To describe the adoption and sales of 3D TVs as underwhelming would be an understatement. Sales may not be absolutely abysmal, depending on your definition, but this was supposed to be the next thing, and it turns out most consumers don't give two poops about 3D television. (We really love that TechDigest.tv paid us homage with their logo, btw). Despite awful gimmicks, 3D TVs have always felt like a product that was created for a market that manufacturers intended to produce, rather than encourage, through marketing.

Well, if you've been paying attention to the news coming out of CES, one of the new buzz words you may recognize is "4K TV", which offers picture resolutions up to 4 times what was previously available on big screen TVs. But, just as there was with 3D TVs, questions abound about whether or not a large enough market exists for these products.

The word 3D is barely being uttered at CES 2013, but just about all the major TV makers are talking about 4K or ultra-definition HDTV that has four times the resolution of those 1080p sets many of us now own. That's a lot of pixels, which means the picture will be sharper not just when you're sitting several feet away from the set but even if you get up close.

But most us don't get all that close to big screen TVs. The 4K sets being shown at CES are big. Samsung has an 85 inch set, Sony is already selling an 84 inch model. About the smallest set you'll find is 55 inches but even with that size screen, people tend to sit a bit from the screen. I have a 55 inch 1080p set perched several feet in front of my living room couch so I rarely get close enough to my TV to notice any gaps between pixels.

The idea here is that at some point, there are going to be diminishing returns on resolution. Whether 1080p represents that point remains to be seen, but it may be reasonable to think that we've reached a level where more needs to be done to generate interest in higher resolution TVs besides just announcing them and showing the normal demos. They tried that with 3D TVs, along with a few movies that lended themselves well to the 3D experience, and we know that wasn't enough. The real opportunity here is content, specifically good 4K TV content that really takes advantage of all that the technology has to offer. That means content shot with the higher resolutions in mind, including mind-blowing shots that will simply pop with the higher resolution. Sony is the big player here, so you can probably already guess the route they've decided to go.

Taking advantage of the fact that it owns its own movie studios, Sony is trying to jump start content by re-rendering some of its own films into 4K and encouraging short film makers to create content. But it will still be awhile before there is enough native 4K content out there to give viewers a lot of choice of programming.

Sorry, but rehashing old content isn't going to do the trick here, and a lack of early adoption and interest may doom 4K TV to 3D TV's fate. It's all about the implementation. Your new release should show us why we already want the product, not try to generate interest that wasn't natively there. Higher resolutions could be a selling point, were there content that took advantage of it. Given that Sony, as already mentioned, owns its own movie studios, I would have expected them to have timed the product release to something they'd created to take advantage of it. Sadly, it looks like the $20k+ 4K TV devices won't be off to a hot, or useful, start.

This morning at CES, Senator Ron Wyden laid out a broad and detailed agenda for how Congress can and should promote internet freedom and increase innovation -- mainly by focusing on knocking down the barriers presented by legacy players who don't want to adapt or compete. Among other things, he talked about increasing access, pushing back on data caps, dealing with the harm of software patents, greater privacy protections and more. Joe Mullin at Ars Technica has done a nice job bullet-pointing the key planks if you don't feel like reading the whole speech linked above. I'm sure many here will appreciate this line from his speech:

What chills the sharing of ideas and collaboration is the maximalist approach to copyrights and patents. Rights-holders are too eager to use their power to scare off challenges to the status quo, and this perpetuates stagnation.

Other items of interest: he's working with Senator Al Franken on taking an antitrust approach to deal with net neutrality. Details obviously matter -- and I've been quite skeptical of net neutrality laws, as they seem ripe for regulatory capture by big broadband providers -- but an antitrust approach is at least an interesting idea. We've been arguing for nearly a decade that the whole concept of "net neutrality" is something of a red herring. The only reason net neutrality is an issue is because of a lack of competition. Thus, taking an antitrust approach may actually make sense, though (again) the details matter quite a bit.

On patents, he's arguing that we need much more detailed info on the impact of software patents on the economy:

A related concern is the affect of software patents on America’s ability to innovate. Congress should begin a review – a cost-benefit analysis – of software patents’ contribution to the economy. The acquisition of these patents appears less about deploying innovation and more about employing a legal arsenal. The patent system should not, as Julie Samuels at EFF says, operate as a tax on innovation, as it does now. How are you promoting innovation if you stand behind a law that enables a few lines of code to be patentable for 20 years? Software is different than a new invention. It is a building block -- a new set of instructions -- that should be continually built upon and improved.

This is good... but I still get nervous when people focus too much on software patents. There are significant problems with all kinds of patents, and focusing just on "software" alone, may leave other problems in place. Still, more data and information is a good thing, and a serious look at the economic impact of software patents can only be a good thing.

In separate conversations after his speech, Wyden made it clear that with all the other -- more high profile -- things that Congress is fighting over in the next few months, it may be difficult to get too much through Congress, but he is quite reasonably optimistic about how many people in Congress are awakening to the importance of the internet and to understanding the wider concerns of all of us who use the internet on a daily basis.

With the ever growing amount of content to read/watch/hear, humans are going to need to figure out much more efficient ways to consume information. Speed reading will only get us so far, and then we're going to have to rely on ways to filter out irrelevant stuff so we can focus more on just the things that we really need to see. Here are just a few early attempts to get computers to help us out with information overload.

• Clipped is a software tool that tries to extract key bits of information from long pieces of text. Tanay Tandon, a 15yo kid, created it and also filed a patent for his algorithm.... [url]
• TLDR is a browser plug-in that tries to create short summaries for articles. These algorithms aren't perfect, but then again, neither is human comprehension. [url]
• Another teenager wrote news-summarizing software and raised $1 million for it. It was originally called Trimmit, but now it's Summly -- and 16yo Nick D'Alosio is looking for some "serious scientists" to help him improve his algorithms with that VC funding. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

In a move that struck some by surprise, the US Patent Office and the Department of Justice put out an interesting statement arguing that companies need to stop abusing promises for fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licenses (pdf) for standards essential patents (SEPs). They argued, quite reasonably, that lawsuits over SEPs can stifle innovation and block competition. Well, duh. While many are interpreting this as having to do with the FTC/Google settlement, which touched on exactly this issue, the DOJ/USPTO letter seems much more focused on trying to knock some sense into the International Trade Commission (ITC) concerning how it deals with the patent cases it hears. As we've been discussing for years, patent holders get two (entirely) separate cracks at using the legal process to slap down those they accuse of patent infringement. First, there's the federal court system, which is what most people think of when they think about patent disputes. The second is going to the ITC and seeking to ban the product from entering the country (i.e., getting an injunction).

The ITC process does not follow the same rules or timeline as the legal process and so you could have a situation where courts go one way and the ITC goes another. Either way, an injunction via either the courts or the ITC is like a death sentence for a product, so most companies figure out a way to "settle" a case when it reaches the injunction stage, so it becomes like a forced license at a ridiculously high price. Thanks to the MercExchange ruling at the Supreme Court, the federal courts are much more hesitant to issue injunctions these days, but for the ITC it's the only remedy they have -- and while they don't always use it, they do use it often enough.

The FTC has lately been expressing growing concern about the ITC's somewhat cavalier attitude towards the impact of the injunctions it gives out, and this DOJ/USPTO paper appears to be another push against the ITC. The statement makes it clear that the ITC needs to recognize that it's core mission is focused on what's best for "the public health and welfare of consumers," and thus, when it comes to standards essential patents, it needs to take into account whether or not the public good is actually served by issuing an injunction.

This is all good and we agree.

But... why is this limited to SEPs? This is an all too typical reaction from government bureaucrats on these issues. They're all up in arms that (*gasp*) companies might use the government granted monopoly privilege to do exactly what it's designed to do: to exclude others in order to drive up the price and limit competition. The real focus should be on whether or not the patents themselves are what's best for the public health and welfare, not whether or not the FRAND agreements on the tiny subset of all the patents out there, the SEPs, are what's best.

The whole thing is somewhat comical when you think about it. The government gives companies the ability to exclude others via a government granted monopoly. It doesn't take a degree in economics to understand that when you give someone the right to exclude others, limit competition and drive up the price of things, that's what's going to happen -- and it's not going to be the best thing for the public health. But rather than recognize that crux of the issue, the response is just to focus on a core subset of patents, the standard essential ones.

Oh, and concerning the Google/FTC settlement, Google finally dropped its ITC effort against Microsoft. Honestly, Google should have done that a while back. Yes, Google inherited the situation from Motorola, but what an amazing statement it would have made about the companies position on patents and the patent wars if it had simply dropped such ITC actions upon the close of the acquisition.

Either way, all of this is yet another example of just how broken the patent system remains. And while it's nice to see the DOJ and USPTO at least paying lip service to the problems of the patent system, it's unfortunate that they think the problem is about "standards essential patents," rather than patents themselves, which create the identical problem for others.

Last year, we wrote about the insane position from the group Newspaper Licensing Ireland (NLI), which represents the major newspapers in Ireland, in demanding that a charity pay them for linking to newspaper stories. In the last few weeks that story has been getting more and more attention in Ireland, in part because a related, but different organization representing mostly the same Irish newspapers, National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI), made a submission to a government review of copyright arguing that linking is infringement if done on any kind of commercial site (so, yeah, they'd probably consider that link to their site infringement).

NNI made a submission to the effect that our view of existing legislation is that the display and transmission of links does constitute an infringement of copyright and our existing copyright law should not be amended in the manner discussed in the Consultation Paper.

Meanwhile, the lawyers representing the charity have noticed that NLI appears to have backtracked ever so slightly and are now saying that "links alone" are not infringement, but if you include any text, you've gone over the line. They've put up a new statement reading, in part:

For commercial use: NLI does not require a licence from any organisation which only displays or transmits links to newspaper content. A licence is required when there is other reproduction of the newspaper content, such as display of PDFs or text extracts.

Of course, whether or not they consider reproducing that text as copyright infringement is left as an exercise for the reader.

Kuwait has generally been a much more open and free society than some of its neighbors in the region, but there's been troubling news lately concerning the decision to put a man in jail for two years for a tweet "insulting the emir" followed quickly by another man getting the same sentence for the same offense. The news reports I've seen have not reported what the tweets actually said, but no matter what, this kind of censorship of political discourse is extremely troubling -- especially given the country's reputation for being more open to political dialogue.

"We've been taken by surprise because Kuwait has always been known internationally and in the Arab world as a democracy-loving country," Humidi said. "People are used to democracy, but suddenly we see the constitution being undermined."

Of course, this is why we were so horrified by a French politician's recent efforts to ask Twitter to help censor tweets for what French government officials deemed "hate speech." Where do you draw the line? Who defines what kind of "hate speech" is being censored. I am sure that the Kuwaiti emir considers the insults directed his way a form of "hate speech," and, from there, you quickly slide into blatant political censorship.

Of course, this seems only likely to backfire in a big way. As more and more people get used to being able to discuss things freely, when a government cracks down on such free speech, they're going to react negatively. Considering that many other countries in that region have used social media as a tool to organize protests and even to eventually overthrow a few governments, it would appear that overly sensitive Kuwaiti officials might want to learn to get thicker skins and learn that the best way to deal with "insulting" speech is to just ignore it.

I have long been a proponent of more widely available sports league streaming options as a method for building revenue. While I firmly believe in the concept of blackout-less and minimal cost streaming for anyone who wants to watch a game on the computer, tablet, or phone instead of on their television, I do understand that there are some hurdles to consider. Chief amongst those hurdles is the enormous contracts many of these leagues have with broadcasting partners, particularly network TV partners, which can present a great deal of friction to streaming services that aren't their own.

With all that said, if ever there was an opportunity to jump that hurdle, one embattled league would have it easier than the others, and that's the NHL. For anyone who isn't a hockey fan, the NHL lockout is essentially over and there will be a season this year. Like any league that has a work stoppage, however, one major concern is whether or not fans will come back to the sport after being denied the product for so long.

The pact is expected to last 10 years and split revenues 50-50 between owners and players, similar to the CBAs in the NFL and NBA. The players are set to return to the ice, but will NHL fans come back as well? The 2004-05 NHL lockout that wiped out an entire season did not keep fans away when hockey returned in October 2005. In fact, it was the exact opposite in many cases. Attendance increased for the majority of teams with nine teams experiencing a bump of at least 5% compared to the 2003-04 season. The Pittsburgh Penguins led the way with a 33% gain, as recent top draft picks Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin made their Pens’ debut. Attendance for the Carolina Hurricanes rose 26% thanks to the team’s Southeast Division crown and first Stanley Cup title.

All of that is absolutely true, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, other leagues that have had work stoppages haven't faired nearly as well. The best modern era example of a post-stoppage negative effect is the MLB player's strike of 1995, after which there was a nearly 20% decline in attendance and TV revenues fell sharply.

Secondly, not all NHL teams felt the post-stoppage bump described above. Those that did not tended to be the teams with limited television exposure in 2005. The best example of this is the Chicago Blackhawks, which blacked out all home games before and after the strike, with home attendance numbers falling in '04 from 13k fans per game to just under that number by '07. However, something magical happened in 2008: owner and blackout proponent Bill Wirtz died and his son immediately lifted the blackout restrictions. Attendance immediately rose as fans had a way to embrace the team regularly and then bought tickets, climbing to a peak of over 22k fans per game in '09.

Finally, note that the NHL is in the weakest position in terms bargaining power over TV contracts, because it receives so relatively little in revenue percentage from their main contract with NBC (who does offer limited streaming of one game per week or so).

NHL teams derived 47% of their revenues last season from arena revenues controlled by the fan. These include gate receipts, concessions and parking. The other half of revenues hail from media contracts, luxury suites, sponsors and non-hockey events. Of the major U.S. sports, baseball is the next highest at 46%, but that figure is set to drop with the explosion of local media deals in the sport like the impending Los Angeles Dodgers deal worth more than $6 billion. The corresponding percentages in the NBA and NFL are 34% and 24% respectively. The NHL simply does not have the media rights fee millions (or billions) the other sports possess.

This lockout presents the perfect opportunity for the NHL to embrace wide streaming of their games as a method for building current and future revenue through an expanded fanbase. We know that stoppages can and have hurt attendance. We know that the more options there are for fans to watch their teams play games, without restrictions, the better attendance comes back after stoppages. Finally we know that the NHL does not get the kind of broadcast fees the other leagues do, so they have the least to lose by going the non-traditional route.

The time for the NHL to embrace internet streams is now. Not with some NHL package that blacks out all the games of someone's home team. Real streaming, real exposure, real broadening of the NHL fanbase, leading to better attendance, more options for ad revenue, and ultimately more lucrative broadcast contracts.

One of the extraordinary aspects of the "three strikes" approach to copyright enforcement is its blind vindictiveness. After three or so alleged acts of infringing on copyright, it's not one individual that's punished, but the entire household that depends on the family Internet connection in question, irrespective of the personal situation of those affected. This kind of collective punishment is something that is regarded as abhorrent in other contexts, but the power of the copyright industries is such that several governments around the world followed the French lead and introduced precisely this kind of scheme, and to hell with the damage it might cause to innocent and vulnerable people caught up in it.

A major issue is that no research was carried out before introducing the legislation in order to understand just what its wider effects might be -- pretty much the only exploration of the consequences is in Cory Doctorow's "Pirate Cinema", the Techdirt Book Club's current choice. That's typical of the evidence-free way that copyright legislation is drawn up and passed, but it is particularly unforgiveable here because some belated research shows just how serious the knock-on damage is likely to be for some:

Teenagers who do not have access to the internet in their home have a strong sense of being 'educationally disadvantaged', warns the study. At the time of the study, the researchers estimated that around 10 per cent of the teenagers were without online connectivity at home, with most of this group living in poorer households. While recent figures from the Office of National Statistics suggest this dropped to five per cent in 2012, the researchers say that still leaves around 300,000 children without internet access in their homes.

The researchers' interviews with teenagers reveal that they felt shut out of their peer group socially and also disadvantaged in their studies as so much of the college or school work set for them to do at home required online research or preparation.

The research is about homes that do not have an Internet connection for economic or other reasons, but clearly the same consequences could be expected for those that were cut off as a result of a "three strikes" punishment against someone in the same household. Students in families affected are likely to be educationally and socially at a considerable disadvantage. Fortunately, as Techdirt has reported, the "three strikes" approach seems to be collapsing under its own weight in France, and more or less ruled out in the UK for legal reasons.

That's just as well, since this new research suggests that the knock-on consequences for young people caught up in this scheme would have been serious and long lasting as far as their employment prospects and social integration were concerned. Moreover, it's not hard to see that the impact on everyone in the families affected would have been similarly disproportionate in terms of cutting them off from online government and business services that are now practically indispensable for modern life.

It's shameful the governments concerned either didn't even consider these issues before plunging ahead with their "three strikes" laws, or did, but simply didn't care about the suffering they would cause. In either case, it shows once more how they are more interested in pleasing their friends in the copyright world than in serving the people that elected them.

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Even against a background of repeated attempts to censor the Net, it's still possible to become a little complacent about some of the actions being taken by the copyright industries. For example, many people probably feel that blocking a site like The Pirate Bay isn't really a problem because, after all, it's just one site, right?

A post on TorrentFreak explains why that's a dangerous attitude:

Copyright activists often warn that a ruling in one case has the potential to be leveraged elsewhere and the wedge can become thicker frighteningly quickly if issues aren't dealt with early on. It seems that a case currently underway in Ireland involving The Pirate Bay is proving that assessment correct.

At the moment customers of the Irish ISP Eircom cannot access The Pirate Bay since an uncontested 2009 High Court ruling orders the ISP to block the site. But that's just one ISP, some people will say, and it's easy to switch to another. Nice try.

That's because the recording labels want the Web block to be extended to other ISPs. Again, some might say: well, it's still just one site. But here's where things start to get serious. It's not just about one site any more:

The plaintiffs (technically EMI, Ireland) have told the court that they are looking to achieve more than just a blockade of the world's biggest torrent site. In fact, they have a list of 260 other "objectionable" websites they have identified that they would also like blocked if this attack on The Pirate Bay is a success.

What started out with Eircom agreeing to have The Pirate Bay blocked could now potentially lead to a few other Irish ISPs having to follow suit. In a worst case scenario that could play out to all ISPs having to block 260 other sites on the music industry's hit-list. Which sites? Only they know.

And of course, if the industry manages to get the court to agree to 260 sites being blocked, you can be sure that it will be back with another few hundred, or a few thousand, at some point in the future. Because once the court rules that Web blocking is acceptable, it's easier to go back to ask for more censorship, citing that judgement. That's why it's important to remember it's never 'just' one Web block.

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Back in November we covered the story of a Texas student whose refusal to wear a school-issued ID card with an embedded RFID chip led to her suspension. Her family, along with the Rutherford Institute, took the school district to court, seeking a temporary restraining order which would allow the student to return to her school without wearing the Smart ID card.

The student's parents cited religious objections to the ID card/tracking device and the filing pointed out that requiring her to wear the badge violated both her First Amendment rights (by compelling speech -- conveying a message she didn't agree with) and the Texas Freedom of Religion Act.

Considering the whole program itself was implemented almost solely in hopes of securing more funding by boosting attendance numbers and that the district had no specific policies in place when it began requiring the ID cards, one would hope that we'd be hearing of the student's return to school sans ID when the decision came down.

Unfortunately, the court's decision went the other way, and Andrea Hernandez has until January 18th to decide whether to wear the badge and return to her original school or transfer to another district school that has yet to implement the Smart ID cards.

A Texas high school student who claimed her student identification was the “Mark of the Beast” because it was implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip has lost her federal court bid Tuesday challenging her suspension for refusing to wear the card around her neck...

[Judge Orlando Garcia] tentatively halted the suspension, but changed course Tuesday after concluding that the 15-year-old’s right of religion was not breached...

Hernandez's family feels the ID card and embedded chip represent the "Mark of the Beast" as detailed in Revelations 13:16-18. The school's counteroffer -- to have Andrea wear the badge without the RFID chip -- was rejected by her family, which still felt the badge itself was representative of the Antichrist. Judge Garcia saw it differently, however.

“The accommodation offered by the district is not only reasonable it removes plaintiff’s religious objection from legal scrutiny all together,” (.pdf) U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia wrote.

The Rutherford Institute plans to appeal this decision, claiming this decision is "not permissible under our constitutional scheme" and turns the district court into "an arbiter of what is and is not religious."

The Institute has a point, for whatever it's worth. Hernandez's parents claimed that both the ID card and the embedded chip were offensive to their religious beliefs but the court here seems to have decided the compromise offered by the district negates the family's opinion on the chip-less ID card. The school's offer to transfer the student to another school within the district is also reasonable on its face, but it does take away a few options -- namely, the classes Hernandez was attending this specific school for.

The school's interest in having Hernandez only appear to support the program could probably use some further examination as well, although angling for outward complicity isn't a violation of rights in and of itself. It does "compel" speech in a way, but more than simply rubbing the First Amendment the wrong way, it sends a message about what's truly important to the school district: that students show "support" for the district's policies... even if they object to them.

We've tried a few times to debunk the ridiculous logic of "if you've got nothing to hide..." argument in favor of surveillance, but leave it the awesome Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal to do a much better job in the form of a simple webcomic. In case you can't view the comic, the key line:

Everyone has something to hide and usually no one cares. By surveilling everyone, you catch the benign breaches of law and taboo. If the public are all guilty, the executive part of the government can selectively enforce laws, essentially giving them both judicial and legislative power, which defeats the whole point of separation of powers.

Right. That.

Against a background of the UK government teetering on the brink of imposing an opt-out Web filter "for the children", here's yet another example of how automatic categorization of sites for blacklists gets it wrong, as recounted by the UK's Open Rights Group (ORG):

someone used blocked.org.uk to tell us about another church (St. Mark's in Southampton) that is blocked -- this time on [the mobile operator] Vodafone. We have confirmed that it is also blocked by Orange. The site is blocked on O2's highest blocking setting, but not on their 'default safety' service.

Using O2's very handy 'URL checker', we have established that they classify the site as 'alcohol'. It is likely that this is the category that has led to its blocking on other networks, but this is not confirmed.

So why might a church be classed alongside sinful purveyors of alcoholic beverages? ORG has a suspicion:

It is likely that the reason for this categorisation is the use of the word 'wine' on the church's website. The church is part of the 'New Wine Network of Churches'. Their website explains that this means they "have the aim of 'Equipping Churches to see Jesus' Kingdom Grow'". Their use of the word 'wine' is not related to selling or the use of alcohol.

Although it seems that the site has now been unblocked, that's only because it was "manually reviewed". As ORG points out:

It's yet another example of how internet filters make simple and costly mistakes which often result in 'over-blocking.' Our report from May this year collected more examples of this. Since then we have seen political parties, technology news websites, and more recently a number of maternity health sites all blocked by mobile networks. It can be tricky and slow to get sites removed from block lists (although mobile networks say this is improving).

That last point is important. No system is perfect, and errors will always be made. But what matters is how quickly the mistakes are corrected. Unfortunately, the evidence so far is that not only are such automated filters unreliable when it comes to evaluating sites, but the correction mechanisms are pretty awful too -- a worrying combination.

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It appears that there are still some writers out there who moved from print to an online presence while never having learned to properly "internet." Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com is one of them. Writing up his baseball Hall of Fame ballot, Heyman botched a few facts about Jack Morris in his push for the pitcher's inclusion, as Craig Calcaterra at NBC Sports pointed out:

Jon Heyman put up his Hall of Fame column this afternoon. For years he has pushed hard for Jack Morris for the Hall. He has long overstated Morris’ merits in my view, but it’s gotten to the point now where he’s simply making crap up:

He was thought good enough to be the ace on teams that had Bert Blyleven and Dave Stewart, and to receive Cy Young votes in seven seasons. I can’t allow his vast accomplishments to be re-evaluated downward by a new emphasis on different numbers.

Jack Morris and Bert Blyleven were never teammates. Jack Morris played one season with Dave Stewart. In that one season — 1993 — Morris was 7-12 with a 6.19 ERA. It’s possible that Heyman is calling Morris the “ace” of that 1993 Jays team because he got the Opening Day start, but he didn’t distinguish himself at all that year, he was out of the rotation by early September and was left off the postseason roster. Some ace.

Poynter followed up on the aftermath of this error, noting that Heyman's reaction to being called out in his fiction was to fix the mistake in the article without calling attention to the correction anywhere on the offending page. When called out on this 'stealth' correction, Jon Heyman responded with his least factual statement yet.

@thitchner not a simple mistake like that on the internet. I have never seen corrections listed below an internet story.

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) January 8, 2013

I'm not sure which parts of the internet Heyman is familiar with, but examining this statement (and its off-hand dismissal of the internet as a place beneath common courtesy or respect), I would hazard a guess that Heyman hasn't ventured much further than the pages run by CBS Sports. Andrew Beaujon points out that CBS Sports has failed to issue timely corrections on its website before, most notably its premature announcement that Penn State Joe Paterno had died -- a "scoop" it borrowed without attribution from a Penn State student website.

The "internet" that I'm familiar with is full of corrections. Updated posts happen all the time. Tom Hitchner helpfully pointed out a couple of recent corrections to Heyman -- one at the New York Times and one at Slate. Here at Techdirt, we update posts whenever clarification or correction is needed, as well as when new information flows in.

Everyone who realizes that the instantaneous give-and-take the internet provides requires this sort of transparency -- from the lowliest hobby blogger to the writer who's at least two or three sizes too small for the platform he's been given -- lists their corrections, or at the very least runs visible strikethrough. Apparently, Jon Heyman feels the internet is too insignificant to deserve honesty. If this is the attitude he's chosen to project, he doesn't deserve many readers.

The UK Border Agency (UKBA) has a bit of a problem on its hands after handing off some outdated information to a private company acting on its behalf. The agency is attempting to kick 174,000 illegal immigrants out of the UK, a job it apparently feels is best handled by a third party, utilizing text messages and email. Unfortunately, due to inaccurate information, legal migrants are being politely asked to pack up and go.

Capita, which won a £40m UKBA contract to trace 174,000 migrants living illegally in the country from September, has been sending text messages and emails to them telling they are required to leave Britain. But immigration lawyers say those who have received Capita's texts in recent weeks include a woman with a valid British passport and a man with a valid visa who had invested £1m in a UK-based business.

As if suddenly being asked to leave a country you're legally residing in wasn't upsetting enough, the fact that these "hit the road" messages were sent over the holiday season only made things worse.

Alison Harvey, of the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association, said it had asked for the messages not to be sent over the holiday period: "We were concerned at reports of people who had valid leave to be in the UK receiving the texts and that, over the holiday period, it would be difficult for them to get in touch with their lawyer and they would be anxious and distressed with no possibility of reassurance. Our request was declined."

Home Secretary Theresa May has promised to look into the erroneous texts and is being pressured to halt the program altogether. To its credit, the UKBA has owned up to providing the questionable info:

UKBA admitted the problem was with the accuracy of its records: "We advise anyone contacted in error to contact us so records can be updated. Where our records show that people are here illegally, it is vital we are able to contact them as we are determined that they should return home. This is the first time a government has taken proactive steps to deal with this pool of cases, some of which date back to December 2008."

Capita has a contract worth potentially £40m, but is paid for results (migrants leaving the country), rather than guaranteed the entire amount, so it seems unlikely that it has anything to gain by contacting legal migrants. It's also unlikely that sending stern text messages will have much impact on the immigrants the UK government wants to see removed. Of course, Capita may not have the staffing to pursue illegal immigrants with anything more manpower-intensive than texts and emails. One week prior to receiving this contract, it was taken to task by a National Audit Office report which showed that it failed to provide enough qualified and competent courtroom interpreters (through its subsidiary, Applied Language Solutions [ALS]), leading to a large number of abandoned trials.

"The ministry overlooked its own due diligence process, which showed ALS was simply too small to shoulder a contract of this value. The ministry also took no account of the resolve of many experienced interpreters not to work for this company. Against a target of 98%, ALS supplied an interpreter in only 58% of hearings in February 2012.

"This unacceptably poor performance led to courtroom chaos," the report said. It forced court staff to interrupt their core duties to find interpreters at short notice and triggered a steep rise in the number of abandoned trials … ALS could not even guarantee that interpreters had undergone mandatory criminal records checks."

And then there's the question of whether spending £40m to remove illegal migrants is a wise idea. In an article published a few days later, The Guardian points out that the government's hardline approach to immigration is damaging the "multibillion-pound market" in foreign students.

Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of Universities UK, said the flurry of recent statements by senior ministers calling for a crackdown on "bogus students" had given the impression that overseas students were no longer welcome and was driving them towards competitor countries such as the US, Canada and Australia.

"We are concerned about the language and the atmosphere that is being created, not least because it plays very, very badly internationally," Dandridge said. "Whatever the intentions of the politicians are … every time these sorts of comments are made by the home secretary or others it does have a potentially very damaging impact internationally."

A study by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (pdf) estimated that overseas students contribute nearly £8 billion a year to Britain's economy and projects it to near £17 billion by 2025. Not only does putting out the "unwelcome mat" for foreign students adversely affect the UK's economy, it also does damage to its standing in the global marketplace, as Dandrige explains:

"What universities are reporting to us [is that] they are seeing significant drops, particularly from India, from Pakistan and now from China and Saudi Arabia. These are countries that send large numbers and also they are important countries in terms of international engagement and industry engagement, so we want to be promoting and fostering relations with them, not erecting barriers."

Between Capita's own issues, the UKGA's failure to provide up-to-date information and the fact that chasing immigrants out might not be in the country's best interest, this situation has the potential to develop into a black eye for all involved. Even if the number of legal immigrants who spent the holiday season wondering if they were being deported is low compared to the total contacted, it's still a very inauspicious start for a questionable program.

As you may have heard, Greece isn't having the best fiscal time of things these days. Oddly, as Glyn Moody noted previously, such dire straits haven't really gotten the country to focus on the important things when it comes to the internet and technology. Now, unless a few open source software groups get their way, it appears that the country with money problems will once again turn a blind eye to open source software in upcoming government purchases.

The ministry published a request for tender in November, seeking suppliers of 26,400 laptops, 1760 servers and 1760 wifi access routers. The value of the contract is set at just over 15 million euro. The purchase will be partly financed by the European Regional Development Fund. The ministry is asking for laptops and servers that can run either a ubiquitous proprietary operating system or Linux. But, say the Greek Linux User Group (Greeklug) and Eel/lak, a Greek open source advocacy organisation founded by 25 universities and research centres, the technical requirements clearly favour proprietary solutions over open source. "The specification is a copy of the proprietary vendor's e-mail and office software."

As someone who gets to deal with government bid contracts, I can assure you that this is extremely common. It's often the case that these kind of request for bids begin with an end product in mind and then develop the bid language to conform to that product. For anyone who wants to actually put together their own effective solution for consideration, it's incredibly annoying. But for a country with the kind of money problems that would make a homeless guy with an addiction to gambling on crack consumption laugh, to linguistically exclude an open source and less expensive software option is simply dumb.

Unfortunately, Greeklug and Eel/lak aren't expecting the Greek government to listen, so they may have to take their complaints elsewhere.

Both are also appealing to the European Commission, hoping that Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes and Commissioner for Regional Policy Johannes Hahn will pressure the ministry to correct the tender request. "To give free and open source a fair chance, the technical specification will have to be improved", the groups plead.

We'll see if that route works. Regardless, to have money trouble and not consider open source software is just plain irresponsible.