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Invincible Self-Repairing Software

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 10:20 am by Jamie

Sarah Connor Chronicles, John Henry

AZM Ally Le Padawan alerts us that Skynet is developing software that repairs itself! Researches at suspect Skynet front MIT have created ClearView, a software that repairs certain types of bugs within minutes of their discovery all without the aid of human intervention. To put it to the test, researches installed ClearView on a group of machines running Firefox and set a team of l337 HAXXORZ to attack to browser. ClearView successfully defeated all 10 of the attack methods employed by the attackers creating patches to correct exploits within an average of five minutes.

This sounds pretty cool. It would be interesting to see OS’s adopting ClearView as a sort of default anti-virus solution. The question is, could it also detect what software on your machine was purchased and what was cracked? If it automatically patches bugs, would it also be able to automatically shut down cracked software? Would it recognize your software cracks as exploits or would it just ignore them?

The thing that surprises me a bit is why hasn’t this research been done earlier? One of the commenters on the original post said something about IBM implementing something similar with OS/2 but that it ultimately got scrapped. Seems like a no-brainer to bundle this with an OS. Ah well, the past returns.

Source: Technology Review

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 10:20 am and is filed under The Future, Skynet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Invincible Self-Repairing Software”

  1. AvatarHamstadini
    Posted: Nov 4th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
    1

    *Tilts head*

    Cromarte painting action figures instead of being a one-note method of destroying John Conner? What episode was THAT from? Not that I give a damn about anything after third season…

  2. AvatarKevin
    Posted: Nov 4th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
    2

    Wait what? There were only two seasons…

    As to why it wasn’t worked on before, there’s this fun little thing called planned obsolescence. This is similar. If you don’t work out the bugs, when the bugs pop up you’ve still got a job. Thus anyone working on it reduces the number of jobs for programmers. This tactic has been around for a while and is used by a number of professions, such as politicians and lawyers so they can always say “if you keep me elected/hired I’ll solve your problem” then they build new problems so they’ll have a job in the future. Although I wouldn’t necessarily classify politicians as problem solvers to begin with.

  3. AvatarCortharis
    Posted: Nov 5th, 2009 at 8:40 am
    3

    Well there’s always the risk that thhe program will fix bugs differently on different machines. Also, what implcations are there when the software patches itself?

    I want to know if the software will patch diffenertly between similar machines or the same across the board.

  4. AvatarCowdog
    Posted: Nov 5th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
    4

    Self repairing software just makes the liquid metal T1000 that much harder to defeat when it comes back in time to kill our human savior.

    ;D

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