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 software 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 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.

Interessant, dass der Grossvater von #PedoTrump aus DE ausgewiesen wurde: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Trump
vlt versucht der Sprössling da ein #Trauma zu überwinden? Wäre angenehm, wenn er dazu professionelle Hilfe annehmen würde und in eine geeignetere Institution gehen würde, anstatt als Präsi der USA alle Menschen mit seiner verkehrten Wahrnehmung zu dranglasieren. #fedup

@blogwart hm, diese Massnahme kostet Jobs, aber nicht von Ausländern.

Das ist ein gutes Video. 😁👍

#schweiz

@tante the boosters do not care. I had a coworker tell me to my face yesterday that we need to stop relying on "internal expertise" at our company, and instead hand that off to LLMs to write tests to validate everything. This was after I pointed out to him that the majority of tests the LLM wrote for him were fake, and tested nothing. You could write code that severely broke what the LLM has written for him and the tests would have continued to pass. How can we give up on the expertise we have, and give up on further building that expertise, if the tools aren't capable of doing the work? If you can't validate the output then you're guaranteed to create a catastrophic failure in the future.

@hart wer bezahlt, befiehlt. Also kriegen alle etwas von ihm?

@vowe #Thatcher ?

Betrügerische Werbung lohnt sich für Online-Plattformen aktuell besonders, generiert Abermilliarden. Die Leidtragenden sind oft Personen, die sich aufgrund von Schicksalsschlägen an jeden Strohhalm klammern. Wenn du auch der Meinung bist, dass Big-Tech-Plattformen sich nicht länger am Schicksal dieser Leidtragenden gesundstossen sollen, dann unterstütze bitte diese Petition von @digiges und @Konsumentenschutz zuhanden des Bundesrats.

Und – ganz wichtig! – sage es weiter!
https://www.digitale-gesellschaft.ch/2025/12/18/stopp-dem-milliardengeschaeft-mit-betruegerischer-werbung-petition-zur-plattformregulierung/

🤸 updated #docker images for #duckdb v1.4.3
- based on Alpine: https://hub.docker.com/r/codieplusplus/duckdb
- based on Debian: https://hub.docker.com/r/codieplusplus/duckdb-debian

all multi-arch for #amd64, #arm64, #riscv64

@chrisstoecker die müssen jetzt halt das unTruth Netzwerk kaufen für einen Freundschaftspreis von 3800 Mia. USD ..

#Merz so:
> We will protect Denmark and Greenland from the threat posed by Russia.

✌️🫣 irgendwas fehlt da doch, oder? kann mir jemand auf die Sprünge helfen?

Wir brauchen immense #Investitionen in den #Klimaschutz. Die Generationen unserer Kinder werden uns deshalb für den #Klimafonds noch dankbar sein.

Wählen und abstimmen am 8.3.

@randahl comrade #krasnov leaking private messages.. 🫣

Dear everybody:

Everything is so much easier to understand, once you realize that the Gold-foil-King is a Mafioso, who only know mafioso methods, and only use mafioso methods.

The letter to the .no PM is classical mafia:

"Nice country you have there, pity if something happened to it. Better think careful about who gets those peace-prices, capisce ?"

EU needs to stop pussying around, and go full in and stand up to the bully.

If not now, when ?

Und dann machen die einfach so ein Dingsbums mit Abstimmung und widewipp ist #Grönland wieder europäisch!

Der #USA ist es ernst mit dem Kauf von Land bei Freunden. Und sie organisieren sogar ein Crowd funding bei der eigenen Bevölkerung dafür. Jede Amerikaner*in zahlt in diese Kriegskasse ein mit den kommenden Zöllen. #Tariffs4land Und bis Juni wird sogar schon ein extremer Preisanstieg antipiziert. Das muss dieses unwiderstehliche Verhandlungsgeschick sein, das man ihnen nachsagt. #Europa wird ein $-Geldsegen beschert. ...

Lieber linksgrünversifft als rechtsbraunverkackt.

@runmingl ACM publishes like a company, profits like a company, spams me like a company, enshittifies like a company... We should just stop pretending it is still a professional body of computer scientists.

Der #Taco #Pedo kommt ans #WEF nach #Davos.
Muss ich einen guten Platz finden, um ihm meinen nackten Arsch zu zeigen. Ihm auf die Birne zu ka/cken und pis+sen. Manno, rege ich mich auf.. Weshalb läuft dieser Mafioso immer noch rum?

The rise and fall of Stack Overflow is a case in point of the parasitic nature of LLMs. LLMs feed their models on places like Stack Overflow to be useful to users, so users flock to them to avoid the eternal snarky comments and just get an answer to their problem right away. But this is a dead end. No new answers will be generated if no one uses Stack Overflow or similar places.

What goes for Stack Overflow goes essentially for the whole internet. Like a mold growing on food, consuming it, and dying once the food is gone - LLMs will kill large parts of the 'old' internet before long.