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Links for 2020-09-30

  • inside the LAPD/LASD usage of Palantir

    Much of the LAPD data consists of the names of people arrested for, convicted of, or even suspected of committing crimes, but that’s just where it starts. Palantir also ingests the bycatch of daily law enforcement activity. Maybe a police officer was told a person knew a suspected gang member. Maybe an officer spoke to a person who lived near a crime “hot spot,” or was in the area when a crime happened. Maybe a police officer simply had a hunch. The context is immaterial. Once the LAPD adds a name to Palantir’s database, that person becomes a data point in a massive police surveillance system. […] At great taxpayer expense, and without public oversight or regulation, Palantir helped the LAPD construct a vast database that indiscriminately lists the names, addresses, phone numbers, license plates, friendships, romances, jobs of Angelenos — the guilty, innocent, and those in between.
    This is absolute garbage — total bias built-in. No evidence required to get a person in the firing line: “The focus of a data-driven surveillance system is to put a lot of innocent people in the system,” Ferguson said. “And that means that many folks who end up in the Palantir system are predominantly poor people of color, and who have already been identified by the gaze of police.”

    (tags: palantir databases privacy law lapd lasd los-angeles surveillance big-brother police crime gangs)

  • Everything you wanted to know about the Hydrogen economy but were too busy to research

    Informative Twitter thread: ‘International hydrogen markets could be a thing, but don’t bet on hydrogen shipping’; ‘H2 future looks good regardless’; and ‘distributed plants could satisfy local industry and power markets while relieving electrical grid bottlenecks. The benefits are more likely to remain local rather than exported. So important for a just transition.’ (via Forge The Future)

    (tags: h2 hydrogen green climate-change future eu europe twitter via:ftf)

  • AWS CRT HTTP Client in the AWS SDK for Java 2.x

    Interesting — a new, high-performance, high-concurrency HTTP/1.1 client library in the AWS SDK, outperforming other Java HTTP client libs

    (tags: java libraries aws http http-1.1 clients)