AT&T sent out an email to all Apple 3G iPad owners on Sunday night, apologizing for, and trying to explain, the breach that exposed some 114,000 email addresses, blaming the incident on the "malicious" work of "hackers."

The FBI has confirmed it is investigating how private information about iPad users was compromised via an insecure AT&T Web server, as Gawker first reported yesterday. The FBI also contacted Gawker Media today.

Steve Jobs has cast Apple as the most pristine of tech giants, but his sanctimony sometimes backfires. Here, the CEO says Apple guards each use of private customer data—days before Apple partner AT&T exposed iPad customers' private information.

Apple remains silent on the breached privacy of upwards of 114,000 iPad owners, leaving its partner AT&T to apologize for the mishap—and to struggle to contain the PR damage.

AT&T just issued an official statement concerning the iPad breach. We've updated our original post.

Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the cellular-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking.

Text-messaging enthusiast Tiger Woods can finally switch to Verizon: AT&T's dropping his endorsement contract.

The best time to say "sorry" to your customers is when no one else will hear you say it. That seems to be the thinking at Google, Amazon and AT&T, which are all ready to grovel to you, today.

Everyone got upset earlier because it looked like AT&T had banned notorious website 4chan for hosting tasteless content and maybe for inventing annoying memes. But no! The site was blocked for a purported hack attack against AT&T.

AT&T, for reasons unknown at this point, has blocked user access to portions of 4chan, the online hangout for the world's most notorious cyber-terrorists. And they thought iPhone customers were a pain in their ass! This will end badly.

Another Friday afternoon (in spirit!), another "Obama admin continues Bush admin-era 'national security' policy" story. This one is a mysterious NSA program called, ominously, "Einstein 3."

The voting machines were tampered with! By "voting machines" we mean the mindless finger-dialers from Arkansas who were tricked by the nefarious AT&T syndicate into voting for, successfully, Miss Kris Allen, the straight white corn boy who defeated, in an upset, gay Frankenstein. The New York Times now cries foul.

Call it the final wave of the American invasion: A passel of tech executives from Google, YouTube, Twitter, and others, squired by a Wired feature writer, are touring Iraq.

The practice of predicting the future in ads has always been dicey. But in 1993, AT&T got damn near everything right! Present-day dreamers Microsoft would kill for this record of adverfuturism accuracy:

Apple has the iPhone; Google, the G1. Where's the Yahoophone? We hear new CEO Carol Bartz nixed the Yahoo One Phone, a project with Motorola and AT&T, after her daughter got a look at it.

If wireless Internet access is such a hot technology, why is it such a dud business? I asked that question in Wired five years ago, and I still don't know the answer. Since then, eager-to-please Wi-Fi startups have gone the way of boutique ISP service. AT&T, once broken up by law for being an evil monopoly, has reassembled itself into the dominant telecom brand again — bad service and all. This morning, a press release out of Texas announced that AT&T will acquire privately held Wayport, which operates 10,000 hotspots at locations from McDonald's to the Four Seasons. For $275,000,000 in cash, AT&T will now double its number of Wi-Fi hotspots. I side with the Wall Street Journal's snap analysis: Maybe this will make up in part for all those customers canceling their AT&T home phones.

Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner Cable executives told Congress yesterday they would not track user behavior online unless given explicit permission, but that they would prefer to police themselves, instead of having to deal with government oversight. Because that would be Orwellian. [Wired]

AT&T's service agreement runs to 8,000 words — about twice the length of a Wired magazine feature. But it still doesn't list all the details. You'll have to hit the Web for AT&T's 2,500-page guidebook. California state regulators blame themselves for loosening rules in hopes of increasing competition. I went through the Los Angeles Times's summary (written by former San Francisco Chronicle consumer advocate David Lazarus) and pulled out the two lines you need to read:

Text message rates have doubled since 2005, from about 10 cents each to 20 cents today. Senator Herb Kohl (D.-Wisc.), who chairs the Senate's antitrust subcommittee, has asked Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile to explain it to him. "It does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages," the letter says. "Text-messaging files are very small, as the size of text messages are generally limited to 160 characters per message, and therefore cost carriers very little to transmit." Kohl's suspicion: The four big carriers have increased their prices nearly in sync, suggesting a collusion to wring more money out of the market rather than to compete against one another. Read the whole thing — it's no Series of Tubes. (Photo via Gizmodo)

The Federal Communications Commission will probably approve AT&T's request to stop filing annual reports on customer satisfaction and service quality. AT&T's angle actually makes sense: Most of the giant telco's modern competitors — cellular and Internet phone companies — don't have to file the data. The FCC is expected to cancel the reports entirely rather than require everyone to file. The Commission's charts show that customer complaints doubled from 2004 to 2006, but that doesn't take into account the ease of griping online in recent years.