boston

Updated 1:55 p.m. PDT with DirecTV's response.

DirecTV apparently had big trouble delivering ESPN2's coverage Tuesday morning of the season opener between the Boston Red Sox and Oakland A's, who are playing the game in Tokyo.

The number of reader comments to a 6:29 a.m. blog post about the outage by Amalie Benjamin, who covers the Red Sox for The Boston Globe, soared past 120 within a couple hours after the transmission failure began. The fans, naturally, are calling for congressional hearings on the matter.

While the problem seemed to have been remedied … Read more

Fellow Americans, on January 31, we celebrate the anniversary of what was undoubtedly one of the most hilarious faux-pas in homeland security: the 2007 Boston Bomb Scare.

For those who stepped in late, on January 31, 2007, the city devolved into mass hysteria (well, kind of) when police were alerted to a number of suspicious electronic devices scattered around the city.

Before long, the city realized that the light-up displays were actually promotions for the upcoming film version of the cartoon show Aqua Teen Hunger Force--light-emitting diode (LED) circuit boards shaped like the show's "Mooninite" characters. But … Read more

Back on November 5 I wrote about an independent fundraising effort on behalf of the Ron Paul campaign. The occasion was Guy Fawkes Night, the commemoration of the 1605 attempt to blow up the Palace of Westminster in England. As I said at the time, this was a strange occasion for fundraising in a US presidential campaign, but at least it gave the organizers a convenient tagline for the effort: they called it a "money bomb".

Formerly priced at $425 per speaker, these speakers from a respected maker are now listed at around $250 per speaker--a pretty substantial discount. Round out your home theater or immerse yourself in games with an audio upgrade.

What: Boston Acoustics tower speaker How much: $249.99 Shipping: Free Where: Amazon.com When: Through unknown date

Click here for product review.

The Eastern Conference of the National Basketball Association and the Linux community now have more in common than you might have thought.

In the NBA, most of the established talent is out west, on teams like San Antonio, Phoenix and Dallas. The Eastern Conference is a wide-open race in which there's no clear favorite, and any team's chances of winning can change very quickly with the addition or subtraction of a few key players.

With that in mind, the Boston Celtics engineered the most dramatic off-season overhaul in the league, trading for superstars Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen … Read more

When I heard that MIT student Star Simpson had been arrested at Boston's Logan airport for wearing an outfit that incorporated what police called a hoax bomb, but which was really nothing more than a piece of electronic art, I was outraged.

I know that times being what they are, law enforcement needs to take security threats seriously. No one will dispute that. But what we're seeing, again and again, as in the case of the two Boston men arrested for putting up devices that were part of a Cartoon Network marketing ploy, is that police, media and … Read more

Boston Acoustics today launched a new series of home audio products for the fall, along with a new logo and slogan ("Play Smart") designed to reinvigorate the storied brand. The trio of new product announcements are as follows:

TVee Model Two (September 2007, $400): Add Boston to the parade of brands offering a single-speaker audio solution. Instead of a virtual surround solution offered by the likes of more expensive models from Yamaha, Philips, Nirotek, and Polk Audio, the modestly priced TVee (Television Entertainment Enhancement System, pictured above) is more in line with that of earlier Zvox and SoundMatters … Read more

BOSTON--A federal judge in a Massachusetts district court gave the founders of college-based social networking site ConnectU two weeks to revise the complaint that they have filed against Facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and four other early employees of the fast-growing social network. The ConnectU founders, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their fellow 2004 Harvard graduating classmate Divya Narendra, have accused Zuckerberg and his company of stealing their code and business plan when Zuckerberg was casually employed as a programmer for ConnectU in the 2003-2004 academic year.

Judge Douglas P. Woodlock, during the case's dismissal hearing on Wednesday … Read more

If indie cinema hero Wes Anderson--of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums fame--directed a quirky courtroom drama, there's a chance that it might bear some resemblance to what could unfold at Wednesday's impending showdown between social-networking sites Facebook and ConnectU.

The backstory of the legal squabble, after all, in which the three founders of college-centric start-up ConnectU have accused Facebook czar Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their business plan and code, reads like classic Anderson.

It's a melange of gossip about upper-crust Silicon Valley, allegations of old-school Ivy League skulduggery and an oddball cast of characters that ranges from … Read more