That is simply FUD – Palantir guarantees to customers that their software is working within 90 days AND has generated results. They offer a refund if not. Their homepage said this for a while!
Well, feel free to buy a core and let me know how long it takes before you're up and running. Having been on the inside during 3 of their deployments, and on the outside of 2 more, I can definitely say 90 days is wildly optimistic.
edit never mind, after reviewing your comment history, it looks like you probably work for Palantir. You should probably disclose that. I stand by my comments about deployment times.
The alternative to Palantir - an alternative enterprise bespoke system or one built by the companies' or Gov's IT department - costs a whole lot more (25x) and often doesn't work! Palantir is a great value.
I presume you're talking about the DCGS-A system. Palantir has done an expert level job confusing the public on this.
That system definitely has problems (it's terrible and sucks in many places), but it's a system of much larger capability and complexity than Palantir.
Comparing Palantir to it is like comparing a wheel to a an entire transport system. Palantir could comfortably fit in as a single capabilty in DCGS-A (and probably do a better job than the stuff currently filling in that role), but it could never replace it.
It's basically just a federated search, mediocre map and halfway decent link-analysis tool. But ask it to do anything even remotely outside of those three things and you're basically dead in the water as it doesn't offer anything relevant to all the other millions of things DCGS-A provides. DCGS-A is more than just some analytic tools.
The reason it's not part of DCGS-A is very political and complex and as much Palantir's doing as the Army's, but the answer is that the components that are on DCGS-A that basically do what Palantir does were selected because they're cheaper over the long run, even if a bit clunky. For example, on the client side, there's presently a forward looking mandate from big Army to drop flash and java clients (because they're an IT administrative menace). Palantir's front end is Java.
> there's presently a forward looking mandate from big Army to drop flash and java clients
I would feel way safer if the IC & military disabled Flash & Java in their browsers, along with the rest of the web. Those two plugins have shaped up to be quite the vehicles for zero-days.
Luckily for Palantir whether or not it works is classified. I have my doubts. I'm sure it "works", but I'm also sure it's a giant waste of money and Americans are not safer because we're funneling millions of dollars to Palantir.
I messed around with the demo they used to have on their website. It seems to be very much an answer to the 9-11 failure to connect the dots problem.
Unify search, build semantic links.
It was a very manually intensive tool based on what I saw. Very little automation, more like those pictures and strings you see in crime shows on TV...but on a computer.
Any SaaS B2B company with network effects does this easily because the revenue from each customer is a function of the value they derive from the software, which increases with the square of the number of customers.
Think Excel (network effects derived from its communication properties), CoreLogic (derived from having all the data), Addepar, etc.
These companies also typically have high fixed costs across all of their customers once they are at scale.
Palantir stores an audit trail that shows exactly where each piece of data comes from and who has accessed it. This allows citizens, courts, regulators, etc. to see precisely how data is being used.
These features are a deep part of the platform (i.e. they can't be turned off) that powers a lot of the other features (entity resolution / de-resolution, for example). Say what you want about the people collecting the data and the data they are collecting, but civil Liberties and privacy protections are an inseparable part of Palantir.
>> Palantir stores an audit trail that shows exactly where each piece of data comes from and who has accessed it. This allows citizens, courts, regulators, etc. to see precisely how data is being used.
What are you blabbering about? What you suggest is impossible.
Immutable audit trails and non-repudiation without specialized devices (blackboxes) are a lie. It is impossible to create a bulletproof auditing system for access to sensitive data, especially when you're talking about the kind of surveillance that the NSA is doing with PRISM.
I suspect that when government officials cite the "transparency" and "auditability" of NSA PRISM, this is what it all boils down to -- marketing talk from Palantir etc.
It is really too bad people are criticizing Lessig, or he thinks he is being critisized, because "Palantir is a bad company, or that it has done bad things, or that it has been funded by bad people".
That's not the first thing that comes to mind when I read "technologies that could give us, and more importantly, reviewing courts, a very high level of confidence that data collected or surveilled was not collected or used in an improper way."
What do you mean by "what he's really trying to do"?
Anyway, I'm pointing out that he's making/repeating a technically incredible claim. I'm ever so slightly surprised and saddened that scrutiny of that claim isn't the focus here.
He's using the issue of copyright to condone the current direction of the surveillance state, and he is offering red herrings as "balancing" compromises.
Yes, I agree with you. I think it is because we are among the first to find it, sparked by that blog post. This seems to be the technical crux of the debate.
I doubt his aim is to condone the current direction of the surveillance state, but perhaps pursuit of "balance" plus technical credulity helps achieve the same.
One view is that if you have Euros, the safest place for them is Germany, because if the single currency does break up over a weekend, at least your Euros will be converted into Deutsch Marks.
Would the money be safe in Germany? I think I much prefer to have my money (little as it is) in a bank outside of the Eurozone. Perhaps in one of the South-America or BRIC countries if at all possible.
Really? BRIC? Perhaps a few of the most corrupt/oppressive/restrictive/authoritative/land grabby/no-due process governments in the history of the world? You'd feel safer there? Not Canada, US, UK, Australia, Japan? I'd take any one of those over BRIC any day of the week.
I think he's talking about stowing his money there, not himself. Corrupt, oppressive, authoritative regimes are more likely to screw their own people than valued foreign investors. Theoretically.
Well perhaps all of the BRIC countries wouldn't make sense, but if money is stored on a bank in Brazil or China I would expect it to be reasonably safe. The point I tried to make was that I wouldn't like to store money in countries too closely linked to the Euro and (perhaps) US Dollar.
