Micron, Hynix on track for January deal
Micron Technology, the world’s second-biggest maker of computer memory chips, appears to be on track for some sort of deal with struggling rival Hynix Semiconductor, and analysts said the talks were moving faster and more aggressively than they had expected.

South Korean Hynix, the No 3 maker of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, chips that is saddled with more than $6 billion in debt, said that it and Micron had begun talks on an alliance, which could include a merger of some of Hynix’s chip plants within Micron’s operations.

New hole in AOL Instant Messenger
Even AOL Time Warner wasn’t fast enough for a team of brash young hackers out to prove themselves. Without waiting for the multi-billion-dollar conglomerate to return from a holiday break, an international team released a program that turns the most popular instant-messaging program into a key that invades from the Internet to unlock many home computers. An AOL spokesman said the problem will be fixed soon, and users won’t have to do anything.

Comcast customers report migration snags
A new wave of headaches is afflicting Comcast’s high-speed Internet customers, as the company struggles to move its former Excite@Home subscribers to a brand-new network. The cable company, which has 800,000 Excite@Home customers, started changing some of its customers’ network connections, but many of those subscribers found that their connections have simply gone dead, or are spotty at best, and that technical support is too overwhelmed to help. A Comcast spokeswoman said she had no immediate information on the outage reports or the number of subscribers affected.

Bush eases computer export rules
President Bush eased Cold War restrictions on high-performance computer exports to Russia, China, India and Pakistan. Under the relaxed export control standards, individual licenses and prior government review will be required only for the export of computers that perform more than 190,000 MTOPS, or millions of theoretical operations per second. High-end computers available at some retail computer stores as well as the Internet can provide that level of general processing power. The current threshold is 85,000 MTOPS, a performance standard that has become commonly available for years.

Since 1990, the export controls have been relaxed almost once a year, providing for increasingly powerful computers to be exported.

Oracle to cut up to 850 jobs
Coming off its toughest quarter in a decade, business software giant Oracle said it will fire up to 850 employees, or 2 percent of its worldwide work force, early next year to help offset sluggish sales. The layoffs will be concentrated in the Oracle’s North American consulting arm, as well as its divisions that sell software to the government, education and health care markets, according to a company statement.

FCC reconsiders long-distance plan
A federal appeals court ordered the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider whether SBC Communications should be allowed to offer long-distance phone service in Oklahoma and Kansas. A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the FCC did not pay enough attention to competitors’ claims that SBC charged rivals too much for access to its network.