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I fear that North Korea is about to learn what the rest of us have been forced to swallow for the last few years.

Once technology gets its hooks into you, you have no idea how much you'll change.

Not a few weeks ago, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt made what was then termed a private visit to Kim-Jong-un's unusual fiefdom.

Perhaps he was allowed in because the powers-that-be thought they could get a fine price on a few Chromebook Pixel laptops.

Perhaps the "Supreme Leader" himself wanted to improve his Google results and attempt to confirm … Read more

One thing that Conan O'Brien does very well is express his utter bemusement with video games.

He reviews them with a sense of incomprehension that is to be both respected and admired. (Unlike my colleague Jeff Bakalar, who comprehends everything.)

So faced with the new "Tomb Raider" game, he found the existential questions came at him a little too quickly.

For example, why is she called Lara Croft and not Laura Croft? Somehow, "Laura" flows from the tongue more readily.

And does she clutch her stomach because she's trying to look thinner or because … Read more

The pressure on the world's educators is enormous.

They are asked to mold genius from raw material that wouldn't fetch much on the commodity exchanges.

It's hardly surprising that they need to find outlets of relaxation wherever and whenever they are able.

Who, then, could not have sympathy with the professor who visited Wageningen University in the Netherlands, only to have technological misfortune visited upon him?

I am largely grateful to Gawker for its patrolling of Reddit, which was alerted by a newspaper article in the Netherlands.

The Dutch seemed keen on pointing out that the unfortunate … Read more

"This is getting too weird for me."

These are words you never expected to hear coming from the mouth of Tim Burton.

Yet Samsung, which these days leaves no competitive joke unturned and no Hollywood star untapped, delivered precisely that during the Oscars broadcast.

The ad, released by Samsung a little while before the show, features Burton playing a director delighted to be turning the "Unicorn Apocalypse" game into a movie.

In this context, "delighted" takes on a very idiosyncratic form.

We begin by hearing that another Samsung endorser, LeBron James, is addicted to &… Read more

It's hard to imagine that, on seeing yesterday's carnage at Daytona when scores of spectators were hurt after debris from a crash flew a fence, someone at Nascar would have been thinking about a vital matter such as copyright infringement.

Yet it seems that one no-doubt harassed Nascar operative did exactly that and demanded that a video taken by a spectator and posted to YouTube be removed.

As the Verge breaks it down, within hours of the crash, Nascar seems to have insisted to YouTube that the video, taken by someone with the handle "tyler4dx", infringed … Read more

When it comes to advertising, Samsung thinks it has Apple a touch jittery.

With ad after ad, Samsung's brand image is becoming sharper, wittier, and more lovable.

So the temptation to take over an awards ceremony in which actors desperately try to be sharper, wittier, and more lovable than other actors has proved irresistible.

As Ad Age reports, Korea's finest is positively hijacking tomorrow night's Oscars broadcast with six ads.

The most fetching promises to be one in which the brilliant director of "Edward Scissorhands," Tim Burton, will make an appearance.

He will play something … Read more

When it comes to the smartphone industry, it's difficult to get a broad view.

The intensity of entrenched positions makes it resemble Congress. And respect is in even shorter supply than intelligence.

I was, therefore, moved when Apple Insider pointed me to a new ad for the LG Optimus G Pro.

It appeared to be a deep and respectful homage to the iPhone 5 ad in which Apple shows off its panoramic capabilities, as Jeff Daniels intones at his most amiable.

You know, the one with lots of kids and Daniels saying, "Cheeeeeeeese." (Embedded below, should you … Read more

When it comes to late-night talk shows, I am not sure if Conan O'Brien is bringing up the rear.

He seems, though, to be keen on suggesting that Google Glass might be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

It's not so much that Google has created these new glasses through which you can have a richer, more informative view of the world. It's that the company has created a sister device, intended to be worn as, well, a back-up.

And so we see Google Glass from the other side of life. It is the side most familiar … Read more

I've always felt a little skeptical about Google.

To be honest, not just about Google.

But in the case of the men from Mountain View, there's always been something so touchingly gauche about the way they've gone about their business.

None of this was assuaged by the recent sight of Google's Sergey Brin sitting on New York's subway wearing his Google glasses and looking like, well, a nerd on the subway wearing silly glasses.

I feared, therefore, for the world's nerve ends when I heard that Google had launched a site to promote those … Read more