Your Database Is Not Probable Cause
I have spent a large part of my career building systems that answer questions. Databases are very good at this. Give me a sufficiently well-designed dataset and I…
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The Computer Found a Car. Police Stopped Looking.
A few weeks ago I wrote about what “human in the loop” is supposed to mean. Lindsey Isaacs’s case is a different version of the same problem, and…
Read article →Remote Notarization Doesn’t Eliminate Trust. It Moves It.
Whenever we move a process online, there is a temptation to describe the physical steps we eliminated. No travel. No paper. No physical meeting. No waiting room. Fine.…
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Human in the Loop Has to Mean Something
Angela Lipps spent more than five months in jail for crimes she said from the beginning she could not have committed. She lived in Tennessee. The crimes happened…
Read article →Your Notary Journal Is Part of the Security System
A notary journal looks remarkably unimpressive for something that can become extremely important. It’s a book. Rows. Boxes. Dates. Names. Signatures. Maybe a thumbprint. There is no machine…
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The Last Mile of a Real Estate Closing Is Still a Logistics Problem
We tend to talk about real estate closings as financial transactions. They are. They’re also logistics operations. A signing requires the right documents, the right signer, the right…
Read article →Building Things Because They Should Exist
A surprisingly large percentage of the things I build begin with the same sentence: “Why the hell doesn’t this exist?” This is not always a financially responsible question.…
Read article →Deed Fraud Is Becoming a Technology Problem
Stealing a house sounds like it should be difficult. It’s a house. You can’t exactly put it in your pocket and walk away. What you can steal is…
Read article →WTF Did Chat Put in the Database?
Building Weather With Regerts for Home Assistant Home automation has a recurring problem: it is remarkably easy to make your house smart, and surprisingly difficult to make your…
Read article →Why Does a Real Estate Transaction Still Require So Many Phone Calls?
There is a particular sentence that makes my systems-integration brain itch: “I’ll call them and find out.” Sometimes a phone call is exactly the right thing. But when…
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