thefts

The drama surrounding Electronic Arts' attempt to buy Take-Two Interactive is, increasingly, playing out like a combination action-adventure and shooter game.

As noted in a story published Friday in The New York Times, Take-Two has become a moving target not only because of maneuvering by the company's officers but because of changes in its shareholder group.

The offer EA presented on Thursday directly to Take-Two shareholders--$26 per share, or about $2 billion--is essentially the same one it offered the video game publisher in February. But as the Times story points out, Take-Two's shareholder population has in … Read more

Harvard says about 10,000 of last year's applicants may have had their personal information compromised. At least 6,600 Social Security numbers were exposed. Worse, a compressed 125 M-byte file containing the stolen student data is currently available via BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer network.

In a statement published Monday night Harvard officials said the database containing summaries of GSAS applicant data for entry to the Fall 2007 academic year, summaries of GSAS housing applicant data for the 2007-08 and 2006-07 academic years, and administrator information had been compromised. The server had been taken offline for several days last month … Read more

Someone apparently hacked into a computer belong to an employee of MTV Networks and possibly gained access to names, birth dates, social security numbers and compensation data of 5,000 employees.

MTV Networks, a unit of media conglomerate Viacom, notified employees of the security compromise on Friday and said that while the computer files pertaining to employees' private information were password protected, the company can't be sure they haven't been opened.

"Once we learned of the incident, we immediately launched an internal investigation," the company said in a statement. "We ... contacted appropriate law enforcement authorities, … Read more

Electronic Arts is not alone in its interest in buying Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required to read entire article).

SEC filings show that Take-Two says it has received other offers, but has spurned those as well as the original $2 billion offer EA made last Friday and announced last Sunday, the Journal reports.

EA issued a public statement on Sunday saying it had made an earlier offer to Take-Two that was rejected and that it was boosting the per-share price it was willing to pay to make the deal … Read more

Customers of HSBC, Bank of America, and Washington Mutual suffer the highest rates of identity theft in the banking industry, according to an investigative study released Wednesday by a UC Berkeley Law School researcher.

The Federal Trade Commission received over 245,000 reports of identity theft in 2006, but does not typically publish the names of the financial firms and companies listed in the reports. Through an extensive Freedom of Information Act request, Chris Hoofnagle, a staff attorney at UC Berkeley's Boalt School of Law, was able to get detailed records on the individual consumer complaints.

Hoofnagle received detailed … Read more

Imagine the game industry dominated by two giants.

That's what could happen if Electronic Arts succeeds in its $2 billion attempt to grab Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive and Activision's planned merger with Blizzard goes through.

As in so many other industries, an EA/Take-Two merger would indicate massive consolidation, especially in the wake of the December announcement that media giant Vivendi was buying Activision to become Activision Blizzard. But gamers probably shouldn't worry that an industry pyramid dominated by EA and Activision will mean less innovation.

After all, even with a wide gap between the … Read more

I'm not usually one to get up for something happening at 5 a.m. PT, but in the case of this morning's Electronic Arts conference call to discuss its proposed $2 billion takeover bid of Take-Two Interactive Software, I made an exception.

That's because I assumed that EA might provide some new piece of information that would materially enhance details of the game maker's Sunday bid announcement.

My mistake.

In reality, the EA conference call, which lasted nearly an hour, was largely a rehashing of the information the company published in its Sunday press release, accentuated … Read more

In a startling bit of news, Electronic Arts announced Sunday morning that it has launched an uninvited bid to buy Grand Theft Auto video game franchise publisher Take-Two Interactive Software for $26 a share, or what could be a $2 billion deal.

And while EA, in its press release, did not make any reference to Vivendi's December agreement to purchase Activision, there can be no doubt that this is the response EA had to make to keep its spot as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the video games business.

The announcement comes on the heels of what appears to … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In a frenetic keynote address at the Game Developers Conference here, Microsoft showed off the next phase of a strategy it claims will "democratize" game development and distribution.

For several years, Microsoft has been working on its XNA Studio, a platform that allows anyone to create games for the Xbox and for Windows.

But now, the company is expanding the XNA offering to allow the best community-created games to be uploaded to and distributed from Xbox Live.

Microsoft is calling the new offering its "Creators Club," and the idea is to present the Xbox Live … Read more