rabble.coop news…
Building the cooperative economy and supporting communities to fight racism
We’re delighted to have launched two exciting projects since our last update.
Cooperative Alternatives is the lead development agency for co-operatives in the north of Ireland, providing a broad range of services to new and existing cooperatives across the island. Their new website pulls together events, analyses and resources onto one platform and includes a Knowledge Hub for people interested in cooperatives – catered for all levels of interest. Sign up to the Cooperative Alternatives newsletter to keep up to date.
We R.I.S.E Together is a project by Belfast-based Participation and the Practice of Rights organisation which monitors racist attacks, community mobilisations and statutory responses. The new website includes analyses, personal testimonies and data visualisations of attacks which were correlated with other datasets to gain insights into patterns of anti-immigrant activism.
Big Tech news…
“Palantir is here to disrupt… and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” – Alex Karp, Palantir CEO, 2025
A new report, Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies in NHS Data Systems, by Medact has highlighted extensive concerns about the UK government’s decision to renew the NHS England contract with Palantir Technologies. Peter Mandelson, former top ranking UK Labour Party official and pal of paedophile and suspected Mossad agent Jeffrey Epstein, referred to the Palantir deal as “my personal pride and joy”.
Palantir was listed by UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese as being complicit in the genocide in Gaza, notably increasing its support for the Israeli military since 2023, with “reasonable grounds” to believe that Palantir provided automated decision-making technology to generate targets among the Gazan population. The Canary has reported that the contract could lead to data about people using the NHS being made accessible to the US government.
Government news…
“Don’t call it age verification. Call it centralised personal data collection. And understand that is serves surveillance, not safety for children.” - Tutanota
The move to ban under 16s from social media is gathering pace globally. This is despite empirical evidence from Australia saying the ban is ineffective. As predicted, young people are outsmarting the censor through various means including tricking facial recognition technology and using VPNs (virtual private networks) to mask their IP addresses.
In February we offered our own opinion on how the social media under-16 ban is ill-conceived and a Trojan Horse for increased surveillance and further infringements on the right to privacy.
Movement news…
“The EU can treat Ireland as a cautionary tale, or repeat its mistakes on a continental scale.”
Accounting for 22% of state-wide electricity consumption, Ireland has one of the highest concentrations of data centres in the world. A new report, What Ireland’s Data Centre Crisis Means for the EU’s AI Sovereignty Plans, explores how the Irish electricity grid is now effectively structured around the needs of a handful of Big Tech corporations. This has put strain on the grid, driven up domestic electricity prices, and caused climate targets to slip.
In the face of a belligerent government intent on further expanding data centres across the state, communities are beginning to fight back. Check out the Energy for Who? campaign as well as Westmeath and Naas resistance.
Free Software: Pick of the Month…
Manage your passwords with “a no-nonsense, ad-free, tracker-free, and cloud-free manner. Free and open source.”
Strong passwords are one of the most basic, but often neglected, defences against your personal or work data being stolen. However, it is just inconvenient to remember scores of passwords to all your different accounts: email, cloud, bank, social media, etc. Some of us opt for bio-metrics, but aside from the concerns about storing your bio-metric details with the state and private companies, these are not foolproof either.
KeepassXC is a free and open source password manager that manages all of your passwords in once place. It can generate strong passwords for you, and the only password you have to remember is the one you need to get into KeepassXC on your local computer. There are even browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox) that you can use to auto-fill your passwords when you are browsing the internet. We’ve used it at rabble.coop for years and highly recommend it.
That’s us for now. If you haven’t done so already, sign up to our occasional (no more than quarterly) newsletter. As ever, if you have an idea for working with us, tell us about it!