BizzRoot

Hewlett-Packard swooped in with the better bid to overtake Dell and win 3Par, so now we can all sit back and wait for the next acquisition battle to roll around. Meanwhile, Apple debuted updated iPods and Apple TV to entertain us, among other IT news stories of the week.

Heartland Payment Systems has agreed to pay $5 million to Discover to settle claims arising from the massive data breach disclosed by the payment processor last year.

3M has agreed to buy biometric access control systems vendor Cogent for around US$943 million in cash.

The bidding duel between Hewlett-Packard and Dell over 3PAR took over IT news headlines this week with a dizzying back-and-forth flurry of increased bids. Meanwhile, DLL attacks are keeping IT security pros up at night and a top official said that the Pentagon got a security-related wake-up call when a low-level worm caused a serious systems breach.

The most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever was carried out in 2008 by W32.SillyFDC, a low-level-threat worm that got into the network via a thumb drive plugged into a military laptop.

China is stepping up efforts to keep the security systems that protect its critical infrastructure in the hands of local firms, and that could be bad news for companies based outside the country.

Intel considered acquiring either Symantec or McAfee for years before it announced last week that it would buy the latter, former Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger said on Thursday.

Intel surprised the IT community this week with its plans to buy McAfee. Intel justified the multibillion-dollar purchase price by citing the importance of securing mobile devices, a growing need. Facebook users can now share even more information thanks to the site’s Places service, which allows people to publish their location on their profiles. U.S. broadband user complaints about slow service could be valid, according to a government study that says service providers are skimping on bandwidth. This week brought more private network neutrality talks, further frustrating open Internet advocates who were already miffed by Google and Verizon Communication’s negotiations.

Intel has pledged that its proposed $7.68 billion McAfee buyout will result in more secure networked devices through an integration of software and hardware that will challenge offerings from other big security vendors and perhaps change the way in which security is delivered to enterprise IT shops.

The news of Intel acquiring McAfee for nearly $8 billion caught the tech world off guard and perplexed analysts at face value. The fact is that it doesn’t make much sense based on the Intel and McAfee of today, but as the dust settles the deal makes more sense when viewed as a visionary shift with an eye on where technology is headed–everywhere.