A question in the Slack channel was stumping field CTO Nick Durkin’s team at the software deliverer Harness: how to tell Microsoft’s application development tool the location of certain .zip files.

To get a bit technical, the Microsoft Build Engine couldn’t find NuGet packages. One employee had a suggestion:

Have you asked ChatGPT? It’s been amazing with nearly all of my code- and infra-related questions.

ChatGPT, the generative-AI bot launched by OpenAI, did, in fact, answer the question—ultimately providing a “decent answer,” according to the asker, one not easily found in available documentation. The automated reply also sent example code-snippets.

“You can tell MSBuild where your NuGet packages are stored by specifying the package source in the NuGet.config file or by specifying the ‘-source’ option when running the ‘msbuild’ command…” read the response.

“It handled it in all of 30 seconds,” said Durkin.

ChatGPT has offered another valuable tool for coders, who are increasingly incorporating the AI-based language-model and all-around super-Jeeves into their everyday practices. The increased access to answers from artificial intelligence also potentially levels the programming field.

“This can make good developers great. This can make great developers excellent,” Durkin told IT Brew.

OpenAI season. This month, Microsoft announced that Azure enterprise customers will have access to the OpenAI-developed artificial-intelligence model, for applications ranging from summarizing customer data to writing reports or code. The general availability of Azure OpenAI grants customers access to OpenAI’s AI models, including GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL-E-2.

While ChatGPT, the sometimes controversial chatbot trained on vast amounts of data from the internet, also has the ability to answer hackers’ more malicious questions, wider access to the model may help coders complete routine and time-consuming tasks, like finding errors.

Read more here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

It may be hard to remember now, but just over a decade ago, BlackBerry was synonymous with smartphones. These days, the company has abandoned its identity as a cellphone maker, but new innovations in its IoT sector, especially pertaining to car software, have BlackBerry mounting an impressive tech industry comeback.

IT Brew spoke with BlackBerry CTO Charles Eagan at CES ’23 in January to talk about car software cybersecurity.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Car safety and security is something a lot of people have been talking about at CES. Where do you see the industry moving in that regard?

Safety and security are really becoming the same word. As kinetic things start to become cyberattack-able, safety and security are [intertwined].

Now, cars are safe. There’s a lot of knowledge in terms of functional safety that has been designed into cars. There are type approvals and heavy reviews that go into software, and a big part of security in automobiles is partitioning. We have a hypervisor that allows you to partition the bad software that’s untested or could be maliciously compromised with the control system.

Cars have a great architecture—the volume of the software update is kind of where the rubber hits the road, so to speak. We have to make sure that we’re not accidentally opening up compromises as we [are vastly] changing the software on the vehicle. So, we know a whole bunch of good practices on how to partition, do lease privileges, zero-trust, you know, a lot of cybersecurity wisdom needs to be applied to that car…

Keep reading here.—EH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $130 million. That’s the amount of money in ransomware demands the FBI says it has prevented victims from having to pay, after working with Germany and the Netherlands to seize the servers of the ransomware group Hive. (US Department of Justice)

Quote: “It is unlikely that Home Depot [Canada] customers would have expected that their personal information would be shared with a third-party social media platform simply because they opted for an electronic receipt.”—Philippe Dufresne, Canada’s privacy commissioner, on the home-improvement chain apparently sharing personal details from e-receipts with Facebook parent company Meta (Toronto Star)

Read: ChatGPT may only be the beginning of an AI “arms race.” (Fast Company)