Oil companies don’t want to be in the credit card business, which they farm out to financial companies on various consignment basis. Here’s a good example of bad things that happen when the two companies’ customer information gets out of sync. Bogus late charges are bad enough; wanting to verify SSNs without any verifiable security is beyond the pale. (more…)

Jim Rapoza wrote an interesting article (SaaS Access in the 5 May 08 eWeek magazine pp35-43), that describes the next browser architecture as something very much like a remake of (IBM) 327x technology, with an additional  overhead layer. This, along with the adjacent article by Ryan Naraine on the Opus Palladium browser project at UI-Urbana-Champaign, suggests to me that one lock-in may be exchanged for another. Perhaps the devil we know isin’t so bad after all.