Articles by Paul Hartsock

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently commented on Yahoo's present situation by saying "Sometimes you're lucky." He was referring to his company's rebuffed attempt to buy Yahoo a few years ago for $47 billion. But that doesn't necessarily mean he thinks owning Yahoo now would be a bad idea -- perhaps all he meant was that by waiting a few years, Microsoft may be able to get Yahoo for a whole lot less than $47 billion...

The hacker group LulzSec has been carrying out a security-busting blitzkrieg across the Web over the last few weeks, and its targets are getting bigger and bigger. You can tell where it's been by the path of sites left shivering in a fetal position -- sites belonging to organizations like PBS, Sony, Bethesda Softworks, and even the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency...

Attendance-wise, CES is having a fat year. Bloated crowds meanderthrough the show floor's arteries, clumping around deposits of coolgadgets, blocking the flow for those not willing to get a littlephysical and squeeze themselves through Press conferences overflow, locking out anyone who's not in linean hour in advance. Floor walkers do the CES zombi...

Last year's CES was 3D TV's great big debutant ball. The world wasshown something kind of cool-looking and told, This is the futureof home entertainment! Behold! Everyone oohed and aahedappropriately, then went out and bought tablets It's OK that 3D TVs still aren't exactly commonplace in the typicalAmerican living room. They're expensive, there's ...

Verizon aims to populate its nascent 4G LTE wireless network withnearly a dozen new devices over the next six months, the companyrevealed Thursday at its press event at the Consumer Electronics show.It showed off four smartphones, two tablets, two small notebookcomputers and two mobile hotspots ...

The 2011 Consumer Electronics Show kicked into full swing Thursday asexhibitors threw open the show floor doors and let in the throngs ofgadget gawkers gathered at the Las Vegas Convention Center Larger vendors' booths were immediately swamped with attendees pokingand prodding the newest wares. I happened upon Research In Motion'soutpost to check o...

Microsoft may have big things in store for the world of tablet computers. However, anyone attending CEO Steve Baller's keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show Wednesday hoping to see a parade of upcoming Windows tablet devices likely left disappointed ...

Motorola launched a salvo of mobile devices Wednesday at its press event at the Consumer Electronics show, including a new tablet device running Android 3.0, aka "Honeycomb." ...

A couple of weeks ago, talk surfaced of a super-thin and super-brightphone in the works from LG. Despite whatever happens with theso-called "LG B," it won't be the only handset around with a brightsmile and the thin waistline At Samsung's CES event Wednesday, Omar Khan, CSO of SamsungTelecommunications America, whipped out the Infuse 4G, what he ca...

Intel managed to draw a standing-room-only crowd at its Wednesdaypress event. Even those who were fortunate enough to get a seat had tofight for elbow room. The main event, of course, was Sandy Bridge, thenew line of processors Intel broke news with earlier this week.Wednesday's event was a more formal and thorough introduction The company put Sand...

Summer was a Droid double-header for Motorola. The company opted to follow up last year's successful original Droid launch by introducing not one but two sequels: The Droid X, followed by the Droid 2. When I first heard this, I started to believe Motorola was having a numerological crisis, unable to find the value of X or unwilling to give it a number lest the world think it's somehow better than 2...

As much as I'd like to review the Verizon Droid X from a perspective utterly unpolluted by bias, preconceptions and ingrained habits, that's just not going to happen. The problem is, I'm a human being. Not only that, but I'm also a human being who's been using a certain other smartphone of note as my daily driver for a few years. No matter how oft...

Microsoft did its best Woody Harrelson impression this week and set out to bag some zombies. The zombies we're talking about here are PCs infected with malware. The bad guys spread the malware around and then remotely control victims' computers as part of a botnet that can do stuff like send out spam email or carry out DDoS attacks In the real worl...

A few weeks ago, I heard rumors about Facebook opening a new email service. Looks like Google beat them to the punch, though, because Gmail just opened up a new Facebook service. Maybe not technically -- Facebook plays absolutely no role in "Buzz," which is what Google named its creation. Buzz just seems to feature some of the same social networking capabilities as Facebook, as well as some Twitter-like traits. In fact, Buzz is sort of like what would happen if Facebook and Twitter had a love child that Gmail adopted and raised...

Apple held most of the music industry virtually at knifepoint for years, and that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if you were a consumer who wanted a legal way to get popular music at a fairly reasonable price: a buck a song, 10 an album, no exceptions. It was only about a year ago that iTunes let go of its dollar-store policy and allowed for a little leeway in its pricing. True, that leeway amounted to only a few cents per song, but the point is, for a very long time, it was the distribution channel dictating prices, not the publisher.

We're now in week two of Google's high-profile battle with China, and the stakes have risen high enough to catch the attention of no less than the U.S. Secretary of State herself, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She cheered on Google's stance in a speech Thursday, saying, "Censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere, and in America, American companies need to make a principled stand. This needs to be part of our national brand." ...

For lots of U.S. Internet companies, doing business in China is virtually a no-brainer -- the market opens up well over a billion new potential customers. The only downside is the Chinese government's pet peeve regarding public dissent. It sponsors what has to be the biggest censorship operation on the planet. If you're surfing the Web in China, y...

3-D is definitely not just for cheesy drive-in movies anymore. It's done great box office with animated films, and that big 3-D sci-fi action movie "Avatar" coming out this weekend has won over a lot of early reviewers, at least on a technical level. But one of these days you won't have to go out to a theater to see 3-D movies -- you'll just have ...

In making a move meant to enhance user privacy, Facebook went about things in a kind of intrusive way this week. As you know, the site started out as a college-kids-only social network, and the content you'd find on Facebook at that time reflected the demographic in all its boozy glory. But now Facebook's for everyone, and it's a serious enterpris...

Comcast just bought itself a nice little present for the holidays: NBC Universal. The cable network will have a controlling stake in NBC once the deal is flattened out, and in return, it's giving General Electric US$6.5 billion along with $7.25 billion worth of programming. If everything passes muster with regulators, then Comcast will go from being a company that just distributes creative content to one that makes and distributes it...