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.

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."

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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

Having appealed the denial of my request, I got an impressively prompt reply on Tuesday evening from the director of the Office of Information Policy at DOJ, assuring me that she recognized the agency's initial response had been "incorrect," and that a new one would be forthcoming immediately. By Wednesday morning, their stance had changed entirely: They had found the reports I sought, and were forwarding them to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for review to determine what would need to be redacted before release--with a request that ODNI seek to expedite its analysis to compensate for their own delay.

Now, to be sure, I'd rather have had this response a month ago, and the documents before the House vote, but at this point DOJ appears to be doing exactly what they're supposed to and making a good faith effort to facilitate the redaction and release of these important assessments. So it seemed appropriate to follow up on my initial blog post to acknowledge that--and in particular Office of Information Policy director Melanie Pustay, who straightforwardly acknowledged the error and acted quickly to correct it. We'll see soon enough whether a similar spirit of transparency reigns at ODNI.

Cross-posted from Cato-at-Liberty.

"We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist," Hogan said. "We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."

The amount of those damages must be adequate to compensate the patent holder for the infringement. A damages award should put the patent holder in approximately the financial position it would have been in had the infringement not occurred, but in no event may the damages award be less than a reasonable royalty. You should keep in mind that the damages you award are meant to compensate the patent holder and not to punish an infringer.

“When I got in this case and I started looking at these patents I considered: ‘If this was my patent and I was accused, could I defend it?’” Hogan explained. On the night of Aug. 22, after closing arguments, “a light bulb went on in my head,” he said. “I thought, I need to do this for all of them.”

"It didn't dawn on us [that we agreed that Samsung had infringed] on the first day," Ilagan said. "We were debating heavily, especially about the patents on bounce-back and pinch-to-zoom. Apple said they owned patents, but we were debating about the prior art [about similar technology that Samsung said existed before the iPhone debuted]. [Velvin] Hogan was jury foreman. He had experience. He owned patents himself...so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. After we debated that first patent -- what was prior art --because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art."

"In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down."

• Vanessa Hojda made a spectacularly bad email mistake by attaching the wrong file and (instead of her resume) sending a crazy-looking picture of Nicolas Cage with her job application. She didn't get the job that she was applying for, but her 15 minutes of internet fame probably won't hurt her career too much, either. [url]
• CareerBuilder has published a list of some other outrageous resume mistakes. They also list examples of resumes with a "creative approach" where the candidate was hired. Warning: there may be a fine line between creativity and stupiditry for some... [url]
• This cover letter from an aspiring Wall St trader is a bit too colorful for most financial institutions. "Please explain your rationale for the rainbow" will likely be a long-remembered response for some Wall St firms. [url]

“When I saw some metal parts inside the box, I thought, ‘Maybe this is a TV stand or mount or something,’” Horvitz said in a phone interview with Wired. “When I realized it was an assault rifle, it was pure shock and disbelief.”

I'm not sure what pretending all this didn't happen accomplishes from Amazon's end, other than to perhaps flip open the cover to the Streisand Effect alarm, press it, and wait for the derision to ensue.

• Automatically serving ads without a human editor to judge the appropriateness of the content can be a really bad idea -- especially when placing ads on news items. Yahoo News recently inserted ads for Express clothing on a news photo -- unfortunately the photo pictured a distraught man who survived an attack by Taliban militants. [url]
• KFC ran a commercial in the UK a few years ago that set a record for complaints -- because viewers thought it encouraged bad manners and mocked people with speech impediments. This commercial has held on to its record to this day, but there probably aren't many agencies vying for the title. [url]
• Pizza Hut knows its customers love pizza, but does a love of pizza correlate with disliking math? This commercial needs to show its work on how it arrived at its conclusion. [url]
• Kenneth Cole is trying to raise "awearness" with some edgy ad campaigns. But one of its billboards generated some backlash from teachers when it suggested that teachers' rights were at odds with student interests. [url]

"If they would have just taken it down, this all would have been over," Deters said. "They just kind of mocked the whole court system."

The last kind of attack is the most dangerous because it's feasible for a small number of people—perhaps even a single individual—to do a lot of damage. The reason paper-based elections tend to be better than touch-screen elections isn't that the former don't have flaws. The difference is that attacks against paper-based voting systems are far more likely to be O(N) or O(P)—that is, you have to tamper with a lot of ballots or corrupt a lot of poll workers. In contrast, because they contain re-programmable computers at their hearts, touch-screen voting systems are far more susceptible to O(1) attacks such as a custom-developed virus or a corrupt employee at the e-voting vendor. Because they allow a single individual to do extensive damage, they're much more dangerous than other kinds of attacks, even if carrying them out takes relatively more skill or effort than other attacks with O(P) or O(N) cost. The reason to prefer paper-based voting to touch-screen voting isn't that paper voting is flawless, but that the attacks against them are labor-intensive enough that it's difficult to carry out large-scale attacks without getting caught.

The executives behind the decision were trying to force the show's sizable online audience to watch the program on broadcast television instead. Unsurprisingly, the ploy didn't work, and yesterday the network's president confirmed that streaming will resume.

We should give credit where it's due: the network brass recognized their experiment's failure relatively quickly and called it off. And their original motivation is understandable -- online advertising continues to lack the financial firepower of traditional media ads due to a variety of factors, only some of which can be blamed on the ad industry's continued confusion over how to deal with the internet age.

But as Mike originally pointed out, this plan was doomed from the start. Limiting consumer choice is no longer a viable business strategy. Attempts to do so in the media realm are especially hopeless, and doubly so when, like the CW, you've already shown your users how much freedom they could be enjoying. Sure enough, the torrents for Gossip Girl are well-seeded. Given that, the CW's decision to serve its viewers on their own terms is a wise one. Here's hoping they do us all a favor and find a way to make their online ad stock more financially viable.

Sadly I can detect no pattern to my mis-predictions. In some cases, I did not anticipate improvements and advances that would remake a pathetic first version into a truly cool tool. In others I anticipated advances that never came.

• Google. Now, to be fair, I always thought that Google was a great offering, and I was one of the early adopters and users of the search engine. What I didn't understand was how the company would make money -- and why Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia would put $25 million into a company that had no revenue and no clear path to revenue. Given the founders rather vehement claims that advertising on a search engine was bad (and, yes, they were vehement about this early on), I thought the company would struggle to find a business model. In fact, it did struggle for a little while... but once the company figured it out....
• RSS. While we at Techdirt were a somewhat early adopter in providing an RSS feed, I wasn't much of a believer in the technology for a while. I had been using various "multibrowser" systems that would load up a bunch of websites in a huge long list -- and that seemed like a perfectly efficient system for me to use. I was on the record saying I thought RSS was too confusing for most people -- and I still think it suffers from some of those problems, but it's become tremendously successful -- due, in large part, to the user-friendliness of various RSS readers, starting with Bloglines and moving on to Google Reader and the various customizable home page solutions.
• Skype: It launched to a ton of hype and I wasn't buying any of it. There were already a bunch of voicechat products on the market, and there had been for years. I just didn't see what was all that different about Skype. To be honest, I'm still not sure what was so different about it -- but it got users, and for the most part "it just worked." Never underestimate the power of those two things.
• The web itself: I first heard about "the world wide web" in early 1994. I had been using email, usenet and gopher for a while before that. While I knew that the web was something special, as soon as I first tried out Mosaic in 1994, I didn't think it would become this big of a deal. In fact, I just assumed that the world would move on to something else after a few years. After all, after the web came along, gopher pretty much died out, and I assumed that some new offering would come along and make the web obsolete, just as the web did to gopher.
• The original Napster: While I actually only played around with Napster briefly (at the time I had no broadband connection), I thought that it would revolutionize the music industry. In a way, it did, but not the way I expected it to. I honestly thought that (1) Napster would be found legal and that (2) the recording industry would quickly realize what a useful tool it would be for distribution and promotion of music. Boy, was I wrong on that one.... Though, to be fair, at the time, there were plenty of others who felt the same way. It's only in retrospect that people now say that Napster was obviously illegal.
• Intelligent Agents. I had done a research project in college about some of the work being done on intelligent computer agents, and I really thought the technology had a lot of promise. I figured that well before now, there would be virtual assistants everywhere, doing things and making people's lives more efficient. Turns out the technology never really worked all that well, and at best, most of the early efforts in the space moved on to things like collaborative filtering.