In an exciting first, the autopilot feature in a Tesla car managed to save rather than kill its occupant. At 0300 PT on Friday, the highway patrol pulled alongside at grey Tesla Model S travelling at 70 miles an hour on a freeway down toward Silicon Valley and noticed that driver – 45-year-old Alexander Samek – appeared to be …

A Tesla with Autopilot engaged accelerated toward a barrier in the final seconds before a deadly crash, an official report into the crash has revealed. Apple engineer Walter Huang was driving his Model X P100D on a Silicon Valley freeway on the morning of March 23 when the car, under computer control, moved into the triangular …

Australian pay TV broadcaster Foxtel has explained why it couldn't broadcast the new season Game of Thrones without trouble: more than 60,000 new subscribers swamped its systems. Australian viewers hit the ceiling on Monday local time after trying to be first-to-see the opening episode of season seven when a cascade of crashes …

UpdatedNest's Dropcam and Dropcam Pro security cameras can be wirelessly attacked via Bluetooth to crash and stop recording footage. This is perfect for burglars and other crooks who want to knock out the cams moments before robbing a joint. The three vulnerabilities are in camera firmware version 5.2.1, and no patch is publicly …

VidThe US Army is investigating how one of its drones took an unplanned 623-mile excursion and ended up stuck in a tree two states away. The Shadow RQ-7 drone was launched by soldiers from the 2nd Stryker Brigade of the 7th Infantry Division during a training mission in Arizona at 17:16 local time. It was supposed to provide the …

Australia, Malaysia and China have suspended the search for missing Malaysian airlines flight MH370. The Boeing 777, which left Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, disappeared on March 8th, 2014. The plane quickly left areas covered by radar and was presumed to have reached an isolated arc of the Indian Ocean to the west of …

A quadcopter carrying drugs and mobile phones crashed in a yard of Manchester's Strangeways prison last Friday, and while residents were deprived of that particular cargo, a former inmate claims cases of airborne contraband delivery are "rife". According to the Manchester Evening News, a Prison Service spokesperson said: "A …

Microsoft’s first update to Windows 10 is bricking some users’ PCs. The cumulative update is rebooting after getting part way through the installation process on x64-based systems without completing set up. The update is KB3081424. The problem has been reported, here, on Microsoft's official forums. In the case of one user, …

A dodgy software installation that deleted vital files caused last month's Airbus 400M transport plane crash in which four people died, it is claimed. On May 9, a test flight of the A400M, intended to replace the aging Hercules as a mainstay of NATO's air mobility fleet, crashed in Spain, killing four of the six crew. …

Adding a single colon to a web link is enough to kill Skype on your PC, Android and iOS device. Sending the characters http://: in a chat conversation via the software will cause the application to crash, and bomb all over again when restarted as the application will process the chat characters again before you get a chance to …

AnalysisCads and/or bounders can crash and reboot iPhones from afar by sending them specially crafted texts, thanks to a new vulnerability in iOS. A 75-byte sequence of unicode characters triggers the glitch, and can be smuggled into text messages, causing iThings to crash if they appear in the victim's notification screen. Texting …

Self-driving cars have put in hundreds of thousands of miles on California's roads and, according to the state's Department of Motor Vehicles, they have had four bumps and scrapes along the way. In September 2014, California's DMV issued new guidelines that allow autonomous vehicles on state roads, as long as there's a human …

The Russian space agency Roscosmos has confirmed that its out-of-control Progress cargo capsule will begin its fatal plunge toward Earth on Thursday. Control of the 7,298kg (16,089lb) spacecraft was lost shortly after launch last week and the cargo pod, which is carrying three tons of supplies for the International Space …

The Virgin Galactic "spaceship" rocketplane which broke up in mid-air during a flight test on Friday deployed its unique "feather" atmospheric re-entry system far earlier than planned, according to federal investigators. VSS Enterprise in feathered descent testing. Credit: Clay Observatory/Virgin Galactic VSS Enterprise in …

UpdatedRichard Branson's commercial space company Virgin Galactic suffered a serious setback on Friday when a test flight of its SpaceShipTwo aircraft crashed during the testing of its rocket motor. SpaceShipTwo crash This doesn't look good "Virgin Galactic’s partner Scaled Composites conducted a powered test flight of …

A Romanian security researcher has published a vulnerability that allows someone to crash a remote Nexus 4 or Nexus 5 phone – by sending them a crafted “Class 0” text message. Instead of falling into a user's inbox and waiting for someone to read the message, a Class 0 or “flash message” pops up immediately as a message window …

Automated "predatory" robot bankers caused a number of serious glitches that sent the global financial system shuddering to a halt, researchers have claimed. Boffins from the University of Miami found that squadrons of "ultrafast" and out of control trading algorithms caused major spikes and crashes in the market. These …

An Albuquerque man found himself on the wrong end of a cuffing on Monday after cops claimed he had been engaged in drunken rumpy-pumpy behind the wheel. Local police said he had jumped a red light, ploughed into another vehicle and then attempted to evade justice by hiding in a cactus bush. Police mugshot of Luis Briones …