The members of the group charged on Thursday mostly lived in the Yonkers area of New York, prosecutors said, but prosecutors said those charged are part of a larger, global network that has been siphoning money from ATMs by using stolen prepaid debit card numbers.

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In May, Lifestyle Forms & Displays Inc., a mannequin maker and importer led by the 65-year-old Mr. Keilson, had $1.2 million wiped out of its bank accounts in just hours through online transactions. The theft from the Brooklyn, N.Y., company, which has about 100 employees, wasn’t an isolated incident.

Many smaller businesses find themselves vulnerable to cyberthieves, mainly because they have limited budgets for Web security and few or no technology experts on staff.

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation set up a fake online forum two years ago to attract online thieves who steal personal identification and account information for credit, debit and bank cards that are used to make illicit purchases or to sell to others.

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The database, which the wireless companies will build and maintain, will be designed to track phones that are reported as lost or stolen and deny them voice and data service. The idea is to reduce crime by making it difficult or impossible to actually use a stolen device, reducing resale value.

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“It was strictly a business decision,” said Kabam’s COO Chris Carvalho, quoting a line from The Godfather.

Carvalho said that in return for Google getting a 45-day exclusive, Google has agreed to drive traffic to the game through various marketing techniques. In addition, Google only takes a 5 percent cut of revenues from virtual goods sold inside the game, compared to Facebook’s 30 percent cut.

Together, those two incentives could make for a more profitable game, even if Google’s audience is much smaller.

“We’ve found our games monetize very well on the Google+ platform, and their team to be incredibly responsive and willing to get things done quickly and efficiently,” Carvalho said.

At last count, roughly 40 million people have joined Google+, and to date, it has a total of 28 games. In comparison, Facebook has more than 800 million users worldwide, and literally has too many games to count.

Getting heard above all those distractions on Facebook can be costly, so clearly Kabam feels it has a better chance to stand out on Google.

It will be important to see if other developers feel the same way and follow in Kabam’s footsteps. If so, Facebook may feel pressure to make games easier to find (other than the developer purchasing more ads), or even adjust its revenue cut, as some have suggested may occur with increased competition.

In all, Kabam has three other games on Google+: Dragons of Atlantis, Global Warfare and Edgeworld.

The Godfather will not be the first exclusive on Google+ Games. Rovio launched Angry Birds first on Google+, and still hasn’t officially launched yet on Facebook (probably due to the large costs, since Rovio is known for being outspoken about Apple’s 30 percent revenue cut on mobile devices).

Kabam has licensed rights to “The Godfather” movie from Paramount Digital Entertainment to build a big-budget social game for Facebook, based on the American Mafia classic.

Kabam, which is based in Redwood City, Ca., is known for making hardcore social games that appeal to gamers typically found using videogame consoles. That differs from Zynga, the leading social games company, which makes mainstream games for the largest audience possible.

The game, which launched today, is set in the Prohibition era of the 1930s, preceding the setting of the first film by about 10 years. Players and five crime families will battle for money, power and respect, with the goal of becoming the “Don” of a family.

The illustrations are cinematic, with extremely dark and menacing graphics, which is a dramatic shift from the cartoonish art and happy, smiling characters found in most Facebook games today.

From big defense contractors to smaller, specialized start-ups, companies are cashing in on healthy demand for software and other technology that can sort through and analyze mountains of government and private-sector data to help track down criminals or look for signs of terrorist activity.

Police, for example, might use video-analysis software to spot a suspicious package in a crowded train station and correlate it to the license plates on a nearby car to find a potential suspect.

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“His crimes and the scope of his crimes reflect a virus in our business culture that needs to be eradicated,” U.S. District Judge Richard Holwell said in imposing the sentence. Judge Holwell also ordered Mr. Rajaratnam to pay a $10 million fine.

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Today, a teaser video appeared on Facebook, offering a look at the characters, clues as to what the narrative will be about, and the tagline “Being bad never felt so good.”

No details on the launch date, other than it’s expected soon.

Zynga has picked up the pace of releases since filing for an initial public offering in July, adding Empires & Allies, Words With Friends and Adventure World. Without a doubt, it remains the largest game maker on the platform, with nearly 50 million daily players and 268 million monthly players.

Given the recent launches, Mafia Wars, which launched three years ago, has dropped on the charts to become Zynga’s 11th largest game, with five million monthly players.

Zynga’s competition is coming from two fronts: Companies using branded intellectual property to launch games, and game makers using more advanced game mechanics.

In the crime category, Zynga will soon have serious competition from Kabam, which is working on a game based on “The Godfather”; the game version is due out of beta later this year.

The teaser video for Mafia Wars 2 reveals that the game is about building your empire and getting revenge. Zynga’s first version of the game was what the industry calls a “text-based role-playing game,” where you click to complete various jobs.

Using that mechanic alone for the sequel would appear out of date today, so it will be interesting to see how Zynga evolves the game while still creating something that’s of interest to millions of people.

Here’s a look at Mafia Wars 2:

In a speech to Parliament today, Cameron appeared to endorse the idea that posts on Facebook and Twitter, and communication via BlackBerry Messenger, helped fuel the violence that crippled his country for several days. And he floated the notion of a government-sanctioned crackdown.

From his prepared remarks:

Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media.

Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.

And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

And here, wags will point out that British cops are also using social media, because they posted photos of looters on a Flickr page – here’s one the cops say was taken from a looter’s own Twitter post – and isn’t that a double standard, blah blah blah. Don’t waste your energy debating that one.

If a crackdown moves forward, though, it will put services like Facebook and Twitter in a tricky position: The services’ standard line is that they’ll comply with requests from cops and courts in whatever country they operate in when it comes to subpoenas and the like. But actually censoring communication is a different matter. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion has already said it would work with cops trying to trace text messages sent using its service.

Also worth bearing in mind: Freedom of speech is already much more limited in the U.K. than in the U.S.; recall the farcical but somewhat effective effort to prevent U.K. newspapers and Web sites from printing soccer star Ryan Giggs’ name this spring.

UPDATE: Here’s a response from Twitter spokeswoman Rachel Bremer: “Our only comment is that if the government would like to talk about this we’d be happy to listen.”

Here are the slide decks and other investor materials from Nokia’s incredibly bad second quarter results announced earlier today.

The Finnish cellphone maker saw net sales in its core devices and services business decline 23 percent from last quarter and 20 percent from a year earlier. Meanwhile, revenue and unit sales for its critical smartphones were down more than 30 percent from both prior quarter and year-ago results.

Earlier this week, Silicon Valley Internet giant Yahoo turned in a weak quarter too, but its depressing charts pale in comparison to this set of Nokia financial data.

In fact, if the charts below had any more minuses, it would start to look like a crime scene for an unfortunate knifing victim on “Law and Order” — whose famous “doink-doink” sound is also below.

Here’s the damage to peruse:

Request-Q2_2011_results_presentation

2Q_2011_ENG

Nokia_results2011Q2e

The 14 arrested in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio have been indicted by a federal grand jury in San Jose, California. I’ve embedded the complaint below.

Two others were arrested on similar charges on two separate complaints in Florida. The Florida case concerns the attack on InfraGard, the public-private information-sharing partnership affiliated with the FBI. The New Jersey case concerns the release of confidential documents stolen from AT&T. These would appear to be the first U.S. arrests connected with the LulzSec crew that’s been so active this summer.

Additionally, police in the U.K. arrested another person and police in The Netherlands arrested four more people in connection with the case.

The indictment names 14 people: Christopher Wayne Cooper, 23, a.k.a. “Anthrophobic;” Joshua John Covelli, 26, a.k.a. “Absolem” and “Toxic;” Keith Wilson Downey, 26; Mercedes Renee Haefer, 20, a.k.a. “No” and “MMMM;” Donald Husband, 29, a.k.a. “Ananon;” Vincent Charles Kershaw, 27, a.k.a. “Trivette,” “Triv” and “Reaper;” Ethan Miles, 33; James C. Murphy, 36; Drew Alan Phillips, 26, a.k.a. “Drew010;” Jeffrey Puglisi, 28, a.k.a. “Jeffer,” “Jefferp” and “Ji;” Daniel Sullivan, 22; Tracy Ann Valenzuela, 42; and Christopher Quang Vo, 22. One individual’s name has been withheld by the court, which suggests he or she is a juvenile.

The defendants are charged with conspiracy and intentional damage to a protected computer.

The 14 are accused of carrying out a December distributed denial of service attack against PayPal, the payment site owned by eBay. DDOS attacks are when attackers overwhelm a Web server with fake requests for attention at such a high volume that legitimate users can’t get through.

The group has also claimed responsibility for attacks against Visa, and at one point planned to attack Amazon. Various other factions connected to Anonymous have also attacked Sony and recently claimed responsibility for a hacking attack against the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

The FBI also made arrests today in the attack on the Web site of InfraGard, a non-profit group affiliated with the FBI itself. Scott Matthew Arciszewski, 21, was arrested today by FBI agents and charged with intentional damage to a protected computer. He’s been charged in the Middle District of Florida and has already appeared in a federal court in Orlando.

The complaint alleges that Arciszewski accessed without authorization the Tampa Bay InfraGard website and uploaded three files, and then Tweeted about it on Twitter.

InfraGard is a public-private partnership for critical infrastructure protection sponsored by the FBI with chapters in all 50 states.

In a related complaint unsealed in the District of New Jersey, the DOJ charged Lance Moore, 21, of Las Cruces, New Mexico with stealing confidential business information stored on AT&T’s servers and posting it on a public file sharing site. Moore is charged with one count of accessing a protected computer without authorization.

According to the New Jersey complaint, Moore, a customer support contractor for AT&T, exceeded his authorized access to AT&T’s servers and downloaded thousands of documents, applications and other files that, on the same day, he allegedly posted on a public file hosting site. That would be The Pirate Bay.

According to the complaint, on June 25, the computer hacking group LulzSec publicized that they had obtained confidential AT&T documents and made them publicly available on the Internet. The documents were the ones Moore had previously uploaded. He faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Each count of conspiracy carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Here’s the indictment.

Indictment 7.19.11

[Image via Foxnews.com]

Movity was founded this year, with $1.3 million in funding.

Here is the full press release, along with some real estate news about Trulia’s new HQ:

TRULIA ACQUIRES MOVITY TO ACCELERATE AND ENHANCE THE ONLINE REAL ESTATE EXPERIENCE

Trulia Moves into New 30,000 sq foot Downtown San Francisco Location as the Company Continues to Grow at a Rapid Pace

SAN FRANCISCO, December 21, 2010–Trulia.com (www.trulia.com), a top site for homebuyers, sellers and renters, acquired Movity (www.movity.com ), a stealth start-up focused on surfacing geodata to help new movers make better decisions and creator of social check-in tracker www.weeplaces.com. Movity was part of the Winter 2010 YCombinator class and the team includes Eric Wu, co-founder of RentWiki.com, Sha Hwang, design technologist from Stamen Design, Vaughn Koch, program manager from Bing, and Zain Memon, a contributor to the open-source framework Django.

“The consumer real estate experience will continue to change dramatically and we believe adding this team of talented individuals will accelerate our innovation and growth,” said Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia. “Movity brings strong engineering skills, visualizations specialists and a passion for real estate. We looked at their vision and our vision and we knew we had a perfect match.”

“We are excited to join a leader and innovator in the real estate market and contribute to a world class engineering organization,” said Eric Wu, co-founder of Movity. “I’ve been impressed what Trulia has accomplished in the past few years, and together, we want to change the way people discover local information and find a place to live.”

New Office Space

In 2010, Trulia doubled the size of its workforce and today moved in to a new 30,000 sq foot office in the heart of SOMA in downtown San Francisco. Trulia occupies multiple floors and built the space to include user experience testing rooms, 27 conference rooms and a handful of cool design elements including bike racks, a library and open collaboration spaces to foster an environment of innovation and collaboration.

“About 18 months ago we asked our employees what they wanted in a new office and it was pretty clear they wanted to be closer to public transportation, they wanted a bright open office and they wanted to be in the center of the activity downtown,” said Sami Inkinen, COO and co-founder of Trulia. “We took their feedback and we found an office that meets all our needs and allows for future growth opportunities. Moving into the new office today you could feel the sense of pride in our employees and this begins another new and exciting chapter in Trulia’s history.”

James Fleishman, 41, of Santa Clara, Calif., a sales manager for a research firm called Primary Global Research, based in Mountain View, was arrested on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy. According to a statement from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, Fleishman conspired to provide confidential information, including material, non-public information to the firm’s clients using a network of employees at various tech firms.

One was Daniel Devore, a global supply manager at Dell who also worked as a consultant for the research firm. Devore pled guilty on Dec. 10 to charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The complaint against him says he was paid more than $145,000 during a period starting in late 2007 and ending in Aug. 2010 for providing inside information on Dell’s suppliers. Devore is said to be cooperating in the case.

Three more people were arrested today, all on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud:

Mark Anthony Longoria, 44, of Round Rock, Texas, worked as a supply chain manager for Advanced Micro Devices. The complaint says Longoria provided Primary Global clients with revenue and gross margin information, sales figures and average sales prices, all very useful to stock traders. According to the complaint he was paid more than $200,000 for the information.

Walter Shimoon, 39, of San Diego, worked for Flextronics, the Singapore-based contract manufacturer as its senior director of business development. Between 2008 and 2010, the complaint says, he was paid $22,000 for consultation calls with Primary Global clients during which he supplied insider information about Flextronics’ dealings with Apple, filling them in with confidential details about the forthcoming iPhone models, and about the iPad.

Manosha Karunatilaka, 37 of Marlborough, Mass., worked for Taiwan Semiconductor Corp., the massive chip foundry company. The complaint says he provided Primary Global clients with insider information on that company, including confidential sales and shipping information, and was paid $35,000 between January of 2008 and June of 2010.

There’s more details here from The Wall Street Journal.

The criminal complaint is below:

Shimoon, Et Al. Complaint

When a member sees someone attempting to shoplift, he or she presses a button, alerting the store owner, who assesses the situation and awards the user points, depending on whether it was a false alarm, suspicious activity or a crime in progress.

Internet Eyes sweetens the deal by offering a prize of £1,000 to the month’s top point-scorer.
Having viewers pay a membership fee weeds out pranksters and troublemakers from the site, says Tony Morgan, founder and managing director of Internet Eyes.” We get people that really want to fight crime in this country, not just voyeurs that just want to press the button,” Mr. Morgan says.

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Thank goodness for sparkly vampires and animated toys–otherwise, this summer has been pretty weak in the megahit movie department for Hollywood.

But both “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” and “Toy Story 3″ are sequels, so a lot of hopes for some entertainment innovation are riding on the success of a high-tech, big-brain film called “Inception.”

The story about people who slip into dreams and steal secrets is opening July 16 with the tag line: “Your mind is the scene of the crime.”

But that does not even come close to explaining this movie, which appears dense and difficult to comprehend.

Check out this trailer, which looks great and chock full of special effects, but is still pretty perplexing:

The law, called the Free Flow of Information Act, is intended to prevent journalists from being forced to divulge confidential sources, except in cases such as witnessing crimes or acts of terrorism. The amendment, introduced by Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) last week, limits the definition of a journalist to one who “obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity…”

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The piece notes that “dozens of people are murdered every week” in Caracas, “one of Latin America’s most dangerous cities,” and that some of the killings occur for “as little as a pair of shoes or a mobile phone.”

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It looks like the local market is heating up even more, with MSNBC.com announcing the acquisition of Chicago-based EveryBlock.

MSNBC.com–a joint venture of Microsoft (MSFT) and GE (GE) unit NBC Universal–paid several million dollars for the “hyper-local” information site, which is up and running in 15 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston, sources said.

In June, Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL paid about $10 million to buy Patch Media.

The New York-based start-up is a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities on a range of topics, from announcements to news to events to obituaries. It is aimed at competing with local newspapers and other media.

EveryBlock takes a slightly different approach, scouring a mass of publicly available data in a variety of U.S. cities from a variety of public records–such as crime stats, building permits and restaurant inspections–and reassembling them into more comprehensible and geographically relevant news feeds, depending on what a user asks for.

It also pulls up related Flickr photos and information from Web sites like Yelp and Daily Candy and can get very granular, down to keeping track of what is happening on your block or neighborhood.

Maps are also deeply integrated into EveryBlock, as it was on an earlier effort–ChicagoCrime.org–of founder Adrian Holovaty.

The innovative little start-up has a tiny staff of a half-dozen, still calls itself a “project” on its Web site and was started with $1.1 million in grant money won from the Knight News Challenge, an annual contest held by the Knight Foundation.

MSNBC.com is the news channel for Microsoft’s MSN portal, whose execs are very interested in weaving more local results into the site, as well as into the software giant’s new search offering, Bing.

The aim of having EveryBlock data integrated, for example, would be to create a local information dashboard on MSN.

Here’s a screen grab of EveryBlock’s take on my zip code in San Francisco, below (click on the image to make it larger)–and a video interview with Holovaty on YoChicago in early 2008:

It’s a well-intentioned bit of legislation and it doesn’t lack for emotional import, given the famous MySpace suicide case from which it takes its name, but c’mon. As worded here, the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act essentially makes it a crime to hurt someone’s feelings. Worse, its definition of the speech used to do that is very loose and ripe for abuse. It would seem to cover, for example, an irate reader comment on this post or pointed criticism of a public official. Or flame wars? And that’s just silly, isn’t it? And beyond that, it’s a violation of the First Amendment.

“This cannot possibly be constitutionally permissible, it cannot possibly be a good idea, it cannot possibly be what the drafters intended, and yet that is what they wrote,” UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh told the St. Louis Post Dispatch. “If it is passed through Congress, I see it being struck down in courts,” he added.

Here’s hoping it doesn’t even make it that far…

This week, I tested Trulia.com, a real-estate site that’s geared toward helping people who are ready to buy. Trulia combines a simple approach to real estate that anyone can grasp, with enough market stats to excite number-crunching types. It also offers a community where regular users can ask 200,000 real-estate professionals questions without fear of being hounded by agents because their emails are hidden.

An iPhone app from Trulia.com uses GPS to find nearby open houses.

Trulia has been around since 2005, but started out as a site that only posted local real-estate listings in California and New York. After expanding to the national market in 2006, it added other features like pricing heat maps (color-coded to indicate prices in an area), comparable listings, an online community and automatically generated newsfeeds about specific properties and areas. Last summer, Trulia went mobile with a free iPhone app that uses GPS to find nearby open houses.

Starting Wednesday, Trulia will offer CompareIt, a tool that lets users choose five properties for sale to directly compare with one another. Before now, Trulia just generated a list of comparable properties that sold or are for sale at the bottom of a listing.

I only used Trulia for a week, and I’m not a typical buyer since I was just looking — for now. But I got a lot out of the site, especially by browsing maps of neighborhoods that I know well (I’m picky about my preferred location) and asking questions of the Trulia community. Its iPhone app listed nearby open houses according to my search criteria and also worked on my iPod touch as long as I was in a Wi-Fi zone.

Another big plus to Trulia is Newsfeed, a list that shows up on the home page with content that’s automatically generated and personalized according to your past search locations. It is updated every day and spits out stats like the number of price reductions, open houses and new listings in an area. It shows an area’s average listing price, median sales price, number of foreclosures and average price per square foot, among other things. These data are a boon for people who don’t have the time or inclination to look this stuff up, and it aggregates the data into one intelligible, quick snapshot.

I found some flaws in Trulia, like the way it accidentally listed a property that was sold five months earlier. Trulia said it relies on partners for accurate listings, and those partners get their data from Multiple Listing Services or local brokers and agents, therefore Trulia’s data are only as good as its partners’. (At least one other real-estate site also accidentally listed the already-sold condo for sale.) Another problem occurred when I tried to use the CompareIt chart on Washington, D.C., properties; Trulia said the tool doesn’t work for D.C. due to a bug that it hopes to fix. Finally, properties saved on the iPhone app won’t transfer to your Trulia Web site account. The company says it hopes to fix the iPhone issue.

Trulia’s CompareIt lets users compare five properties with one another.

One of Trulia’s competitors is Zillow.com, which displays its own price estimates for all houses in the U.S. (for sale or not) to give people an idea of the real-estate value in an area. The two sites are similar in some ways: Both show heat maps, display data about nearby schools, have mortgage calculators and use online communities to answer questions. But Zillow doesn’t offer a stat-packed Newsfeed or an iPhone app like Trulia.

After browsing through Trulia, I found a variety of properties that suited my target price range and location preferences. One place had lots of big windows and a renovated kitchen, according to the photos and information listed on its detailed Trulia Web page. A shortcut on the page made it easy for me to share this place with three friends to see what they thought. I even posed a question to the Trulia community about the property: Does this unit have a private entrance, or does it share an entrance with the five other units in the building?

Ironically, this was the property that was already sold, as I found out when a real-estate agent responded to my question. It took him just 15 minutes (Trulia says this is within five minutes of the average response time) to post a response saying that he was familiar with the listing and that the place sold five months earlier. Trulia has since updated this property’s status.

Other questions that I asked of the community were answered within 20 minutes. In one instance, I asked a general question about the best time of year to buy in Washington, D.C., and three real-estate agents responded almost immediately; two were from my area and offered their advice — and their services — but one from Florida chimed in simply to offer some encouragement. Each responder was clearly identified with a name, classification (i.e. real-estate pro) and photo. Within a couple hours, four more people responded.

These questions and answers are shared with everyone on Trulia, and I clicked on a thumbs-up icon to vote for the answer I found most helpful.

Email alerts can be set up through Trulia so you’re notified if a property you like dips below a certain price, or if there are new blog posts about certain categories like financing, crime or environmentally friendly properties.

The CompareIt tool worked to see how properties (excluding those in D.C.) stacked up against one another, up to five at a time. These charts arm people with more statistics and (likely) more negotiating power.

The real-estate world can be intimidating, now more than ever. Though sites like Trulia won’t solve this problem completely, they could make the weighty decision of buying a house a little bit easier.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

Today, the news was the worst possible for Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Hudson, an impossibly talented and obviously lovely singer and actress, after the body of her seven-year-old nephew was found after an intense search of the Chicago area.

Julian King was murdered, along with Hudson’s mother and brother, in a horrific crime police are trying to solve now. The main suspect in the case is the estranged husband of Jennifer Hudson’s sister and the mother of Julian.

Hudson used her MySpace page to encourage fans to help in the now tragically-ended search for the boy, and news stories broke all day long, fast and furious. Hudson’s mother and brother were found dead several days ago in the family’s home on the city’s South Side.

No surprise, Internet video is popping up all over, many in the form of condolences to Hudson and her sister in the form of songs and music mashups.

The first and second videos are typical, while the third is Hudson herself singing her signature song–”And I Am Telling You”–from the movie, “Dreamgirls.”

Words cannot express the pain of her family’s loss. But her singing, as you will see, expresses so very much.

Literally, in fact, by taking pictures of their crimes on devices like cellphones and even posting them on the Web, thus proving their guilt. Apparently, you can incriminate yourself doing illegal things quite legally.

Money quote: “As a criminal defense attorney, it’s very difficult when a client proclaims his innocence, but incriminates himself by taking photos of the stolen items,” said William Korman.

Case closed.