Beaky the Robo-Bird picks our “Top Tech Turkeys of 2011”

Sure, every US-based tech site worth its salt is running a “Tech Turkeys” list this week, but only Ars Technica brings you one hosted by a Robotic Turkey o’ Death whom we affectionately call “Beaky.” (Need an extra reason to give thanks? Be grateful that the staff collectively talked editor-in-chief Ken Fisher out of making Beaky into an eel for “historical accuracy.”)

And wow—did Beaky ever have fodder for this year’s list; 2011 was stuffed like a turducken with poor technology decisions. When he found some down time between his overthrow-the-world strategy sessions and his get-grain-into-my-gizzard-now chow marathons, Beaky pecked out these incidents as the lowest of tech’s low points in 2011. So far.

Research in Motion

Oh, RIM. Where do we begin? The company started off the year getting everyone riled up about the BlackBerry PlayBook, only to launch it with choppy performance, without a good app store, and without a native e-mail client (unless you already had a BlackBerry phone). This effectively restricted its use to BlackBerry customers, a species that will soon be extinct if they aren’t already being bred in captivity somewhere.

RIM followed this up with a three-day service outage. Browsers, messaging apps, and e-mail ceased to work on BlackBerry handsets. A month later, the company is still determining the real cause of the outage, with a “SWAT team” investigating the event. (We expect that it looks like a room full of Maxwell Smarts.) In the meantime, it lacks a credible response to the iOS/Android juggernauts.

At this point, RIM is like the deadbeat dad who shows up two months after your 17th birthday and presents you with a stuffed animal in a gift bag. Too little, too tone-deaf, too late.

Duke Nukem Forever

If not for the crazy development cycle, the closing of a once-legendary developer, and the absolutely hideous state of the game when it was released, Duke Nukem Forever might not have been considered such a turd. But, until time machines arrive to fix the many problems of the past, we have to live with reality. The title that was actually delivered played like something knocked out back in 2001 by people who had just started creating games over the weekend, and it was then stuck in a time capsule for a decade.

With the play experience so poor, the only interesting part of Duke Nukem Forever is the backstory. The game remains a sad, depressing monument to mediocrity—and to feces-flinging.

Locationgate

Who doesn’t want their favorite mega-corp tracking their every move without express permission? The poo hit the fan earlier this year when researchers exposed the extent to which Apple logged users’ locations on their devices and how the behavior would not stop when the phone’s location services were turned off.

But that’s not all! It eventually came out that Android phones stored the same type of location data and Microsoft was no saint either. The situation sparked a Congressional hearing wherein Senator Al Franken (D-MN) demanded answers from Apple and Google about their privacy policies. Eventually Apple did patch its “bug” that allowed a location-based log to exist after the user turned off location services, but the term “Locationgate” will linger—at least until the next time a company like Apple or Google makes a huge user privacy gaffe.

Hewlett-Packard

Last September, apparently determined to wipe HP free of every trace of former CEO Mark Hurd—including its leading position in PC sales—Hewlett-Packard’s board brought in the recently-ejected SAP boss Leo Apotheker without so much as an interview. After all, he had done wonders at the software giant, delivering two years of solid profit declines—what did they really need to ask?

Apotheker arrived, looked around, and decided that HP needed to be more like IBM. So he immediately spiked the phone and tablet business before HP even got serious about it, announcing that the company would kill the HP TouchPad less than two months after it was launched and then get out of the PC business. (Ironically, the TouchPad fire sale that followed made the tablet number two behind the iPad in tablet sales.)

In a flash of inspiration brought on by a more than 50 percent drop in the company’s stock price, the board showed Apotheker the door just 11 months after they brought him in, then hired former eBay CEO and failed California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman to clean up his mess. But she didn’t arrive in time to prevent the Apothekerlypse: on Monday, HP reported a 91 percent drop in its fourth quarter earnings compared to last year. That was due in large part to taking a $788 million charge for shutting down TouchPad and the rest of Palm, which HP had purchased for over $1.2 billion. Talk about a return on investment!

Netflix and (ugh) Qwikster

In 2010, Netflix was flying so high it forced longtime rival Blockbuster into bankruptcy. In 2011, Netflix nearly committed corporate suicide and may spend all of 2012 digging itself out of a hole.

It all started in July when Netflix raised monthly subscription prices by 60 percent for customers who wanted both streaming and discs. The new Netflix pricing scheme wasn’t necessarily that outrageous, but it set off a wave of complaints and CEO Reed Hastings acknowledged that he had “slid into arrogance based upon past success.” But his solution—splitting discs and streaming into entirely different businesses requiring customers to be billed twice and use two separate websites—only made customer complaints worse. Within three weeks, Hastings reversed himself, killing off the “new” DVD-by-mail service—you remember Qwikster?—before it could launch. Pretty soon, Netflix was reporting 800,000 lost subscribers and saying it may be unprofitable for all or most of 2012.

Just this week, Netflix stock took another beating when Wall Street saw the company’s decision to raise $400 million from investors as a desperate move. According to the Los Angeles Times, Netflix has lost 75 percent of its market value, or $12 billion, since that fateful decision to charge subscribers a few extra bucks a month. The Netflix service is still a pretty good one, but from a business perspective 2011 was a disaster.

RSA breached

It’s a safe bet that RSA Security chairman Art Coviello hates Adobe Flash. That’s because one embedded Flash file cost RSA millions, forcing the company to replace 40 million SecurID login tokens. In March, Coviello disclosed that RSA had been targeted in what he called an “extremely sophisticated” attack that exposed information about the company’s SecurID authentication tokens, including the algorithms used to create the tokens and the seed values for each customer’s account. That exposed the VPNs of a number of government agencies, defense contractors, and other high-profile customers, though Coviello insisted last month that the data was only used in one unsuccessful attack on a customer (which was likely Lockheed Martin). 

And what sort of “advanced persistent threat” was used to allow hackers to break into RSA’s highly-secure corporate network? According to RSA, it was one e-mail, pulled from a junk folder by an RSA employee, containing a file called “2011 Recruitment plan.xls."(Whether the employee involved remains at RSA hasn’t been revealed.) Gobble, gobble!

Internet censorship

Huge box office receipts? Check. Higher-than-average salaries? Check. Better growth than the economy as a whole? Check. The copyright industries are doing pretty well, global recession considered, but that hasn’t stopped the usual suspects from going to Congress and demanding a full-on Internet crackdown. The Senate’s PROTECT IP Act was bad enough, what with its demands that US DNS providers start blacklisting “rogue sites.” (Also, there’s the whole matter of its quite possible unconstitutionality.) But the new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House brings a whole new kind of crazy to the debate. Beaky might be a bird brain, but even he knows that trying to censor foreign websites, shut down their credit cards and advertising, and force search engine to “disappear” their results is an absurd overreaction to online piracy and counterfeiting.

Between the new proposals and the existing US scheme to seize foreign .com domain names (even for sites that are legal in their own country), it’s hard to see a positive ending for the country. But it’s easy to see a future in which the world simply refuses to accept the current US leverage over ICANN and in which US registrars, ad networks, payment processors, and search engines are increasingly avoided by the rest of the globe. Assuming that whole scheme even manages to curtail piracy, this is a battle only Pyrrhus of Epirus could love.

Bottom line: when a pro-enforcement measure loses the support of the Business Software Alliance and the Church of Sweden, you know it’s a specially wretched piece of work.

Sony hacked

When hackers invaded, Sony took the PlayStation Network down for 72 hours before writing a statement saying that the company had suffered an “external intrusion.” Everyone was concerned about the integrity of the personal data Sony had on file for its members, and they had a right to be: Sony later admitted that hackers had broken into the system and stolen an extensive amount of personal data from its users.

The system stayed offline for 23 days as Sony scrambled to tighten its security. The outage cost Sony dearly, and it wasn’t great for the companies that count on the PlayStation Network to sell their games, either.

Renewable energy

Inefficient energy use costs all of us money. Our continued reliance on fossil fuels creates massive externalities that harm our health, cost us billions a year, and cause no end of national security headaches. Our electric grid is in desperate need of modernization. And what are we, collectively, doing about it? Still arguing over whether temperatures have actually risen, inventing conspiracy theories about science that sound like something from a Red Scare, and hyperventilating about out of context quotes from a stash of stolen e-mails.

It didn’t have to be this way. Despite subsidies for fossil fuels that, by most estimates, dwarf those given to renewables, carbon emissions were plunging faster than the economy a few years back. Since then, the cost of renewables has continued to drop and well-sited solar and wind facilities are either at grid parity prices or will be before the decade ends. Sadly, instead of acting on this reality and putting renewable energy to work where it’s most efficient, we’re twiddling our thumbs as New Jersey becomes a solar powerhouse and the nation as a whole starts burning more fossil fuels. The turkey, in this case, is us.

Windows 7 tablets

A little over a year ago, we talked to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and asked him, as so many others have done, about tablets.