Old Republic Title has announced a new rate increase for the State of Maryland that will become effective on April 1, 2010. 

Sponsorship and or Donations request

  Your property is on the internet. Your house can be seen from the sky and zoomed in on, down to the street level. I know this because I found my birth brother recently, and before I ever contacted or met him, I knew what his house and car looked like. I (correctly) inferred that the minivan he drove was used to take care of his ill adoptive mother and not for kids, as no toys or bumper stickers indicating children were readily visible. This is a lesson for other in what your home and car can say about you.

   A few dollars to a private investigation firm, and those with MVTRAC-style technolgy will turn over a list of all places where a car has been spotted. This is the same tech that allows police to drive along a street and automatically run license plate numbers as they cruise. It is a technolgy which has now made it's way into civilian hands and is being used by everyone from skip tracers to repo men to credit agencies to bounty hunters and more.

As you know, Ohio has proposed legislation to ban private transfer fee covenants.  This past week, a Senate committee held a second hearing on the bill and I was able to make it to the Statehouse to attend.  In favor of the bill was the Ohio State Bar Association and the Ohio Land Title Association.  In opposition, a representative from Freehold Capital Partners.  The interesting thing was that the issues addressed have all been debated here on the Source of Title Blog.  I guess you could say that we have been ahead of the curve!

A secret memo by the US Department of the Interior has exposed an Obama administration proposal to put millions of acres of land off-limits to commercial activity and economic development. The impact of such a move could be particularly devastating at a time when the nation is struggling to recover from recession and job-creating investment is badly needed.

WOW!!

Thank you all for reading my post relating to the new Fannie Mae Addendum, titled NPDC FORM 001 DATED 11-30-09. Maryland

  Research published in a recent edition of Science suggests that analyzing patterns of cellphone use which includes locational data could be upwards of 93% successful in predicting the behavior patterns of users. 

  Combining this with sorely lacking privacy features that most social network users fail to toggle "on" in their account settings which allow datamining services like RapLeaf to compile, the ease of IP Address identification and new techniques for tracking people's locations based upon email trace routes being developed by Google, I am sure that astute weilders of information tools could get this certainty up by a few more percentage points. 

  Heck, enable your pda, notebook, tablet computer or cellphone with GPS and I can locate you 100% of the time, minus when you forget the phone in a bathroom or leave it at work.

For more than two years, I have been blogging about private transfer fee covenants and the group that is promoting them, Freehold Licensing.  Freehold has actually attempted to patent their business strategy of creating private transfer fee covenants (a separate act that I find offensive).  The group now has a new name and a new strategy, all evolving while several states and trade organizations are trying to put a stop to private transfer fee covenants.

   American Scientist's recent article on data preservation raises the spectre of a “digital dark age” if archival techniques are not properly The magazine American Scientist, recently ran an article on data preservation which raises the spectre of a “digital dark age” if archival techniques are not adequately maintained.

   With most data in the future being digital through the inevitable tide of technological progress, the standards and practices we use in these early days of the information age may lend toward gaps in the records for future generations.

A call from a servicing lender asking me to help them re-record a DOT that they accidentally released.