Tech giant Microsoft (MSFT) has made a lot of gains lately with artificial intelligence (AI), and recently, it found a potentially serious new flaw in most chatbots that it calls the Whisper Leak. This flaw may make the topics of your conversations available to outside viewers, and if you never wanted anyone to find out that you were curious about who would win in a fight between Freddy Krueger and John Constantine, well, this could be a problem. Investors were less than thrilled, and sent Microsoft shares down fractionally in Tuesday afternoon’s trading.
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So what is the Whisper Leak? The problem, reports note, is a matter of metadata. While your conversations are protected by Transport Layer Security, a kind of encryption used for online banking, the same cannot be said for the metadata involved, a layer of data that reflects how messages travel across the internet.
Thus, reports note, the Whisper Leak is less a matter of poor encryption and more a matter of what encryption could never really cover in the first place. Microsoft tested 28 different large language models, and found the vulnerability in all of them. Moreover, it tested three different ways to plug the leak, but discovered that no way actually worked every time.
Cloud Gaming Hits India
Meanwhile, Microsoft opened up a major new market by bringing cloud gaming to India. Cloud gaming had been available in a beta version in certain international markets, but the release appears to be opening up as the Xbox Series X/S era is coming to an end. And, with the cloud gaming concept in play, users will be able to get access to a wide range of games without the need for an Xbox console.
Prices range from Rs 499 (roughly $5.64 US) a month for the Essential package, to Rs 1,389 (about $15.71 US) for the Ultimate package. The Essential package offers over 50 games, and unlimited streaming for at least some games you already own. The Ultimate package, meanwhile, offers over 400 games, including over 75 Day One releases, the EA Play library and more.
Is Microsoft a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on MSFT stock based on 34 Buys assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 19.61% rally in its share price over the past year, the average MSFT price target of $633.14 per share implies 24.98% upside potential.
