News written by Jari Ketola (November, 2002)

Lik Sang today announced that Lik-Sang.com will be taken over by a fresh company in order to concentrate on winning the lawsuit against Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.

"Just a few days after having received High Court Orders not allowing us to sell Mod Chip products for the Playstation 2 and Flash Linker products for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance, Lik Sang realized that the powers of those three multi-billion dollar corporations are simply infinite compared to the budgets and resources businesses like Lik Sang have available. Their legal actions have been hurting our customers and our business a lot in the last couple of weeks, so that we have finally decided to let somebody else take over Lik-Sang.com and solely concentrate on the lawsuit", says Alex Kampl, Director of Lik Sang International Limited. "By allowing the new international team to take over, Lik-Sang.com will remain the place you trusted before."

After Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft filed lawsuits against Lik Sang International Limited and it's Directors in the High Court of Hong Kong alleging Copyright Infringement (for selling so-called Mod Chips) by mid September, the situation is much clearer by now. Lik Sang has been working with international specialists and is about to file strong defense for a long trial. A detailed strategy will be announced in due course.

The MPEG-4 organization will be voting in March on whether to make AACPlus part of the evolving MPEG-4 audio standard family. AACPlus is based on technology developed by Coding TechnologiesMP3Pro.

AAC is the latest accepted portion of the MPEG-4 standard family. AACPlus aims to accomplish the same level of quality as its counterpart, but in half the size. It is especially useful in mobile devices, such as cellular phones, where bandwidth is at premium.

Source:
CNet News.com

With there release of Robbie Williams' new album Escapology about to hit the stores, people are turning their eyes to Peer-To-Peer networks, such as KaZaA, to get their hands on the music before it's released. The album can be found quite easily, but the contents of the tracks might not be what the listeners are looking for.

Many of the tracks found appear, infact, to be decoys. The songs start to play as you'd expect them to, but after awhile to song fades to silence. And since people often share music without listening to the tracks first, the broken songs are spread to thousands of users.

Record labels have been planting P2P networks with bogus tracks for quite some time now. They are hoping to discourage people from downloading music. According to their reasoning, if people can't download the tracks, they will buy the album.

No representative from EMI, Williams' record label, could be reached for comments.

Source:
Yahoo! News

There has been alot of discussion and speculation on the future of both magnetic and optical storage media in the recent years. Researchers are continuosly looking for new ways to store more data in smaller space. One of the most promising concepts has been so called 3D optical storage. Dual layer DVDs are sort of a 3D storage medium already - you can access two different data from one point on the disc by adjusting the focus of the laser beam. Imagine how much more data you could store, if you could had, say, 20 layers on one DVD.

Researchers at Boston College's Eugene F. Merkert Chemistry Center have done just that. They have developed a material on which they have been able to write several layers of data by modifying the intensity of the laser beam used for reading and writing. Using this method they have managed to create a CD-sized disk capable of storing 87 gigabytes of data - that's nineteen times more than a regular DVD-R holds (4.7GB).

"This all began when we were trying to do something completely different with the materials," said John Fourkas, a chemistry professor who led the research at Boston College's Eugene F. Merkert Chemistry Center. "It was by accident."