The news at a glance

Apple: Security leaks hit iPad owners

The FBI is looking into a security breach that exposed the e-mail addresses of 114,000 Apple iPad owners, including celebrities and business and government officials, said Ryan Tate in Gawker.com. The breach was discovered last week by a group of Internet hackers, calling themselves Goatse Security, who discovered a way to “trick” AT&T’s computers into handing over the e-mail addresses of iPad owners who use AT&T’s 3G network to connect to the Internet. The breach doesn’t affect iPads that link to the Internet only via Wi-Fi.

The security snafu could dent sales of iPads to businesses, which had previously viewed the tablet computer as “a dandy device for corporate road warriors,” said Clint Boulton in eWeek.com. Businesses see the iPad as a light, portable way to access “cloud-based” data and software applications—that is, information stored on remote servers. In a recent survey, 56 percent of business managers said they would buy iPads for their employees, but if Apple and AT&T cannot reassure customers that their data is secure, “businesses will curb their enthusiasm.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Airlines: Strike paralyzes Spirit Airlines

Upstart Spirit Airlines has canceled all flights amid a strike by its pilots, stranding thousands of travelers in the U.S. and Latin America, said Ben Mutzabaugh in USA Today. Ticket holders have complained that alternative flights on other carriers cost up to three times as much as a ticket on Spirit. Spirit, which carries about 17,000 travelers daily, operates mainly between the U.S. and Latin America. Pilots and management have been locked in a dispute over pay and work rules. “There’s no indication that an end to the impasse is imminent.”

Deals: Cablevision pays $1.4 billion for rival system

Cablevision, the nation’s fifth-largest cable provider, this week said it would pay $1.4 billion for Bresnan Communications, which provides cable service to 300,000 subscribers in Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming, said Nat Worden in Dow Jones Newswires. Cablevision CEO James Dolan also authorized the repurchase of up to 500,000 of the company’s own shares in an effort to eliminate the “Dolan discount” on its stock price, which stems from investor dissatisfaction with the CEO’s sometimes erratic management.

Computers: Dell in talks with securities regulators

Dell Computer and its founder and CEO Michael Dell are in talks to settle a Securities and Exchange Commission civil suit, said Don Clark and Kara Scannell in The Wall Street Journal. The suit concerns rebates that Dell has received from Intel, its microprocessor supplier. Like other manufacturers, Dell receives large, undisclosed rebates from Intel, allegedly to keep it from switching to chips made by Advanced Micro Devices. The SEC says the rebates contributed so much to Dell’s profits that they should have been disclosed to shareholders, giving them an accurate picture of the company’s business.

Regulation: New rules to halt stock plunges

The Securities and Exchange Commission has installed new “circuit breakers” to prevent sudden stock-market plunges, said Nina Mehta and Jesse Westbrook in BloombergBusinessWeek.com. Trading in certain stocks will now halt temporarily whenever their price moves 10 percent within five minutes. The SEC acted after the May 6 “flash crash,” when the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 600 points in 20 minutes. The agency may take additional steps to slow trading, which is dominated by high-speed computers.