Published November 29, 2010

The John Adams Courthouse on Beacon Hill (Emmanuel Huybrechts/Flickr)

Massachusetts courtrooms would open up to “citizen journalists and bloggers” under new rules proposed by a subcommittee of the Supreme Judicial Court.

“The proposed rule changes are designed to accommodate the changing nature of both journalists and the way news is reported while still maintaining order and decorum in the Massachusetts Courts,” reads an overview of the changes.

The proposed changes to Rule 1:19 include:

• Allow laptops and other Internet-connected devices inside courtrooms
• Redefine “news media” to include citizen journalists and bloggers
• Add another video camera position for non-mainstream media

…all subject to a judge’s discretion, of course. The rules protect jurors and prospective jurors from photography or recording.

The committee is made up of members of the state and federal judiciary and journalists in print, radio, television and the Web. One member is WBUR’s John Davidow, the executive editor of wbur.org, who recently launched a Knight Foundation-funded project called Order in the Court 2.0. The aim of the project is to experiment with new media in Quincy district court.

Project director Joe Spurr and producer Val Wang have been hired to help build a model for other courtrooms that want to open up to new media.

“We’re attempting to create an ideal environment for the way a modern courthouse should behave,” Joe tells me.

“For instance we’re aiming to set up a video stream — high upstream, high-quality camera, and will have a site that’s usable where citizens can interact. It could be a hub for any citizen journalist.”

The proposed rules are open for public comment until Jan. 28, 2011. You can send comments to Christine Burak at christine.burak@sjc.state.ma.us.

• Scribd: Read the proposed rules

Published November 29, 2010

This is how you communicate when the Internet goes down. (Florian Seroussi/Flickr)

If you’re one of thousands (hundreds of thousands? millions?) of Comcast Internet customers in the Northeast, you probably lost your connection for several hours last night. If you turned to Twitter to kvetch, as I did, you might have learned a bit about how your Internet connection works.

I was right in the middle of digging into the latest Wikileaks release at about 8 p.m. when the company’s DNS servers failed. Argh! I grabbed my iPhone and tweeted my frustration — and it quickly became clear that the problem affected customers throughout Massachusetts as well as the D.C. area. (iPhones, of course, use AT&T’s wireless 3G networks.)

Twitterer Matt Soleyn (@soleynm) was first with the helpful fix:

Comcast DNS servers are down. Point your computer 8.8.8.8 (Google’s Public DNS) for DNS instead as a fix.

I made the change and got back online in seconds.

So what is DNS? When you open a Web browser and type in google.com, a domain name server figures out that google.com points to 74.125.53.100, an IP address. Humans use domain names because they are much easier to remember than IP addresses. During the outage, you could still type 74.125.53.100 into a browser and get to Google — if you knew that.

A tricky but far easier solution was to switch to a publicly available DNS server such as one provided by Google or OpenDNS.

New York Times tech columnist David Pogue extolled the virtues of Open DNS in August:

Unfortunately, from time to time, your Internet provider’s D.N.S. computer goes down. To you, it seems that the Web itself has gone out, because you can’t pull up any sites at all. In December 2008, for example, 1.2 million Los Angeles citizens thought that the entire Web had gone offline, because of a crashed Time Warner D.N.S. computer.

That story was gleefully provided by OpenDNS, the one-of-a-kind company with a killer idea: to provide a free, alternative D.N.S. service that works better than your Internet provider’s. Faster, more reliably and with more features. You don’t pay anything, sign up for anything or install anything.

It’s a good explainer and worth the read. Soleyn also suggested specifying different providers as your primary and secondary DNS servers, in case one goes out. I set Google as my primary and OpenDNS as my secondary.

Now, I won’t get into the apparently widespread contempt of Comcast, or last night’s competing hashtags, #comcastic and #comcastrophe, or the fact that NPR host Bob Garfield channeled his Comcast rage into a website called comcastmustdie.com.

Funny, no one seemed to care when Verizon telephone service went out last month.

Published November 25, 2010

The Patriots aren't just hungry for Turkey on Thanksgiving. They eat QBs, too. (AP)

Though they’ve been able to celebrate just five wins among them this year, football fans across the country are jealous of fans in Dallas and Detroit.

Every year, fans of the Cowboys and the Lions kick back after a long, hard day of stuffing stuffing on their plates, chopping down thick carrot sticks and drizzling a deluge of gravy on pounds of turkey to relax and doze in front of the TV as their teams square off in an annual NFL Thanksgiving ritual.

The Lions, Cowboys and their fans (oh my!) get to play every year on Thanksgiving, the one day dedicated to the three F’s: family, food and football. What a day.

It seems unfair, though, that the same teams and the same fans get the prime game slot every year.

Pro football on Thanksgiving began as a marketing gimmick, of course, when the Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans moved to Detroit and became the Lions in 1934, according to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The Lions have been playing on Thanksgiving ever since.

The Cowboys’ Thanksgiving ritual doesn’t have quite as historic roots, but they’ve played on the holiday every year since 1966, except in 1975 and 1977.

This year, however, fans across New England will get to have their turkey and eat it, too. The Patriots take on the Lions in Detroit at 12:30 p.m.

Today, for once, enjoy your Patriots. And John Madden’s famous Turducken.

Published November 24, 2010

Out in western Massachusetts, West Springfield's Ty Mann runs from Putnam's Ricardo Wright in a game on Nov. 12. (Courtesy of Peter Camyre/Flickr)

As American as pumpkin pie and turkey dinner, football has its hallowed place on Thanksgiving. But, thanks to another American staple — beer — some kids won’t be allowed to play in their annual Thanksgiving Day football game.

Administrators in Maynard have canceled tomorrow’s game between Maynard High School and Clinton High School after four Maynard players were found drunk at a school dance.

After suspending the four players, Maynard doesn’t have enough warm bodies to safely field a team, Superintendent Mark Masterson said in a statement, and the team had to cancel the game.

As a former high school football player, I know that this game means the world to all of the players. Sure, the four kids made a stupid decision, but now two schools miss the opportunity to carry on a long-standing tradition and the meat, if you will, of many families’ Thanksgivings will be cut out. One’s heart aches for the poor seniors, especially those from Clinton, whose final game was canceled.

The seniors who play for Agawam High and West Springfield High are decidedly more chipper this holiday week after learning that their game will go on as scheduled despite the suspension of four players and four coaches at Agawam.

The Agawam-West Side game had been in limbo since Agawam school officials learned that a hazing incident targeting young players had taken place in the locker room.

As the Globe reported, these Thanksgiving games are about more than just the high school players.

The prospect of Thanksgiving without the big game had upset many parents and alumni in Agawam and neighboring West Springfield, and the decision to let the teams play was a relief.

“It’s important not to punish the entire community and those kids who have not participated,’’ said Mayor Richard A. Cohen. “They deserve to play, and the game will go on.’’

Cohen and (Agawam Superintendent Mary) Czajkowski said they had received many calls from people urging them to allow the game to proceed as scheduled.

Hazing and alcohol violations cannot and should not be tolerated, and enforcing consequences for poor decision-making is crucial in giving students a real education. But now, entire towns are having to learn those lessons the hard way.

The rest of us who were blessed to play our final high school football games on glorious, chilly Thanksgiving mornings should appreciate the gifts those memories bring. And give thanks.

Published November 24, 2010

Edward Swartz holds up a toy as he presents his 30th annual "10 Worst Toys" list in Boston in 1997. (AP)

As holiday gift lists form in advance of Black Friday, one annual list stands out.

The “10 Worst Toys” list has been presented each November since 1973 by World Against Toys Causing Harm (WATCH), a Boston-based group. But for the first time this holiday season, the nonprofit’s founder isn’t around for the list.

Edward Swartz, a Boston lawyer and consumer safety advocate, died in his Brookline home in September. He was 76.

A successful lawyer who won multimillion dollar cases, the Boston Globe obit refers to Swartz as “the Nader of the nursery,” after former presidential candidate and product safety advocate Ralph Nader. In the obit, Nader says toys are generally safer because of Swartz. Nader also notes that “very few trial lawyers move into prevention.”

WATCH, which includes Swartz’s son, James Swartz, last week released the organization’s 38th “Worst Toys” list.

The 2010 list ranges from the dangerous-sounding Kung Fu Panda Sword of Heroes to the seemingly innocuous Animal Alley Pony, which, says WATCH, “has long, fiber-like hair that is not adequately rooted and is easily removable, presenting the potential for ingestion or aspiration injuries.”

• WATCH’s 2010 “10 Worst Toys” List