We’re now starting to see some of the incredible safety gains offered by sensor-equipped Teslas. An over-the-air software upgrade from September allowed first-generation Teslas to have something like X-ray vision; the radar waves can bounce around and underneath the car in front of you, providing the computer with information on what the driver cannot see–i.e., the car in front of the car in front of you. This dashcam video from a Tesla driving down a Dutch highway was uploaded just yesterday. The car’s occupants cannot clearly see that an accident is brewing–but the Tesla does, sounding a chime and automatically applying the brakes to prevent a pile-up: I also love how the father prudently, immediately checks what is going on behind their stopped car before getting out to help. This video is a prime example of both computer and human smarts in action. Transportation website Electrek reports that no one, including the folks involved in the rollover, was injured.
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Dashcam Footage of Tesla Predicting Accident Seconds Before it Happens
An anonymous reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: A security flaw discovered in a common PHP class allows knowledgeable attackers to execute code on a website that uses a vulnerable version of the script, which in turn can allow an attacker to take control over the underlying server. The vulnerable library is PHPMailer, a PHP script that allows developers to automate the task of sending emails using PHP code, also included with WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and more. The vulnerability was fixed on Christmas with the release of PHPMailer version 5.2.18. Nevertheless, despite the presence of a patched version, it will take some time for the security update to propagate. Judging by past incidents, millions of sites will never be updated, leaving a large chunk of the Internet open to attacks. Even though the security researcher who discovered the flaw didn’t publish any in-depth details about his findings, someone reverse-engineered the PHPMailer patch and published their own exploit code online, allowing others to automate attacks using this flaw, which is largely still unpatched due to the holiday season. Read more of this story at Slashdot.