A recent safety test reveals that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature will hit a child in a stroller, a Twitter breach from last year was much worse than first reported, and half a billion WhatsApp records have been breached and are up for sale.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Monday, November 28 and I’m your host, Samira Balsara.
A latest safety test by The Dawn Project reveals that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving will hit a child mannequin in a stroller. The tests were conducted in a public parking lot in Santa Barbara, California in October, using the latest version of Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta software available at the time of testing. The testing found that the self-driving feature will repeatedly run down a stroller in a parking lot. The tests also found that Tesla Full Self-Driving will repeatedly hit a child mannequin in a stroller on roads. On each run, the internal camera in the car showed the viewer that Full Self-Driving is clearly engaged. A flashlight also showed that the accelerator pedal was not pressed during any of the safety tests.
A massive Twitter data breach in 2021 which exposed over five million phone numbers and email addresses, was apparently much worse than initially reported. According to 9to5mac, evidence showed that the same security vulnerability was exploited by multiple bad actors, and the hacked data has been offered for sale on the dark web by several sources. Original reports found that only one hacker gained access to the data. At the time, when the first vulnerability was reported in January, Twitter admitted that the vulnerability had existed, and subsequently been patched, but said nothing about anyone exploiting it. The data includes Twitter users in the U.K., almost every EU country, and parts of the U.S.
Social media networks are big targets these days. A post on a hacking forum claims almost half a billion WhatsApp records have been breached and are up for sale, according to TechRadar. The post on the forum claims to be selling an up-to-date, 2022 database of 487 million mobile numbers used on WhatsApp, which contains data from 84 countries. Over 32 million of the leaked records are said to be from users in the U.S., with 11 million users in the U.K. Other nations impacted include Egypt, France and Italy. TechRadar added that almost one-quarter of WhatsApp’s estimated two billion monthly active users are possibly at risk.
Within the European Union, airlines will now be able to install the latest 5G technology on their aircraft, allowing passengers to use their smartphones and other connected devices in flight. This coverage is possible due to the installation of something called a “pico-cell” in the aircraft. Via that network station, telephone calls, text messages and data traffic can be sent through a satellite network to a mobile network on the ground.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, I’m Samira Balsara.
