Hong Kong levies a new-car tax at the time of sale that can be quite hefty, in some cases as much as the car itself. The EV exception previously made Hong Kong one of Tesla’s most popular markets, but the autonomous territory decided to start imposing the tax on EVs again earlier this year as a way to combat traffic congestion.

A report from the International Energy Agency earlier this year noted that in 2016, Denmark reinstated registration taxes for new EVs and consequently saw adoption drop by 68 percent that year.

"No need for a user interaction, you just need to insert the USB flash drive in the USB port of your car," the researcher told Bleeping Computer. "Imagine an autoplay feature on Windows which executes a script directly."

Furthermore, Turla says one of his work managers believes these flaws could be abused to install RATs (Remote Access Trojans) on Mazda cars.

Other researchers who looked at the MZD Connect firmware shared this opinion. "That CMU [Car Multimedia Unit] is full of remote exec bugs," wrote security researcher Aris Adamantiadis‏ on Twitter. "If you connect it to WiFi you can have a [read only] access to the CAN bus through network DBUS," he added.

Doug Evans, the company’s founder, would compare himself with Steve Jobs in his pursuit of juicing perfection. He declared that his juice press wields four tons of force—“enough to lift two Teslas,” he said. Google’s venture capital arm and other backers poured about $120 million into the startup. Juicero sells the machine for $400, plus the cost of individual juice packs delivered weekly.

Bloomberg performed its own press test, pitting a Juicero machine against a reporter’s grip. The experiment found that squeezing the bag yields nearly the same amount of juice just as quickly—and in some cases, faster—than using the device.

The iPhone 7 home button will only work with the original home button that it was shipped with; if it breaks and needs to be replaced, a new one will only work if it is "recalibrated" in an Apple Store.

"Not supporting that menu function makes no sense," Justin Carroll, owner of FruitFixed, an independent iPhone repair shop, told me. "Just a sad and petulant move on their part that will directly affect consumers especially after their one year manufacturer warranty is up."

On April 1, a customer who purchased Garadget on Amazon using the name R. Martin reported problems with the iPhone application that controls Garadget.

Shortly afterward, not having gotten a response, Martin left a 1-star review of Garadget on Amazon.

Grisak then responded by bricking Martin's product remotely.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut down a tractor and there wouldn't be anything a farmer could do about it.

A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software."

Farmers living in central Tolima province in Colombia say they were terrified when an object they took to be a UFO crashed in a field on Sunday.

X, which was formerly known as Google X, is using the devices to extend internet connectivity to people in rural and remote areas by having the balloons, which travel on the edge of space, relay the signal.

The backdoor is in the Telnet admin interface of DblTek-branded devices, and potentially allows an attacker to remotely open a shell with root privileges on the target device.

However, rather than removing the flaw, the vendor simply made it more difficult to access and exploit. And further correspondence with the Chinese company has apparently fallen on deaf ears.

2017 promises to be an exciting year for electric cars as automakers, big and small, gear up for launches that they hope will lure more drivers away from the gas pump to a plug socket.

These vehicles lack the performance-oriented "P" designation, which means their range goes up a bit. Instead of the P100D's 315-mile range, the P-free Model S sports a range of 335 miles.

Removing the performance credential also confers a second benefit: a lower price tag. Whereas the Model S P100D costs $137,800 before any incentives according to Tesla's site, the 100D brings the price down to $92,500 at the time this was written. The Model X P100D goes for $138,800, while the 100D commands just $98,500.