Nice research. As the writers point out, cars are another obvious one. In fact i'd be surprised if something wasn't going on there already - well it is going on, & it's not even covert. The world, especially Australia, is being flooded with cheap(ish) EVs from China. Those cars contain GPS tracking devices linked to a central database. All that GPS data is potentially being scraped. Beyond that, it's conceivable that the car's computer could be hacked to immobilize it, or as with the pagers, explode.

That would be another good movie - millions of cars exploding as planes fall out of the sky.

The other interesting point raised is the security issue - is a time coming when you can't take a cellphone on an airplane? It's kinda ridiculous that you can't take a tube of toothpaste on or a bottle of water, but everyone is carrying potential explosive devices in the form of their phones/computers. How is that going to be policed?

Even then, it sounds imminently feasible that a plane could be hacked directly. Our thread on Boeing is also a good place to observe signs of such activity emerging. There does seem to be a lot of system-error mishaps recently - they appear to be cases of man (inevitably) losing control of the AI machines they've built - but a deliberate intervention is definitely not off the cards.