EA's hostile takeover of Take-Two Interactive that began earlier this month has received an extension until the day before Grand Theft Auto IV is to be released.

This week, a defensive effort was adopted by Take-Two, which in the business vernacular is referred to as a "poison pill." Poison pills commonly take the form of stockholders' rights plans, which steer hostile takeover bids away from stockholders and back toward the board of directors.

A report released today by the British Prime Minister's office entitled "Safer Children in a Digital World," calls for reform not only by policy makers, but also schools, advertisers, parents, and "the industry."

The 215-page report by psychologist Dr. Tanya Byron, entitled "Safer Children in a Digital World," calls for reform not only by policy makers, but also schools, advertisers, parents, and "the industry."

Nokia Siemens Networks has announced that it can double the data speeds possible on GSM/EDGE networks with only a software update.

By the third quarter of this year, the company claims it will be able to take existing EDGE-capable GSM networks to speeds up to 592 Kbps with its Downlink Dual-Carrier EDGE software solution.

Though it was expected before year-end 2007, Adobe has opened the public beta of Photoshop Express, a Web-based version of its photo editing tool.

Users of Photoshop Express can upload photos directly or import their libraries from Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa. Yahoo's Flickr is notably absent, as the popular photo sharing site is partnered with Picnik for its editing features.

The suit that began in early summer against Verizon Wireless for charging customers a premium for entry into TV promotional contests has entered the courts.

The class action suit states that Verizon Wireless' 99 cent charge to enter contests related to TV shows such as "Deal or No Deal," and "Sole Survivor" via text message are tantamount to illegal gambling. While the games were free to enter online, since nothing was given in exchange for the 99 cent text message entrance fee, the contest violated what is known as the Standard Lottery Rule.

The controversial "Fresh Start" option --the option to pay Sony $50 to not include superfluous programs on new computers-- which was made free after an immediate consumer backlash, may expand to more Sony units, but for now will remain with its TZ series.

Currently, only two Vaio notebooks in the TZ series offer Fresh Start. The configure-to-order TZ2000, and TZ2500. however, the SZ, CR, FZ, NR, and AR series do not.

UK-based company Velocix (formerly CacheLogic) has begun offering live streaming television content with a hybrid P2P live streaming client.

Live streaming offers a challenge to content providers not present in on-demand delivery. Live streams face a concentrated audience all attempting to access the video feed simultaneously, putting a significantly larger strain upon resources than if the same amount of viewers spread out that demand over a protracted time frame.

After an accusatory finger was pointed at Bell Canada for shaping traffic before it even reached ISPs, the company has admitted to the act, saying it has the right to do so.

Bell Canada says it implemented "load balancing to manage bandwidth demand," but did so without informing ISPs or customers. Canadian ISP Teksavvy, a service reportedly popular among P2P users because their traffic is not throttled, first noticed the "load balancing," and confronted Bell.

Friendfeed, a service that turns updates to sites such as YouTube, Yelp, Flickr, and Twitter into one single feed, announced that its blog headlines will now feature Disqus' comments from users' friends.

Disqus is an enhanced comment system for blogs, allowing the user to track comments and replies, and categorize them. Every time a user posts a comment, a new thread is started in his own forum, and replies posted in that thread are linked to the original. While it may seem like recursive commenting, the result is a structure supporting more visible comments.

It's a tool for creating "mashups," which are Web meta-services built upon existing frameworks. Today, Yahoo's Pipes received the Badges feature, which converts Pipes from an RSS feed into a shareable, embeddable widget.

Yahoo has encouraged developers to create mashup services (new tools made by combining pre-existing services) since their emergence in popularity several years ago. Today, it has added Badges to its Yahoo Pipes toolset, enabling users to turn their mashups and feeds into embeddable widgets.

Peerflix offered a service similar to Netflix, except that it was geared toward members trading their own discs rather than renting them. According to its Web site, its demise is attributable to escalating operational costs.

Last night, an e-mail was sent to Peerflix users announcing the service's ultimate departure from the DVD marketplace, and into what is regarded as the current "bubble" in internet commerce: advertising.

Specializing in networking the creative sector -- including artists, musicians, filmmakers, photographers -- imeem opened its API today, allowing developers to take advantage of the site's media library, with OpenSocial support soon to be added.

The imeem Media Platform, as it is called, includes a Web services API and client libraries which give developers access to the site's expansive library of user-uploaded songs, videos, and photos as well as its recommendation engine, social graphs and user profile data. With these, an imeem sandbox environment in which to build and debug applications has also been opened.

Contract notebook manufacturer Quanta has announced it has partnered with ooVoo to create a prototype HD video conferencing unit which it expects to put into production this year.

Quanta Computer Inc, Taiwanese OEM that manufactures notebooks for Dell, Apple Gateway, HP, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, and even OLPC's XO-1, intends to break into the video conferencing market by producing a device that can support HD displays.

Network Solutions, a Web hosting and domain name registration company based out of Herndon, Virginia has temporarily suspended a site for anti-Islamist Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

A 15-minute long film made by Wilders and promoted on the site has not yet been released, but has already been met with public outcry as the lawmaker's position in the political spectrum is far enough to the right to be called reactionary. The botched blocking of a preview for Wilders' video was cited as a potential cause of a YouTube outage in February.

Guitar makers Gibson, who recently filed patent infringement suit against Activision for the Guitar Hero game series has taken the same suit to the makers of Rock Band, MTV Networks, Harmonix, and Electronic Arts.

The guitar maker whose brand was made famous by axe-slingers from Jimmy Page to B.B. King recently sued Activision for patent infringement, claiming that the Guitar Hero concept was property of the guitar company.