[john-h-k]

I had high expectations, there’s a lot of interesting content in this topic, but this is 22 points of low-substance buzzwording.

There’s no common theme, very little justification of any of the claims, and frankly very little to do with palantir

[drcongo]

I found it to have just enough substance to make me take a look at what Nym VPN is, because I'd rather not give money to Mullvad any more, but the VPN looks like something for shilling crypto.

[markasoftware]

Nym is pretty complicated and although they offer some kind of traditional VPN service as well IIRC, their main product is actually the only large scale operational "mixnet", which you can think of as kinda similar to Tor but a lot more resistant to certain types of deanonymization attacks (specifically it's designed to be safe against passive global adversaries, ie an attacker who can monitor every packet on the internet, though with the default settings at least it's not quite there yet: https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0055.php).

The research behind the mixnet is quite legit (look up Loopix). There's cryptocurrency involved because they're trying to do this whole complicated thing to incentivize people to operate nodes in the mixnet (though who are we kidding, the real reason is to make money). One can argue this is good for the long term sustainability of the network, and helps prevent sybil attacks by encouraging a large number of legitimate nodes. Of course, the downside is that the company is trying to make money, not just make the best mixnet possible. Having a profit motive also means they're incentivized to get the network to a point where interactive usage works well even at the price of anonymity (an optimization in this vein is sorta the reason that the paper I linked above is possible).

But having a working mixnet at all is extremely cool. People have been researching mixnets for decades without producing anything practical. While Nym is by far the most deployed / most ready mixnet rn, there thankfully are other options coming up, like https://katzenpost.network/ (though I believe most of the devs behind Katzenpost are also in some VC-funded situation, they certainly at least are trying to position katzenpost as more of a community driven project).

[drcongo]

Thanks for the in-depth context, really appreciate it.

[trollbridge]

The best thing about AI is how it’s pulled the rug out from under most of the crypto shilling universe.

[esseph]

> because I'd rather not give money to Mullvad any more

?????? Why?

[someonebaggy]

Front page HN 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469

One of the two Mullvad founders and shareholders provides 70% of a Swedish far-right political party's funding.

[esseph]

Ah, thank you for this.

Someone flagged you, so I vouched.

[drcongo]

Unfortunately most of the discussion on that thread is Americans arguing about what right and left are. I personally don't care whether Americans think that party is right wing or left wing, but I find their rhetoric about migrants utterly abhorrent.

[drcongo]

Oh cool, now this thread is Americans arguing about left and right instead of focusing on a man saying he'll walk over migrant corpses. Fucking pathetic.

[andsoitis]

> far-right political party's funding.

From the wikipedia article on the Örebro Party:

"Some key issues for the Örebro Party locally include strong secularism, a 30-hour workweek with retained pay, lowered wages for politicians, expanded social housing, abolishing preschool-fees, making public transport free of charge, ending taxpayer funding of what it sees as wasteful sculptures, monuments and art and introducing free dental care. Nationally the party has set out large-scale remigration, closing the Swedish borders to immigration, a stricter assimilation policy and ending taxes on energy and fuel as some of its key issues."

And the party leader has described himself as a Communist and Marxist.

What makes them far-right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Örebro_Party

[someonebaggy]

The part about ending immigration and deporting a large percentage of the migrants who are already there

[pc86]

> What makes them far-right?

Europe's Overton window being about a football field away from sanity.

[smalltorch]

Why can't you see the common theme?

The internet is going to turn into a control mechanism if we don't equalize the power dynamic and build things that make it easy to empower the individual.

Build for the common man, not the vampire.

[andsoitis]

> The internet is going to turn into a control mechanism if we don't equalize the power dynamic and build things that make it easy to empower the individual.

What does that have to do with Palantir?

[smalltorch]

Palantir was not even what my reply was about?

That was my extrapolated common theme I gathered from the author. I just didn't understand how a common theme couldn't be drawn from the contents of the article.