Last updated:Friday, April 18, 1997, 8:30 a.m.
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Wireless phones are the subject of a $5 billion deal between AirTouch and US West. AirTouch would take control of U S West's domestic wireless businesses, adding 1.9 million customers in U.S. regions that have up to 34 million potential customers. In return, San Francisco-based Airtouch would grant U S West Media Group shareholders between 85 million or 93 million new shares.

In for a dime, in for a dollar: Microsoft Network e-mail was mostly restored this morning, although keep checking your mailbox through Saturday for backed-up delivery.

MMX everywhere: Intel says all of its Pentium chips would have MMX multimedia enhancement technology by the second quarter of 1998.

WebTV prices slashed: Sony and Phillips cut prices for the set-top boxes by about 25 percent in an effort to boost consumer interest.

California lawmakers are attempting to make it illegal to distribute material or send messages of a prurient nature with the intent to seduce minors over the Net, by e-mail or through an online service. Of course, it's already illegal to send messages or distribute information in order to seduce a minor; the existing law just doesn't mention the Net.

The Canadian punk who has harassed a family by many electronic means has finally driven them from their home.

Expect more trouble in Germany as the government cracks down on ISPs and online services for providing access to content that violates that country's laws, observers say.

CD-ROM blues: Disney Interactive has laid off 90 of its 425 staffers, as well as an undetermined number of freelancers and independent contractors. It's because retail shelf space for entertainment CDs is shrinking.

Tired of your old CDs? Try netcasting where you can hear the latest tunes, or Malaysian news, if you so desire. Many of these sites use RealAudio, which rules out certain corporate sites where system administrators don't want a hole in the firewall.

Server boosts: BMC Software says it can boost server response times fivefold by offloading CGI processing from the web server and providing parallel CGI processing, load balancing, and recovery. Beta version available free; final version due in July.

The day after the night before: AOL is reportedly cooling to buying rival Compuserve, the Washington Post reports today.

Watch your mail: People who attempt to steal time from AOL by using a 933-byte program called "aol4free.com" are finding that a dangerous Trojan Horse program will wipe all the files from their hard disks. If you spot this item, don't run it; it doesn't duplicate itself or run without human intervention.

Chip growth: Dataquest forecasts a 12 percent growth in chip sales this year.

DRAM prices have stabilized and remain cheap, especially compared to 18 months ago -- when you upgraded your system, didn't you?

Is this a corner turned? Some big web sites now report that a majority of visitors are using Internet Explorer instead of the Netscape browsers. More than 350 corporations have standardized MSIE as their browser of choice, but the sites cited in this story are all Microsoft-related.

Net connections made by UHF
Microsoft earnings soar 85 percent