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SAN ANTONIO - AT&T Inc. sought unrestricted portions of wireless spectrum in the recent auction by the Federal Communications Commission because they better complimented the company’s existing holdings, executives said Thursday.

AT&T spent $6.64 billion for licenses in the 700-megahertz band auction but avoided licenses in the consumer-friendly “C block” because of the additional regulatory requirements, said Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of the wireless unit.

“The auction worked well … but it highlighted that people put a premium on spectrum that is not encumbered by heavy regulation,” said de la Vega in a conference call with analysts and reporters.

Before the auction, San Antonio-based AT&T purchased Aloha Partners LP for $2.5 billion. Aloha had spectrum in the “C block” without the open-access provisions pushed by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

Wireless carriers, which currently tightly control their networks, had opposed the open-access provisions.

Verizon Wireless won almost all the auctioned “C block” spectrum, however.

AT&T’s spectrum won at auction combined with existing holdings will give it full coverage in the top 200 U.S. markets, covering more than 87 percent of the U.S. population, de la Vega said.

AT&T is already the nation’s largest wireless carrier with 70.1 million subscribers.

The auction winners were announced last month but they were barred from talking about their plans until Thursday, which was the deadline for down payments.

The 700-MHz spectrum is considered especially valuable for its ability to better transmit through walls and to meet the growing demand for faster wireless download speeds.

De la Vega said the spectrum will be used to make existing broadband services faster and cheaper, but it will also open the door to even newer technologies.

Next generation networks and devices could offer real-time services like streaming high-definition video, but such services won’t likely be rolled out for several years.

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On the Net:

AT&T Inc.: http://www.att.com

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - THQ Inc (THQI.O) is looking at buying other video game developers, but the publisher of games like “Cars” and “Saints Row” can grow without making acquisitions, Chief Executive Brian Farrell said on Thursday.

“We are seeing some opportunities in the marketplace given the two transactions going on,” Farrell told Reuters in an interview at a company event to preview upcoming games.

He was referring to the pending merger between Activision Inc (ATVI.O) and the games unit of Vivendi (VIV.PA), and Electronic Arts Inc's (ERTS.O) $2 billion offer for Take-Two Interactive Software Inc (TTWO.O).

“It's going to create some opportunities because we are actively looking at every developer, every license out there and with our size now we can be more aggressive than larger, slower firms,” Farrell said.

THQ has already moved this year to bolster its product lineup. Earlier this week, it said had bought Elephant Entertainment, a maker of casual and online games, for an undisclosed amount.

In January, THQ bought Big Huge Games, a studio focused on strategy games such as “Rise of Nations.” Farrell said that team is focused on making a new role-playing game to fill a gap in THQ's product lineup.

Asked if THQ was looking at buying smaller development studios or publicly listed firms, Farrell said: “M&A is not a required or necessary thing in order to grow.”

Analysts have said the recent merger activity in the video game industry is partly a result of development budgets for new games soaring into the tens of millions of dollars, putting pressure on smaller firms with limited financial resources.

Farrell said the video game industry was still growing fast despite concerns that a broad U.S. economic slowdown could hit consumer spending.

“We haven't seen any signs of slowdown,” Farrell said. He said strong year-end holiday sales of new gaming hardware like Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS) Wii console, Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Xbox 360 and Sony Corp's (6758.T) PlayStation 3.

This year, THQ is banking on new games like criminal action title “Saints Row 2″ and “WallE” based on the upcoming Disney/Pixar movie to drive growth after a disappointing 2007 forced it to kill off lackluster franchises like “Stuntman.”

He declined to comment on specific financial forecasts, saying THQ would give an updated outlook when it reported results for its fiscal fourth quarter ended in March. The company previously said it expected a net loss of 13 cents per share on sales of $200 million.

THQ shares have risen 23 percent over the past month but its stock is still down 35 percent from a year ago.

(Editing by Gary Hill and Braden Reddall)

SCHAUMBURG, Ill. - Beleaguered cell phone maker Motorola Inc. said Thursday that it is laying off another 2,600 workers, bringing the company’s total employee cuts to more than 10,000 since last year.

Motorola will take a pretax charge of about $104 million in the first quarter for severance costs from the new layoffs, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Schaumburg-based company said $113 million in severance charges will be partly offset by $9 million in reversals for accruals from prior periods that are no longer needed.

Last week, Motorola bowed to pressure from investors and said it will split off its troubled cell phone business and form two separate, public companies.

Motorola said it would eliminate 3,500 jobs in January 2007 as part of a two-year cost-cutting plan to save $400 million. The company announced cuts of another 4,000 jobs in May 2007 with hopes of improving its sagging financial and operational results.

The world’s No. 2 handset maker has eliminated more than 10 percent of its work force since the start of 2007, when it became clear that two years of strong momentum behind the popular Razr phone had collapsed.

Motorola’s shares slid 12 cents to $9.65 in after-hours electronic trading Thursday. The stock had closed up 16 cents at $9.77 in the regular session.

The company is expected to release its full first-quarter financial results April 24.

WASHINGTON - Money lost in Internet-related crimes hit a new high last year, topping about $240 million, according to a government report showing increases in scams involving pets, check-cashing schemes and online dating.

The number of reported Internet scams dropped slightly from previous years, but the total lost jumped $40 million, according to the report released Thursday by the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center.

The report, based on data from the Internet Crime Complaint Center, shows men lost more than women on average — $765 compared to $552 for women.

The report also shows the amounts lost increased with age. Victims in their 20s lost $385 on average while people over 60 reported lost an average $760 per scam.

The most common crime reported was auction fraud, in which consumers did not get the right merchandise they paid for. A consumer might “pay $25 for a DVD that somebody actually recorded in the back of a movie theater,” said FBI spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan.

The second most common crime was non-delivery of a purchased good, followed by confidence fraud, in which scammers ask consumers to rely on them, resulting in a financial lost.

About half the losses involved amounts less than $1,000 and one-third involved amounts between $1,000 and $5,000.

The jump in money lost online might be due to new scheming techniques and generally more expensive electronic items being purchased online, said John Hambrick, a spokesman for the Internet Crime Complaint Center.

The report cites repeated increases over the years in pet scams, online dating fraud, spam e-mail and “phishing,” in which scammers send phony e-mails to retrieve consumers’ personal or financial information.

Many cases of crime involve scammers asking for charity relating to crises. Milhoan said scammers tried to profit from the Interstate 35 bridge collapse in Minnesota last year in which 13 people were killed.

“The scammer tries to prey on victims who are kind of in tune with what’s going on in the world,” she said. “The scam changes, but ultimately they’re preying on the good will of people.”

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On the Net:

Report: http://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2007_IC3Report.pdf

San Francisco - Just as many financial services firms failed to predict the meltdown of the sub-prime lending sector and its ripple effect on the overall U.S. economy, IT and data security teams won't be able to sufficiently secure their assets and information unless they become far more progressive in assessing risk, according to IBM's top expert in the field.

Steven Adler, program director of IBM's Data Governance Solutions unit and chairman of the Data Governance Council industry group, said that just as U.S. lenders should have seen the writing on the wall long before the sub-prime market collapsed, IT security executives must begin using more progressive risk management techniques if they ever hope to get ahead of data breaches, malicious attacks and emerging compliance regulations.

The traditional model of addressing such technological and business challenges in a responsive manner has been broken for a long time, and organizations may have foreseen the current era of urgency in dealing with breaches, attacks, and regulation if they had applied greater levels of risk assessment to their IT operations sooner, Adler said.

The only way that businesses, government agencies, and other organizations will prevent continued security failures — and rising overhead expense related to handling all of those problems — in the future is by taking closer look at how they can embrace risk management and data governance today, he said.

“With the lending sector, risk was not priced into the market appropriately until August of 2007, and those markets were not acting efficiently before then — they weren't able to accurately predict the risk of companies like Bear Stearns until it was far too late,” Adler said. “Every market is an arbitrator of fear and greed, and information about risk is what we all use to make educated decisions. We need new data governance standards to help companies engage in smarter risk calculation, modeling, forecasting, and analysis on a much more systemic basis.”

Most businesses are already collecting volumes of data that could be put to use in making more informed decisions about IT security and management, but they simply don't know how to put the information to work in a manner that will allow them to do so, according to the expert.

And Adler said that while companies like IBM can supply some of the consulting and technologies needed to help companies improve their risk management capabilities, the process must be addressed on a much higher level that allows organizations to begin moving forward on their own.

“CIOs are already collecting reams of data that could help with risk calculation in their logs, identity management systems, and intrusion prevention tools, but most of the time, it sits uncorrelated, uncompared, and unanalyzed,” he said. “These companies have a wealth of information that could help them calculate risk more effectively; as an industry, we need to talk more about new data models, analytical tools, and what future standards need to look like. That's the type of thing that the Data Governance Council believes in.”

Along with IBM, which founded the consortium, the Data Governance Council is backed by more than 35 of the company's customers and 17 other technology providers.

Some of the firms involved in the effort are already utilizing top-down data governance and risk management schemes to re-architect their IT and security systems and are seeing immediate benefits in lowering their exposure, Adler said.

Adler conceded that even for those early-adopters, the whole notion of applying risk management to their systems and operations goes slowly, but he said it is work that must be started sooner, rather than later, if organizations hope to see benefits in the coming years.

“A few years ago, the perception was that if you had a security breach, you should fire your chief information security officer, and clearly that was so naive because in the end, that was the one person who had the best understanding of how to protect a company,” Adler said.

“Security today is an arms race handled on a weekly or daily basis, and most companies are so challenged by this process that they don't even have the bandwidth to be strategic about risk calculation,” he said. “That has to change, and we instead need to hold people accountable who create the vulnerabilities; we will always have risk, but we need to start holding the average employee more accountable, and for those assessing [via risk management and governance techniques], that's already happening.”

Microsoft confirmed Thursday that it will extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs beyond the current deadline of June 30, 2008, to accommodate a new class of ultra-low-cost PCs (ULCPCs) that are just beginning to pepper the market.

Windows XP Home will be available for OEMs to install on ULCPCs either until June 30, 2010, or one year after the availability of the next client version of Windows, code-named Windows 7– whichever date comes later. The IDG News Service previously reported that Microsoft would extend XP's life for these machines.

Windows 7

Though Microsoft has not yet revealed when it expects Windows 7 to be released, it's safe to say the OS either will be available before June 30, 2010, or Microsoft at least will have an idea by then of when it will be released.

“That is not an unreasonable presumption to make,” said Kevin Kutz, director of Windows Client for Microsoft. The company has said it will release Windows 7 by the end of 2009 or early 2010, but has been vague about specific details or an exact release date.

Kutz stopped short of saying Microsoft is willing to extend the availability of a seven-year-old OS because it doesn't want to concede the ULCPC market to Linux, which many feel is the reason for the move. Instead, he said it's customers and partners who are driving the extension. “The feedback we've gotten from customers and partners is they want Windows on those devices,” Kutz said.

At the same time he acknowledged that Microsoft, too, wants to see Windows on ULCPCs, and wants “to provide the best possible Windows experience for the device.”

Still, if Microsoft is willing to allow OEMs to put a version of Windows on devices up to nine years past its release date when there will be not just one but two XP successors on the market, it's apparent the company recognizes a threat from Linux in that market. Linux is the OS running the current poster child for the low-cost laptop– Asustek Computer's US$249 Eee PC, which was released in October and runs the Xandros distribution of Linux.

Linux also was supposed to be the OS for a forthcoming line of ULCPCs based on new Intel Atom processors that are due out later this year, laptops Intel is calling Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). In the past, Intel had said the MIDs would run Linux and established an effort, called Moblin.org, to develop a version of the open-source software for the devices.

However, Intel's Gary Willihnganz, director of marketing for its Ultra Mobility Group, said this week that both Windows XP and Vista also will run on the Atom-based MIDs in addition to Linux. He even suggested that the devices will be designed with support for Vista in mind, by saying the new platform will “be enabled” for both XP and Vista.

Since Intel's MIDs are not expected to be available until after XP's current June 30, 2008 deadline, this likely inspired Microsoft to change its XP availability policy. On the ULCPCs that are currently available for the market, Vista is not an option because of its memory and hard-drive requirements. Kutz said Thursday that Microsoft has no plans to change Vista to make it more suitable for ULCPCs, and hinted that forthcoming ULCPCs will evolve to the point that they can run Vista.

“It depends on what an ULCPC becomes over time,” he said. “Right now we're enabling as much flexibility and choice as possible.”

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Fewer Americans fell for Internet fraudsters last year but those who did parted with a record 239.09 million dollars (152.5 million euros), an annual report by the FBI said Thursday.

Just under 207,000 complaints of online fraud were reported to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2007, down from 207,492 complaints the previous year and more than 231,000 in 2005, the report said.

But the total dollar loss to the fraudsters was 239.09 million dollars in 2007, up from 198.44 million in 2006, the report said.

“We're seeing more schemes involving bigger ticket items, get-rich-quick and work-at-home schemes that involve higher dollar losses,” FBI special agent John Hambrick, who is in charge of the IC3 unit, told AFP.

“But I'm optimistic that people are starting to catch on to some of these scams and we will continue to try to educate them to the dangers of Internet fraud,” he said, commenting on the decrease in the number of victims of online crime.

The preferred method of ensnaring a victim online was through spam email, the source of 75 percent of Internet scams, the report said.

“A cyber criminal is only looking for a less than one percent return on all the emails he sends out, and he can still make money hand over fist,” said Hambrick.

Most of the victims of online fraudsters were men — 75 percent — and they lost more money per victim than women to Internet criminals.

That's not because they are more gullible but because they are more likely to purchase the so-called “big ticket” items such as televisions online, said Hambrick.

Just over 40 percent of complaints received last year by the IC3 involved monetary losses of between 100 and 1,000 dollars.

Twelve percent concerned losses of between 5,000 and 100,000 dollars, and a hapless 0.4 percent of complainants said they had been defrauded of more than 100,000 dollars.

Sometimes, the fraudsters played on human weaknesses besides money, such as the desire for a pet or romance, the report said.

“You see an ad selling a pet and send in your money, plus a little extra for delivery costs. But you never get the pet; the scam artist simply takes your money and runs,” the report said.

“Online dating and social networking sites also have figured prominently in scams reported to the IC3,” it said.

“After meeting someone at one of these sites, the fraudster tries to gain a person's trust through false displays of affection. In most cases, the fraudster lives far away … The fraudster expresses an ardent desire to visit the person but cannot afford to make the trip.

“The fraudster convinces the victim to send money to cover his travel expenses. Then, invariably, an unforeseen event (often an accident of some sort) prevents the fraudster from making the trip.”

More than three-quarters of the perpetrators of Internet crimes were male.

They tended to live in populous states in the United States, such as California, Florida, and New York, or in Britain, Canada, Italy, Nigeria — which has a well-known scam letter and email named after it — and Romania, the report said.

“Interstate and international boundaries are irrelevant to Internet criminals,” it warned.

“Anyone who utilizes the Internet is susceptible, and IC3 has received complaints from both males and females ranging in age from 10 to 100 years old.”

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc confirmed on Thursday it had been an active bidder in recent U.S. auctions for licenses to create a national wireless network and that it will weigh in as regulators set new rules.

In a statement, the Internet services leader said it planned to remain active in rule-making by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that will govern how Verizon Communications, the winning bidder for the “C Block” of nationwide wireless spectrum, will operate its network.

“In ten of the bidding rounds we actually raised our own bid — even though no one was bidding against us — to ensure aggressive bidding on the C Block,” Google said. Active bidding ensured the rules designed to make these networks more open to independent Web services will be implemented, it said.

The Silicon Valley company also said it will weigh in on new rules the FCC may set as it re-auctions airwaves that are to be shared between public safety agencies and commercial service providers — the “D Block” in the auctions.

“As more policymakers and regulators around the world evaluate their own spectrum policies, we'll continue pushing to help make the wireless world look much more like the open platform of the Internet,” the company said in its statement.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

WASHINGTON - To fix a potentially fatal shaking problem on its snazzy new moon rocket, NASA is considering something that works for mud-stained pickup trucks: heavy-duty shock absorbers.

For nearly half a year, NASA’s No. 1 technical problem in designing its Ares I rocket, which will eventually propel astronauts back to the moon, has been a sound wave vibration problem from its solid rocket motors.

If the vibrations hit the right frequency, they could potentially shake the astronauts to death — or at the least make it impossible for them to work. The astronauts would be in the Orion crew capsule launched on top of the Ares.

The leading solution is to put weight on springs in parts of the bottom end of the rocket and underneath astronauts’ seats to dampen the vibrations. Think MacPherson struts, said Garry Lyles, who heads a NASA team working on the problem.

“These are actually absorbers that are used in vehicles today, especially one-ton and 1 1/2-ton pickup trucks,” Lyles said in a Thursday telephone news conference.

Lyles said it’s possible that further analysis and tests will reveal the shaking problem that’s turned up in computer models of the still unbuilt Ares may be a non-issue. But engineers are seeking solutions just in case.

NASA is not ready to proclaim the case closed and still considers it the highest level of potential problem, Lyles said.

Ares project manager Steve Cook called it “a very manageable issue.”

There are many such challenges that face NASA’s return-to-the moon program, according to a report issued Thursday by outside federal auditors.

The Government Accountability Office highlighted other potential problems, including too much weight in both the rocket and Orion capsule, design issues with a new engine for a booster, insufficient facilities for certain types of testing, and private industry’s inability to make the Orion capsule’s 1960s-style peel-away heat shield.

None of the technical problems are “a fatal flaw,” the report’s author, Christine Chaplain told a House Science subcommittee Thursday.

Former astronaut Kathryn Thornton, associate dean of engineering at the University of Virginia, said experts believe one of the biggest problems is that the space agency is set on a schedule of returning people to the moon by 2020 without enough money. Getting to the moon by that date is “exceedingly unlikely,” she told the subcommittee.

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On the Net

NASA Exploration program: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration

Holy irony, Batman! People who play violent games online actually feel relaxed after they have played a round of bloody fun.

This according to new research discovered by Develop Magazine, which found that a sampling of 292 World of Warcraft players, ages 12-83 years, were more likely to feel calm or tired after playing a round of the popular online game.

“There were actually higher levels of relaxation before and after playing the game as opposed to experiencing anger but this did very much depend on personality type,” said Jane Barnett, who headed the Middlesex study. Translation: If you're an aggressive jackass before you play a video game, you'll still be one after; and video games don't magically turn peaceful people into violent offenders.

Barnett added the research will help develop an emotion and gaming questionnaire to help distinguish the type of gamer who is likely to transfer their online aggression into everyday life.

We at GamePro believe the questionnaire will also help weed out blatant media-hungry opportunists who have used the relatively young video game genre as a platform for blatant self-promotion.