Electronics manufacturer SanDisk is facing a legal fight over its use of popular MP3 compression technology.

German officials seized MP3 players from SanDisk’s booth at the IFA show in Berlin after an Italian patents firm won an injunction against the company.

Italian patents company Sisvel alleges that SanDisk refuses to pay licensing fees it needs to playback MP3 files.

SanDisk also faces a lawsuit brought by Sisvel in a German court, but denies that its products infringe patents.

Source: BBC

Catching criminals could become quicker thanks to a new fingerprint technique developed by British scientists.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield in England have developed a technique to compress fingerprints lifted from a crime scene so they can be transmitted to a fingerprint bureau in a fraction of the normal four to 20 minutes.

“Now we can transmit a lift within 30-60 seconds,” Professor Nigel Alinson told a news conference on Monday at the British Association Festival of Science.

The system, which will be used by all 43 U.K. police forces, was approved by the National Fingerprint Board earlier this year.

Instead of visiting several crime scenes and waiting until the end of the day to get the prints to a bureau, crime scene examiners can use a laptop with a wireless card and a small scanner to send them via mobile phone networks.

Source: Reuters

Digital recording media maker TDK claimed to have reached a landmark on Aug. 31 in the development of recordable media by announcing the prototype of a 200GB Blu-ray laser disc.

A 200GB Blu-ray laser disc doubles the capacity of TDK’s existing 100GB Blu-ray prototype. One of TDK’s new 200GB blue laser discs could store approximately 18 hours of high definition video (encoded at 24M bps), a TDK spokesperson said.

The initial Blu-ray disc standard allows for 25GB single-layer Blu-ray discs and 50GB dual-layer discs. However, a recent signal processing innovation stretches the physical limits of optical media, realizing 33.3GB capacity for each of the disc’s six layers, a TDK spokesperson said.

Source: eWeek

Reports from Taiwan chipmakers indicate that AMD may make a very large percentage of Dell’s sales this year.” AMD, of course, has made no comments in regard to this; but if the reports are correct, then it’s another setback for Intel in the server market

Source: Slashdot

3D displays have been long coming, but the models so far have been fairly small in size and have been fairly unimpressive. However, LG showed of a 32in 3D display at IFA in Berlin which did quite a good job of adding to the depth of field.

Source: Reg Hardware

Borland Software this week is rolling out an upgrade to its Together enterprise modeling tool for the Eclipse platform, featuring SOA capabilities. Borland Together 2006 for Eclipse Release 2 boosts its usefulness for SOA by enabling a UML-based (Unified Modeling Language) view of dependencies in an entire system. This lets developers understand where services are being invoked and helps them gauge the impact of changes, said Dave Hauck, director of marketing for Together technologies at Borland.

Source: Yahoo