.<\/p>\n

The NYPD asked Palantir in February for a copy of this analysis, and for a translation key so that it could put the analysis into its Cobalt system, the people familiar with the matter said. But when Palantir delivered a file in May, it declined to provide a way to translate it, arguing that doing so would require exposing its intellectual property, the people said.<\/p>\n

The NYPD then asked Palantir for the information in a translated format \u2014 asking Palantir to do the translation itself \u2014 according to the people. Palantir responded this month, providing a file that was indeed readable. But according to the NYPD\u2019s examination of the file, it contained only the original data the NYPD had fed into the system, the people said. The analysis appeared to be missing.<\/p>\n

If the dispute is not resolved by the end of this week, the NYPD can continue to view the analysis by using Palantir software, given that customers retain a perpetual software license even after canceling, two people familiar with the matter said. But this could mean having to switch between systems to see information relating to a case, a situation the NYPD wants to avoid. Plus, as an ex-customer, the NYPD will not have access to the same product upgrades or support should the software fail.<\/p>\n

The standoff highlights a thorny issue for companies and governments that outsource their data-mining tasks to outside contractors. Technology experts say software companies have little incentive to smooth a customer\u2019s transition to a rival\u2019s product. In some situations, a software company would genuinely risk devaluing its intellectual property if it shared information with a customer, since that could show the customer how the information was created, according to Tal Klein, chief marketing officer of IT monitoring company Lakeside Software.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I may be a bit unfair to Thiel and Palantir here:  It appears to me, at leastdescribed Mr. Klein, that this is a part and parcel of privatized IT operations and the cloud.<\/p>\n

In a truly competitive and open market, the profits approach zero, so any business would put as much friction into changing services so as to maximize its power over its clients.<\/p>\n

This is why you should not privatize this sh%$ or move it to the cloud. <\/p>\n

It’s a computerized roach motel:  Your data checks in, but it never checks out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Thiel is a gay bashing gay man, an Ayn Rand loving sociopath, and one of the founders of the Big Brother wannabee software company Palantir. Needless to say, his history should be a red flag for anyone who would want to do business with him. Subscribing to a philosophy which maintains that self-interest is …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,368,366,412],"class_list":["post-180185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-corruption","tag-privacy","tag-privatization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180185"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}