Last updated:Tuesday, April 29, 1997, 8:30 a.m.
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Prodigy's going to China where without America Online or Compuserve to deal with, it hopes to have a fighting chance to sign up 20,000 to 30,000 subscribers by year's end. The service will be tightly monitored to ensure it contained nothing that could be deemed unacceptable to the Chinese government, the Prodigy chairman said.

Only four of 25 U.S. Internet-related IPOs are selling at or above their offer price, a British specialist information technology investment bank points out. It's time to make money instead of making promises, investors and analysts are beginning to say.

Vinton Cerf, known by some as the "father of the Internet," touts MCI's Vault telecommunications system, which would merge Internet and phone traffic on to a supernet. Interesting tidbit: Cerf says MCI's Internet traffic has been increasing at more than 300 percent a year.

A consortium in Singapore says it has made a breakthrough in secure Internet trade by making the first live sale using Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) standards.

U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen warned in a Georgia forum Monday that the Net is spreading knowledge that terrorists can use to wreak havoc on law-abiding citizens everywhere. A German cabinet minister has the same worries: Interior Minister Manfred Kanther says his government does not want to stifle expression, but the law needs the keys to unlock coded communications.

Keep your hands on the wheel: So have you heard about the Web car? They've rigged up a Mercedes E420 with some flat-panel displays, several computers in the trunk, a wireless modem and a few other goodies. To quote GMSV's First Light: "That should make it easy to use Zip2 to locate the nearest hospital after the crash."

A tiger in a lion's den: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will address the Newspaper Association of America today at noon Central Time. Transcript of his speech and the Q-and-A that follows will be availabe promptly, we're told. Shall we except the long knives to be drawn between the guy who's in charge of Sidewalk and the publishers who will protect their local news franchises at almost all costs?

Speaking of Mr. Gates: He says hand-held computers are the next step. Hmm -- isn't that called the Newton MessagePad? And didn't we just see one of those in the Computing section Sunday?

Ever hear of a rogue wave? It's a huge swell that comes out of nowhere and swamps small craft. There are such things as rogue Java applets, too, and Finjan Software says it has a low-end version of its server software that can block hostile Java applets that sneak through firewalls and routers.

Kickin' the dawg: AOL is far behind 14 major ISPs in call failure rate (or highest in busy signals, if you want to look at this positively) according to a survey by web measurement company Inverse.

They laughed... but now they'll see our genius: For years, yours truly has been trying to convince the powers-that-be at her various newspaper jobs to incorporate scratch-and-sniff cards to accompany her news stories. Imagine the possibilities: the odor of a diesel spill at a pristine mountain lake; the scent of a perfect symphony; the sneeze-producing whiff of a scandal in the dusty archives of City Hall. They laughed. But now, on the web, some advertisers (of all people) are adopting the idea and giving those who click on banners virtual scratch-and-sniff cards. (No, I'm not going to tell you which ones. Click randomly on all the ads you see on Mercury Center, OK?)

Iomega recalls some Jaz diskettes that could cause users to lose data. ABout 75,000 disks, made between March 13 and April 20, can be identified by looking at the date and manufacturing code on the back side of the disk. If the date falls between March 13, 1997 to April 20, 1997, and the letters and numbers below the date end with "MS," then the disk should not be used and must be replaced. For more information on the recall, users may call Iomega's hot line at (800) 336-1314.

Netscape won permission to export stronger encryption with its browser; but it must give the U.S. government access to the keys used to encode messages within two years.

Bug fixes on the web: Online tech support -- and we don't mean those wimpy FAQs -- is coming, an MSNBC columnist says. Also coming (this time from another MSNBC columnist) is direct marketing by modem. And you thought spamming was your biggest problem.