Last updated: Wednesday, Sept. 3, 1997, 8:30 a.m.
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Sue the government: Japanese telecommunications giant KDD will sue the Federal Communications Commission over the U.S. agency's plan to push foreign telephone companies to set lower connection fees.

Chinese seek phones: Nokia, the Finnish telecommunications company, has won a $300 million contract in China to expand a digital mobile phone network in the southeastern province of Fujian.

Chips are down: Japanese chip makers say 16 megabit DRAM chip prices fell about four percent in August, and is not expected to increase soon, because of the large inventory of unsold PCs.

CIOs out earn programmers: The pay for information systems professionals has soared 10 percent in the past year, a survey by Computerworld says; but the biggest raises went to the top dogs, chief information officers, who had a 28 percent increase.

U of WWW: Is the web beginning to replace, rather than enhance, higher education? It is at Northwestern University and the University of Oregon. UCLA is aiming to provide home pages for every class in the College of Letters and Sciences by the start of this term.

Diagnose from afar: If remote diagnostic software seems too much like a niche product for you, think again; do you have to call service technicians when your photocopier needs servicing? Do you want to check on the status of your network while you're on vacation?

Searching for the best: You may argue with the result, but Internet World magazine measured the top six search engines and named HotBot the best. The story has descriptions of each search engine surveyed (they excluded the directory services).

Push, don't shove: Dell is going to ship all its PCs with Microsoft push channels, moving beyond its current use of the web as a revenue-generating site.

A denser Web: Will the Net become more consolidated? Will there be a shake out? It certainly appears so, an analysis of existing reports indicates.

Netscape is transforming its Web site, the world's largest, to include an online service for professionals where you can get instant updates of software, digital certificates and community groups.

Untapped market: Girls are not so much turned off by violent computer games as they are bored by their shallowness. Purple Moon is finding the girls gravitate toward rich characters, story lines and immersion in experiences. And you know the tree doesn't grow far from its roots.

Steering around bottlenecks: Sprint is planning to upgrade its Net backbone with a 622-megabit-per-second packet network. It could circumvent routing bottlenecks that prevent ISPs from taking full advantage of the backbone.

Tie up your dog, Congress is back: August is over, Congress is back, and what does it have in store for the wired community? Gambling, taxes, privacy and spying are just a few of the issues likely to pop up in the coming weeks.

More aol.com addresses: After dealing with its problems of overload, America Online reports 13 percent growth in the second quarter. Compuserve's numbers are up slightly, as well.

Spider control: Lycos is claiming rights to spider technology, which is the basis of many search engines. The patent application was submitted by Carnegie Mellon University.

Pity the poor Java developer: Sun or Microsoft? Those competing libraries are forcing choices that few developers want to make.

World's speediest server: That's what Netscape and Silicon Graphics say they are building.

Just got a new Toshiba laptop? Uh oh.

Not to repeat ourselves, but in case you forget to look at that handy little column to the right, where we point out the top technology stories in Mercury Center today, don't miss the piece on the Net's backbone getting a backup.