Micro-SOFT is getting Harder to Hack

Lifted freom WSJ this am The Morning Download: Microsoft Roots Out Software Bugs With Artificial Intelligence By Steve Rosenbush Good morning. There's a price to be paid for success and in the case of Microsoft Corp. that price has included providing a massive target for hackers and others looking to exploit every vulnerability in its massive software base. Thus, Microsoft and its users have long lived with the reality of breaches, updates and more breaches. The company has worked to minimize the problem, to some extent a function of legacy code as CIO Journal has reported. On Monday, it look another step in that direction as it announced plans to provide users with a cloud-based bug detection tool powered by artificial intelligence, which seeks to eliminate vulnerabilities in Windows, Office and other enterprise applications – avoiding the need for costly patches later on. CIO Journal's Angus Loten has the story. “Project Springfield,” which the company showcased at its annual technology conference in Atlanta, Ga., is essentially an extension of so-called fuzz testing, in which software is bombarded with random, unexpected inputs. Those that cause the software to crash reveal a potential vulnerability, Mr. Loten reports. It takes that approach a step further, by using AI to “ask a series of ‘what if’ questions” in order to make more sophisticated decisions about triggering a crash, helping it find vulnerabilities other fuzz testing tools miss, and scaling the process in the cloud, he explains . Good for fishing or phishing

On cars and AI

Lifted from the Internet: WSJ electronic

The Morning Download: Toyota Ramps Up AI Research That Drives Autonomous Vehicles By Steve Rosenbush

Good morning. Toyota Motor Corp. is working fast to catch up in the development of autonomous vehicles, an area where some car companies have a head start. The critical asset in this tech market isn't so much technology, as it is the capital, and the willingness to deploy it in an effective way.

Toyota said Thursday it is expanding its artificial intelligence research to University of Michigan, its third university collaboration in the U.S., to try to advance its efforts in autonomous driving, the WSJ's Mike Ramsey reports. Last year Toyota announced a $1 billion effort to expand its research in autonomous driving and has hired professors from Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he notes. It also brought on the entire staff of Jaybridge Robotics in Cambridge. The latest partnership includes the hiring of UM researchers Ed Olson and Ryan Eustice, autonomous vehicle experts at the Ann Arbor-based school, according to the WSJ.

Toyota said the UM campus will be responsible for fully autonomous cars, the Stanford campus will be working on partially autonomous vehicles and the MIT campus will work on machine learning, an interesting coordinated approach to the research effort. Speaking of capital and the willingness to deploy it, Uber said Thursday that it hired Ford Motor Co.’s top electric vehicle executive, Sherif Marakby.