Sumner Lemon

3Com Corp. said Sunday that an explosion at an oil depot in Hemel Hempstead, England damaged the headquarters of its regional operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). The company said there were no injuries among its employees as a result of the blast.

Sybase Inc. is considering how it could make some parts of its database software available under an open-source license to customers and developers in China, a company executive said Wednesday.

The number of registered blogs in China has more than doubled since the beginning of this year, according to a market research firm in Beijing. China had 33.4 million registered blogs at the end of the third quarter, up more than 100 per cent since January, when it had 14.5 million blogs, said research company Analysys International.

Chinese police will detain a man for seven days after he posted an offer on eBay Inc.'s Chinese Web site to sell babies over the Internet, according to a local press report. The man, identified only by his surname, Wu, was arrested by police on Oct. 28, the Shanghai Daily reported. The advertisement was determined by police to be a joke, it said.

A Chinese telecommunications operator has begun a paid trial of Verso's NetSpective M-Class filter, a product that is designed to block VoIP calls made using Skype, as well as other peer-to-peer applications, Verso said in a statement. If the paid trial now underway in one Chinese city goes well, the operator will purchase the NetSpective M-Class application filter before the end of the year, it said. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

ObjectWeb Consortium has signed an agreement with a Chinese software group, Orientware, to build a common open-source middleware platform. According to the terms of a memorandum of understanding announced Friday, Orientware will also release several of its middleware components as open-source code.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said Tuesday it had expanded the scope of a chip-technology partnership with IBM Corp. to include exploratory research into a range of advanced chip-related technologies through 2011.

The People's Bank of China (PBC), which sets China's monetary policy and regulates some areas of the country's banking industry, has issued a set of guidelines that cap the amount that individuals can spend online at 1,000 renminbi (US$123.53) per transaction, according to its Web site. In addition, the newly issued guidelines, entitled "Guidelines for Electronic Payment (No.1)," restrict the amount that Chinese users can spend using electronic payments made via the Internet and mobile phones at 5,000 renminbi per day.