She lived a long and happy life. We had her for over 14 years. Always got the best of food and got to sleep on the bed every night.

It's not quite easy getting a photo while not only wearing it, but also showing the front plus a bit of the backside of the watchband at the same time. It's a snap-on design, where I spent like a week shaping and sizing the leather to my wrist, including water shrink shaping and sizing, before considering it properly finished.

A couple background links...

• https://lemmy.world/post/22860120
• https://lemmy.world/post/23353964

Let's hope it's actually true.

military contractor Palantir is helping the IRS analyze dozens of different data sets on Americans to investigate a broad range of financial crimes, according to records shared with The Intercept.

Since 2018, the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division has used Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics platform to aggregate and analyze a sprawling list of sensitive federal databases and data sets.

Public records detailing Palantir’s IRS contract, obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight and shared exclusively with The Intercept, reveal the immense volume of data plugged into the military contractor’s software. The LCA uses both Palantir’s Gotham and Foundry applications to facilitate “analysis of massive-scale data to find the needle in the hay stack,” the contract paperwork says.

Documents indicate the IRS has paid Palantir over $130 million for these services to date.

Palantir’s LCA is ostensibly directed toward cracking down on fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes. According to a 2024 agency privacy impact assessment, IRS “Special agents and investigative analysts … utilize the platform to find, analyze, and visualize connections between disparate sets of data to generate leads, identify schemes, uncover tax fraud, and conduct money laundering and forfeiture investigative activities.”

[

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Trump Wants to Put You in a Massive, Secret Government Database](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/17/government-surveillance-centralized-database-privacy/)

The IRS use of the software, launched under Trump’s first term and expanded under Biden, is now in the hands of an IRS Criminal Investigations office that has drastically scaled back its pursuit of tax cheats and pivoted, under Trump’s direction, toward investigating “left-leaning groups,” the Wall Street Journal reported in October.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency — especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir, whose business model is premised on integrating data and expanding surveillance capabilities,” American Oversight director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement to The Intercept. “Its platforms have been used in deeply troubling contexts, from immigration enforcement to predictive policing, with persistent concerns about overreach, bias, and weak oversight.”

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the IRS.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency — especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir.”

The contract documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that these “disparate sets of data” are vast. Palantir’s LCA allows the IRS to quickly search and visualize “connections from millions of records with thousands of links” between databases maintained by the IRS and other federal agencies. According to the contract documents, this data includes individual tax form and tax returns as well as Affordable Care Act data, bank statements, and transactions, and “all available” data compiled by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Its view apparently extends to cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple. “The application would sit on top of a singular repository of identified wallets from seized servers utilizing dark web data obtained from exchangers such as Coinbase,” the documents note.

The program places an emphasis on mapping social relationships between the targets of an investigation. That includes analyzing a “network of people and the relationships and communications between them,” such as “calls, texts, [and] emails events.” The use of “IP address analysis” within LCA allows the IRS to “Identify suspects more easily” and “Establish (new) relationships among actors.”

These investigative functions are continuously updated, the materials say, through ongoing close work between Palantir engineers and IRS personnel.

[

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Palantir Will No Longer Profit Off of New Yorkers’ Health Data](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/24/palantir-new-york-city-hospitals-contract/)

The intermingling of sensitive data on millions of Americans comes at a time of increased global skepticism and opposition toward Palantir, which, despite its military-intelligence origins, has a thriving business with civilian agencies like the IRS. The use of Palantir software at the U.K.’s National Health Service, for example, has created an ongoing political controversy across Britain, while a similar contract with the New York City public hospital network was recently canceled following public protest.

The contract is also active at a time when IRS Criminal Investigations has been coopted to aid in the broader Trump administration’s aggressive agenda. In July, ProPublica reported that the agency was working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide “on demand” data to accelerate deportations. Last year, the New York Times reported that Palantir, founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel, was central to an administration effort to increase data-sharing across federal agencies.

“The question isn’t just what it can do — it’s who it will be used against.”

The company’s right-wing politics and eagerness to facilitate U.S. and Israeli military aggression abroad, NSA global surveillance, and ICE deportations has also made many weary of its access to incredibly sensitive personal data. A recent post on the company’s Palantir’s X account summarizing a book by CEO Alex Karp triggered an immediate backlash from those unnerved by the manifesto’s fascistic bent. The bullet points extolled the virtue of arms manufacturing, argued the Axis powers were unfairly punished after World War II, called for a reinstatement of the draft, condemned cultural pluralism, and claimed that wealthy elites are unfairly persecuted.

“When the government can map relationships, track behavior, and generate investigative leads across data sets at this scale, the question isn’t just what it can do — it’s who it will be used against,” Chukwu said. “Entrusting that infrastructure to a company known for opaque, security-state deployments only heightens those risks.”

Artist: Shan | danbooru

After months of community outreach and growing popular support, on April 23 the Philadelphia City Council, with a 15-to-2 majority, passed a series of bills called ICE OUT. The bills make it legally harder for city officials, agencies and police to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Philadelphia City . . .

Continue reading Philly City Council passes ICE OUT bills at Workers.org

From Workers World via This RSS Feed.

Larruping..

Just your daily reminder from Democrats that they suck.

Banner image: Kungaka in Mutawintji National Park. Image by Tom Parkin (CC BY-ND 4.0).

Indigenous knowledge helps identify new, highly threatened skink in Australia

Researchers have described a new-to-science species of skink that may be one of Australia’s most threatened reptiles.

The small population of the skink, possibly fewer than 20 individuals, lives in a pocket of rocky gorge within the arid Mutawintji National Park in New South Wales state, the researchers report in a new paper.

The skink has been named Liopholis mutawintji, in a nod to the park, the only place it’s currently known from. Its common name is Kungaka, meaning “the Hidden One” to Wiimpatja Aboriginal Owners. This refers to the species’ habit of hiding in crevices and burrows.

Scientists from the Australian Museum Research Institute (AMRI) partnered with Wiimpatja Aboriginal Owners and the New South Wales National Parks & Wildlife Service to confirm the Kungaka as a distinct species.

Thomas Parkin, the study’s lead author with AMRI, told Mongabay by email that the Kungaka was previously thought to be a highly isolated population of White’s skink (L. whitii), a species widely distributed in southeastern Australia.

But with Mutawintji roughly 500 kilometers (300 miles) away from the closest White’s skink population, the team decided to revisit the reptile’s taxonomy. The team analyzed DNA samples and compared physical traits of White’s skinks from different populations across Australia.

Their analyses revealed that White’s skink is not one species, but three deeply divergent lineages. The three species in the revised taxonomy are the southern White’s skink (L. whitii), northern White’s skink (L. compressicauda), and the Kungaka.

Parkin said the Kungaka can be distinguished from the other two White’s skinks “by the presence of dark-tipped scales on the palms of its hands and feet, a proportionately longer tail, and subtle differences in overall body proportions.”

Alex Slavenko, a member of the Skink Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, who wasn’t involved in the analysis, told Mongabay by email: “The team here have done a fantastic job bringing together genetics, morphological data from museum specimens, Traditional Owner knowledge and ecological data to resolve a long-standing taxonomic issue.”

Monitoring of the skinks over 25 years suggests the Kungaka may already be critically endangered, the authors say. Threats include damage to their habitat from feral goats, drought, and introduced predators like feral cats.

“[T]he formal description of Kungaka as a distinct species will allow its listing under state and federal threatened species lists, which is a crucial first step for planning and implementing management plans,” Slavenko said.

Parkin said efforts are underway to manage threats and that captive breeding and genetic management are also being considered.

Warlpa Thompson, study co-author from the Mutawintji Board of Management, said in a statement: “Our people have been leading the way for looking after this extremely rare lizard. Now that it’s about to be given the name Kungaka, the Hidden One, in Wiimpatja parlku, the world will soon know how special they are.”

Officials have argued in court filings that the projects are exempt from federally required assessments, but are scrambling after a judge disagreed.

This dude is lib as shit but this song is a banger lmao mental health sucks

FranceFuites, le service public numérique qui assume enfin la transparence totale. Vos données, partout, tout le temps.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/46520773