Four businessmen have trademarked country domains that begin with MP3, and now they’ve formed an alliance, reports TheStandard.com.

From a ZDII column: “VA Linux won back some fans on Wall Street this week with its impressive fourth-quarter earnings report. While it appears to have some momentum and has carved out a nice little niche for itself, investors shouldn’t expect a miraculous recovery anytime soon. That’s not to say VA Linux can’t be a fine investment, short- or long-term. Those who believe in the Linux operating system will undoubtedly take a second look at VA Linux considering it’s trading at an 85 percent discount from its all-time high of $320 a share.” (FUll disclosure: VA Linux owns NewsForge.)

Emulex Corp. said on Friday it had been the victim of a hoax that caused its stock to plummet more than 50 percent, Reuters reported. A press release, reportedly put out on Web-based news dissemination service Internet Wire, said the company’s chief executive had resigned and Emulex had been forced to restate 1998 and 1999 earnings, as well as revise the fourth quarter to a loss from a gain.

Studios are not casual about losing control of films that can cost $50 million to $60 million to produce, says Rich Taylor, a Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) spokesman. If media companies are going to retain control of their products, now is the time to lay the plans, says a story at IDG.net.

Aiming to create a de facto standard in the harshly competitive memory card market, EE Times is reporting that backers of the SmartMedia card have opened its interface specification and made it available free of charge.

Reuters is reporting, America Online outlined specifics of how it plans to structure agreements with content providers for its interactive television platform in a letter made available Thursday to federal regulators who are considering AOL’s merger with Time Warner.

Akamai, which speeds content delivery on the Internet by maintaining a network of computers closer to consumers, is receiving daily gripes from people who think–mistakenly–that the company is scanning their ports, or sending packets designed to get information about their
computers, reports CNET News.

ZDNet News UK reports, nanotechnology could provide computer chips thousands of times quicker than today’s fastest processors according to researchers at Molecular Electronics, a US firm dedicated to researching and
developing atom-sized computer components.

According to ZDNet News UK, security firm Network Associates has promised a fix for versions 5.5.x to 6.5.3 of its PGP (Pretty Good Protection) encryption software.

The EE Times is reporting that the two companies, both based in Santa Clara, Calif., said they expect the merger will speed their development of MPEG-4 devices.