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HONG KONG (Reuters) - Global banking group HSBC (0005.HK) (HSBA.L) has admitted to losing a computer server holding transaction data of 159,000 account holders in a Hong Kong branch office. The bank said in a statement issued late on Wednesday that it lost track of the server during renovation work at a Kwun Tong district branch on April 26.

The data on the server includes account numbers, customer names, transaction amounts and transaction types, but does not contain any customer PINS, passwords or user IDs, the company statement said.

“The server is protected by multiple layers of security. The risk of data leakage and fraudulent transactions resulting from the loss of the server is deemed to be low,” it added.

The bank, which has a backup of the data, apologized to affected customers, and said none of them would be liable for financial losses from any fraudulent activities.

Asked why the bank took nearly two weeks to confirm the loss, HSBC spokeswoman Vinh Tran said:

“We reported it immediately to the police, and then we did an internal investigation to get more information of the extent of it,” she said, before informing Hong Kong's Monetary Authority.

Hong Kong's police said they were treating the case as theft, with investigations still continuing.

(Reporting by James Pomfret; Editing by Ken Wills)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Take-Two Interactive Software Inc (TTWO.O) scored over $500 million in global sales of its criminal action game “Grand Theft Auto 4″ in its first week, making it one of the most lucrative entertainment launches in history.

The video game publisher is sure to use the strong results, which topped even the most bullish expectations, to strengthen its bargaining position in talks with rival Electronic Arts Inc (ERTS.O), which is trying to buy it for $2 billion, or $25.74 per share.

“When you're negotiating like this it's all about leverage,” said Janco Partners analyst Mike Hickey.

“Take-Two couldn't be in a better position. If EA wants to keep their bid at $25.74 and thinks that's a fair price, they are going to have to walk away from this deal,” Hickey said.

Take-Two has held off on engaging Electronic Arts until after the “GTA 4″ launch, arguing the returns from the game should be a factor in its value.

Take-Two said on Wednesday that “Grand Theft Auto 4″ sold about 6 million copies in the week after its April 29 launch, raking in more than $500 million.

Initial sales topped the $300 million for last year's “Halo 3″ video game from Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and exceeded Hollywood's biggest blockbuster film debut, “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End,” which raked in $406 million globally in its first six days.

Unit sales were in line with analysts' expectations, but revenue beat even the highest forecasts by about $100 million, reflecting strong demand in Europe, where the game costs more, and high sales of pricier collector's editions.

Daniel Ernst, analyst with Hudson Square Research said the initial sales weren't as important as long-term sales, which he forecast would be 13 million units by the end of the year.

“If you were buying this company four years ago, you were really just buying GTA,” said Ernst, who has a $30 price target for Take-Two and sees room for EA to raise its bid.

“Now you're getting this plus four other parts of the business that are fixed, or mostly fixed.”

Some analysts doubted the sales would prod EA to offer much more, noting that EA has said it will be a “disciplined bidder” and is willing to walk away.

“I don't think that many people buy the idea that just because you blow the numbers out on GTA, EA is going to come out with a higher bid,” said Todd Mitchell of Kaufman Bros, who recently lowered his rating to “hold” from “buy.”

Take-Two shares edged slightly higher on Wednesday, rising 4 cents to $26.39. EA shares were up 32 cents to $52.50.

Made by Take-Two's Rockstar studio, the game casts the player as an Eastern European immigrant who runs drugs, shoots cops and knocks off rivals. Critics hailed the game as a brutal and satirical masterpiece.

“Grand Theft Auto IV's first week performance represents the largest launch in the history of interactive entertainment, and we believe these retail sales levels surpass any movie or music launch to date,” Strauss Zelnick, chairman of Take-Two, said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Michele Gershberg in New York and Scott Hillis in Seattle)

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - As US technology giants including Google place a multi-billion dollar bet on WiMAX, backers of the wireless data-streaming format say it will radically change mobile Internet use.

A WiMAX network of the kind to be deployed across the United States by a joint venture dubbed Clearwire may render cable or phone line Internet obsolete and set the stage for free Google mobile telephones supported by advertising.

“It is like mobile Internet in your pocket,” said Scenna Pabesh, a spokeswoman for nonprofit WiMAX Forum, an industry group that promotes interoperability of networks and devices using the format.

“Anything you could imagine doing in your office or on a hefty Internet connection at home you are going to be able to do on the go.”

WiMAX is deployed in 110 countries and Wednesday's unveiling of Clearwire should ensure the United States joins those ranks, according to Pabesh.

The Asian Pacific region leads in WiMAX adoption. South Korea is considered a “success model” with 150,000 people, most of them in Seoul, subscribing to WiMAX mobile services, she said.

WiMAX quickly moves large amounts of digital data such as video or picture files across kilometers, as compared to Wi-Fi connections available in cyber cafes or other “hot spots” where signals reach a few hundred meters or less.

“It is really Wi-Fi on steroids, but the trick is getting it rolled out,” Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle told AFP.

“It is actually a game changer if Clearwire can bring it out. For the consumer it is cheaper, faster and you are not locked down to home or Starbucks.”

WiMAX takes advantage of broadband frequency spectrums and was likely on Google's mind when it got US regulators to make open access a condition in a recent 700 MHz spectrum auction.

WiMAX connections are so data-rich and inexpensive that it would be feasible for online colossus Google to market a “Gphone” that offers mobile telephone and Internet services supported by advertising, Enderle said.

WiMAX also holds the potential to deliver high-speed Internet to remote locations because towers can relay WiMAX signals long ranges.

While the Clearwire network is not expected to be deployed in the United State for several years, Wednesday's announcement is seen as a “bellwether” by the industry, according to Pabesh.

“This can only be good news for WiMAX and its propagation worldwide,” Pabesh said. “We expect WiMAX to become a mass market technology in the next two or three years. It is really bringing mobile broadband to the masses.”

Clearwire is one of the largest WiMAX spectrum owners worldwide, with an emphasis on Europe, according to WiMAX Forum.

“What a lot of people overlook is that WiMAX is already quite successful and new deployments are coming online rapidly,” Pabesh said.

Sprint Nextel and Clearwire said they would combine their networks in a new company, to be named Clearwire, to deploy a nationwide WiMAX network that will “dramatically enhance the speed and manner in which customers access all that the Internet has to offer.”

The new firm will start with a combined 3.2 billion dollars of investment from Internet search giant Google, computer chip maker Intel, cable firms Comcast and Time Warner Cable and service provider Bright House Networks.

SAN FRANCISCO - In another step in the worldwide march of Apple Inc.’s iPhone, the top mobile phone operator in Latin America said Wednesday that it has inked a deal to bring the multimedia gadget to more than a dozen countries starting later this year.

America Movil SAB, controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, said it plans to bring the iPhone to all of its Latin American operations but didn’t offer more details about the arrangement, including whether it would be the exclusive iPhone provider in the targeted countries.

Apple has so far struck exclusive deals for the iPhone with AT&T Inc. in the United States, O2 in Britain, T-Mobile in Germany and France Telecom’s Orange wireless arm in France.

The company plans further expansion later this year through the partnership with Mexico City-based America Movil, which boasts 159.2 million subscribers in 16 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico.

A spokeswoman for America Movil said the company had no further comment beyond the short press release announcing the partnership.

In the past couple of weeks, Apple has also signed deals with Rogers Communications Inc. to sell the device in Canada; Milan-based Telecom Italia SpA to sell the iPhone in Italy; and Vodafone Group PLC, the world’s biggest mobile company by sales, to sell it in a total of 10 countries, including Australia, India, Italy and Turkey.

The announcements are all important steps for Cupertino-based Apple as it looks to expand sales of the iPhone, the combination iPod-cell phone-Internet device that went on sale last June in the U.S.

But many consumers in countries where Apple has not struck iPhone deals with mobile operators are using them already. They’re using “unlocked” iPhones that have been modified to work over any cellular network, a sign of the growing worldwide demand for the phones that has also irked Apple, which has disabled some unlocked phones through software updates.

Apple has so far sold 5.4 million iPhones worldwide, based on data as of the end of Apple’s fiscal second quarter, which ended in March. Apple has a goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of this year.

“We’re excited to be working with America Movil to bring the iPhone to Latin America later this year, and we can’t wait to get this revolutionary phone in the hands of even more people around the world,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris.

Mozilla warned Wednesday that a malicious program inserted adware code into a Firefox plugin that has been downloaded thousands of times over the past three months.

Because of a virus infection, the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 was polluted with adware, Mozilla security chief Window Snyder said in a blog posting. “Everyone who downloaded the most recent Vietnamese language pack since February 18, 2008 got an infected copy,” she wrote. “Mozilla does virus scans at upload time but the virus scanner did not catch this issue until several months after the upload.”

Mozilla is now going to add additional scans of its software to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, she said.

The malware in the language pack is from the Xorer Trojan, according to discussion on Mozilla's Bugzilla developer Web site, which indicates that Mozilla developers first discovered the issue on Tuesday.

“I think it (happened) just because the author's local network was infected with the virus, so it modified HTML files,” wrote developer Hai-Nam Nguyen. “The infected code just display(s) annoying banner but it can't propagate.”

The open-source browser maker does not know how many people were infected with the adware, but the plugin was downloaded more than 1,200 times in the past week and has been downloaded 16,667 times since November.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Web page for the plugin was off-line as Mozilla scrambled to come up with a new, adware-free version of the language pack. In the meantime, users of the software should disable the plugin, Snyder said.

LOS ANGELES - The six major Hollywood studios have won a $111 million judgment for copyright infringement against the shut-down file-sharing Web site TorrentSpy.com.

The judgment, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, fined the operators of the Web site, Valence Media LLC, $30,000 per violation for nearly 3,700 illegal movie and TV show downloads.

The Motion Picture Association of America said the judgment sends a strong message to copyright violators.

The site shut down in March, saying the legal climate was too hostile to continue.

Its lawyers filed a document in court Monday saying Valence had sought bankruptcy protection in a United Kingdom court and requesting that the judgment be stayed.

NEW YORK - Goodbye, broadband over power lines. We hardly knew you.

Once touted as a possible third option for home broadband that could compete with phone and cable companies, the idea of providing Internet service over power lines now looks like it has died in infancy.

A Texas utility company said last week that it is taking control of the equipment that was to be used in the largest planned U.S. deployment of broadband over power lines, or BPL — and won’t be using it to provide Internet service.

Oncor Electric Delivery Co., the Dallas-based distribution arm of former TXU Corp., said it will buy the network from BPL technology provider Current Group LLC of Germantown, Md.

The network was to offer Internet service to 2 million electricity customers through their wall outlets. Instead, Oncor will use the data capabilities of the network to monitor the electric grid.

“Our business is delivering electricity, not being an Internet provider or a television provider,” said Oncor spokesman Chris Schein.

Other BPL trials have met with similar fates, though a few are still in operation. Compared to coaxial cables and copper phone lines, power lines are poor conduits for data. Some deployments also met fierce legal resistance from ham radio operators, who found that BPL created radio interference.

The Federal Communications Commission was a booster of BPL. FCC commissioner — now chairman — Kevin Martin said in 2004 that the technology had the potential to become an Internet solution “throughout the United States.”

Yet the FCC found only 4,776 BPL subscribers in the country at the end of 2006, the latest figures it has published.

NEW YORK - A Sony TV with novel display technology that has drawn rave reviews for image quality may actually last little more than half as long as the company claims, according to a test by a private research firm.

Sony’s XEL-1 is the first TV on the U.S. market that uses organic light-emitting diodes, which give a bright, colorful image while keeping power consumption low. The screen diagonal is just 11 inches, making it more of a conversation piece than the center of the living room, especially considering the price — $2,499.99.

DisplaySearch ran two XEL-1 units for 1,000 hours, and measured the drop in brightness. Extrapolating from that, they found it would take 17,000 hours for a display to lose half its brightness, a standard measure of display life.

Sony says the display lasts 30,000 hours, or 10 years of typical use. Spokesman Greg Belloni said that figure is based on years of tests and the company stands by it.

Poor longevity has been a problem with OLEDs, but Barry Young, senior adviser at DisplaySearch, said it has more or less been solved in the most recent iterations of the technology.

“The results demonstrate that the Sony display is significantly inferior in many ways to the current (OLED) designs,” DisplaySearch’s researchers wrote.

For example, Young said, Samsung makes a smaller OLED display for cell phones that lasts longer than Sony’s TV.

___

On the Net:

http://www.sonystyle.com/oled

Web searching can expose users to a whole range of malicious sites, so Yahoo is now teaming up with security vendor McAfee to make its search experience more secure for users.

On Tuesday, the two companies announced a partnership that they said will “deliver a safer Web-search experience” through the beta launch of a new SearchScan feature. Built on McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology, SearchScan alerts Yahoo Search users when they're visiting risky sites.

More Than Neighborhood Crime

Those suspect sites could be hiding spyware, adware or other software that is less than friendly to your PC. SearchScan also knows about sites with bad e-mail practices, such as ones that send out spam.

Suspected risky sites show up with a red warning sign and text in the search-results page, thus cautioning users with a visual indicator. For instance, a risky site would receive the warning sign — a red triangle — under it, as well as red text that reads: “Warning: Dangerous Downloads, Unsolicited E-mails.”

The SearchScan beta is available to users of Yahoo Search in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain. The Yahoo-McAfee arrangement is a global agreement to work together on other fronts as well, such as bringing Yahoo Search to McAfee users.

Risky browsing resulting from search engines is a concern for 65 percent of Americans online, according to Yahoo — even more than neighborhood crime, getting a wallet stolen, or an e-mail-based scam. As an online safety issue, it is second in importance only to children's safety on the Net.

According to McAfee Vice President Tim Dowling, “Research indicates four out of five Web site visits start with a search,” and that SearchScan's new, advance warning can be one of the strongest weapons against online threats.

Cited as Worst by McAfee

McAfee said that its SiteAdvisor technology has been downloaded more than 135 million times, and that it tests and rates on an ongoing basis “nearly every trafficked site” for several areas, including browser exploits, phishing, excessive pop-ups, spam, spyware, adware and more.

Yahoo's new advisory warning follows in the footsteps of Google, which has been tagging risky search results since last year.

Yahoo has an interest in working with McAfee technology, not only to improve its users' Web-surfing security, but to improve its own security rating. In May of last year, a McAfee report indicated that Yahoo's search engine had the highest percentage of risky search results. AOL had the safest results.

The report also indicated that about 4 percent of all search results linked to risky Web sites — which, at least, was an improvement from the 5 percent it indicated in the previous year's report.

Sun Microsystems gave developers at its JavaOne conference their first glimpse of JavaFX — a family of products it announced last year that promise to enable developers to create rich Internet applications that run on a variety of platforms.

“JavaFX is a powerful client technology for creating rich Internet applications with immersive media and content across the multiple screens of an individual's life,” said Sun Microsystems Executive Vice President Rich Green. “Java technology is now ready for the new creative audiences that have emerged in response to consumer demand for rich content.”

Introducing JavaScript

Built on Java Standard Edition — the Java platform already running on many desktop computers — JavaFX is designed to unite billions of Java SE and Java Micro Edition devices, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said when the technology was first announced last year. “It will allow any consumer electronics manufacturer to accelerate the delivery of Java/Linux-based devices — from phones to set tops and dashboards and everything else imaginable and without fear of format lock-in or disintermediation from a competitor,” he said.

In particular, Sun's new suite introduces a new high-performance declarative scripting language known as JavaFX Script. Like the rest of the Java platform, the product will be made available under the standard GPL license.

Among other things, JavaFX Script will enable the binding of applications to various data sources, Sun said, enabling developers to create compelling mashup offerings. Moreover, JavaFX Script is designed to deliver a rich end-to-end experience for developers and users alike through its close integration with other standard Java application and infrastructure components.

The scripters, social-application creators, designers, content authors and consumers who elect to join the Java ecosystem of more than six million developers will “take Java technology in exciting new directions,” Green said.

On All Screens

Green said Sun's Java runtime technology already has evolved to become the most powerful, scalable and secure development platform for a broad range of enterprise and mobile applications. “Consumer demand is where the action is, and with 2.2 billion mobile devices and 91 percent of all desktops, Java technology has become a constant digital companion, playing an essential role in everyday life,” Green added.

Sun's JavaFX tool suite — which will compete with Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight — is expected to benefit from Java's widespread acceptance.

“Java powers virtually every enterprise on the planet, in every Web farm and every enterprise and in any large system out there — it's everywhere,” Green said. “The rate of growth of Java continues unabated, across all the screens of your life.”

The first version of JavaFX Desktop for the browser and desktop is slated for launch this fall, Green told JavaOne attendees. Additionally, Sun is working with the majority of global handset manufacturers and carriers to deliver the first versions of JavaFX Mobile and JavaFX TV by spring 2009, Green added.