AP – PayPal, a unit of online auction site operator eBay Inc., plans to double its staff in Asia to 2,000 by the end of the year, president Scott Thompson said Wednesday.

Computing giant IBM has hit back at a recently published report claiming that the company’s mainframe business practices in India are strangling competition in the country. The research paper, released by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) in conjunction with IT forum OpenMainframe.org, claims that IBM is undercutting its competitors in terms of price, while also bundling operating systems with its mainframes that are purposefully difficult to migrate to other servers. “The applications get tied to an IBM operating system (z/OS) that cannot run on other servers because of IBM’s restrictive licensing practices,” the 90-page report alleged.

AP – Defense contractor Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC Inc., on Wednesday said it received a contract from the U.S. Navy to develop and enhance command and control software.

AFP – Microsoft on Tuesday warned that hackers are targeting a freshly-uncovered weakness in some earlier versions of its Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser software.

AP – A Wells Fargo analyst downgraded shares of Crown Castle International Corp. on Monday, saying there is little potential for the cell phone tower company to surpass Wall Street’s expectations for 2010.