Choicepoint Roundup, March 13
- Axiomlounge talks about public records, outsourcing, and the public records laws that cause all of this.
- Joseph Menn has a great story at the LA Times called “Did Choicepoint End Run Backfire?” Menn asks questions about the effect of Choicepoint’s choices in avoiding regulation. Public Domain Progress notes is not archival quality [link to http://www.publicdomainprogress.info/2005/03/choicepoint-just-one-example-of.html no longer works].
- Speaking of which, the California DMV is about to audit Choicepoint’s distribution of data. Anyone want to bet on what they find?
- Not Choicepoint related, but it seems that AOL may be allowed to read all your AIM messages. It’s all over the blogosphere.
- Deep in the Heart of … France seems surprised to see me, (it’s ok, I can’t spell, either) but doesn’t understand the deep irony of me using all these public sources of data that are watching tout les mots he writes.
(Private to DITHO…F: I don’t buy that data hosting and code hosting can be separated, except in simple cases. Internet-speed round trips, measured in 10s or 100s of MS are expensive compared to secondary storage round trips, measured in high single digit MS counts or less, or main storage, measured in nanoseconds. If I need to do several iterated queries, each using data the previous query returned, the user visible wait state becomes intolerable.)
- Finally, today’s Two Minutes Hate comes to you from Oh!Pinion [link to http://wpblog.ohpinion.com/index.php?p=222 no longer works], who compares Choicepoint’s foibles to the snake oil salesmen who brought us the Pure Food and Drug Act. (That’s really demeaning to the snake oil [link to http://www.interhack.net/people/cmcurtin/snake-oil-faq.html no longer works] salesmen, but most of them are dead, according to a database lookup I did.)
A few other posts on Choicepoint, tracking and analyzing the story can be found in Emergent Chaos Choicepoint Posts.
Adam, I agree that currently there are some technology barriers (if not road-blocks) to large-scale deployment of separate code and data. However, its not that code mobility is impossible per-se in our current world after all – OSGi exists, as does client-side scripting for browser-based apps.
So I think such a shift is possible, and I’m speculating that increasing privacy pressures will make the shift likely. Sure Internet latencies are at least an order of magnitude higher than LAN/SAN latencies, but then, there’s a lot less code that will need to be schlepped (technical term) around over the Internet than data. From the end-user perspective it is possible that it will still all appear the same – stuff running in a browser window and going out over the wire, but with different behavior under the covers.
PS: I did notice that there is a little problem of various moving parts mis-meshing on my blog, resulting in trackbacks not working.