A federal prosecutor says PayPal violated a 2001 anti-terror law aimed at fighting money laundering when it provided payment services to online gambling companies, the Web auctioneer said in its annual report filed on Monday.
PayPal, (EBAY) an online cash transfer service provider owned by eBay, agreed in August to restrict online gambling merchants from using its transaction system and paid a $200,000 penalty to New York state.
A spokesman for eBay said the company received a letter on Friday in which a U.S. attorney accused PayPal of violating a provision of the USA Patriot Act.
The provision prohibits the transmission of funds that are known to have been derived from a criminal offense, or are intended to be used to promote or support unlawful activity.
In its annual report, eBay said that PayPal acted in the good faith belief that its conduct was not in violation of the anti-terror law.
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Video-game merger: Two makers of popular video games merged to form Square Enix, a move that analysts said could shake up an industry faced with intensifying rivalries and rising development costs.
The marriage of Enix and Square, makers of the smash hit "Dragon Quest" and "Final Fantasy" titles, also will probably plunge the company into the battle being fought by console makers for supremacy in next-generation systems, analysts said.
Meanwhile, Sony (SNE), Nintendo and Microsoft (Microsoft) are all believed to be developing successors to their current consoles, PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox respectively, for launch in 2005-06. Sales of Sony's original PlayStation surged in the mid-1990s when Sony won the FF and DQ titles away from Nintendo's console.
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Playstation payoff: Ken Kutaragi, head of Sony's video-game unit and often mooted as a possible future leader of the world's biggest consumer electronics maker, got a further boost in a management reshuffle.
Sony (SNE) said Kutaragi, who built the PlayStation into the world's dominant home video-game machine, was appointed executive deputy, but will continue to run the highly profitable PlayStation business.
Kutaragi, often lauded as a visionary but known for ruffling feathers among Sony's top brass, will oversee Sony's work on DVDs that use blue laser light. The DVDs, which can pack several times more data on a single disc than conventional red-laser DVDs, are slated for release next month.
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DVD Jon faces retrial: A teenager whose DVD-copying exploits made him a hero to hackers worldwide will be retried by a Norwegian court in December, his attorney said, in a trial that will be closely watched by Hollywood.
In January, an Oslo court acquitted 19-year-old Jon Johansen, dubbed DVD Jon, of charges that he developed a computer program that enabled mass copying of movies on DVD digital discs, sometime after the Motion Picture Association of America filed a complaint with Norway's Economic Crime Unit.
There is no specific legislation in Norway barring the digital duplication of copyrighted material, but Johansen's program has been made a criminal offence in the United States under the Digital Copyright Millennium Act.
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Microsoft's Swiss cheese software: Three-fourths of computer software security experts at major companies surveyed by Forrester Research do not think Microsoft's products are secure, the technology research company said.
While 77 percent of respondents in the information technology field said security was a top concern when using Windows, 89 percent still use the software for sensitive applications, Forrester said in a report titled "Can Microsoft Be Secure?"
Microsoft, (Microsoft) the world's largest software maker, launched a company-wide initiative over a year ago to make its software more secure and trustworthy in the face of attacks that targeted the vulnerability and wide reach of its software.
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Gaming for the masses: People in homes where the annual income is less than $35,000 a year spend about 50 percent more time a week playing video games than those in homes with incomes above $74,000, according to a study from Jupiter Research.
The study also found that overall, teenagers spend less time playing games than watching TV, going online or listening to the radio. However, game playing occupied more of their time than reading books and magazines, it said.
Video-game hardware and software sales topped $10 billion in the United States alone in 2002, and the industry generally considers boys and young men between the ages of about 6 and 24 as its target audiences.
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Another GPS satellite: The Air Force launched its latest Global Positioning System satellite and it will begin service to U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf in record time.
The NAVSTAR GPS 2R-9 satellite was launched aboard a Boeing (BA) Delta 2 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The new satellite will join a constellation of 27 GPS satellites in orbit 12,700 miles above Earth. GPS satellites, which provide navigation and positioning aides to everyone from astronomers to pleasure boaters, are primarily for use by the military and are being used extensively to deliver "smart" bombs to targets in Iraq.
- AP and Reuters contributed to this report.*
