14 DAY TRIAL // Put this piece of news in the rumor box, but it appears that an Italian hacker has managed to hack Cortana and change the answers that the digital assistant can provide to its users.
But let’s take the details one at a time and see if this is indeed possible or not.
First and foremost, Cortana has recently launched on new markets, namely Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, so more users have finally received access to this particular feature on their Windows Phones.
As reported by WindowsBlogItalia, the hacker managed to get access to an online database holding all answers that Cortana offers to a defined set of questions from users, so what he did was to modify some of these answers to provide a series of other, more personal responses.
Custom questions and answers
As you can see in the video below, with this little hack, Cortana can be tweaked to recognize and answer custom questions, such as “What is the best hacking team?”
Hacker group OrangeSec hasn’t provided too many details on the way they managed to break into Cortana’s online database, so nobody can confirm whether the video is indeed real or not, but there’s no doubt that Microsoft is already investigating this problem and looking for a way to prevent similar cases in the future.
As for the possibility of adding custom questions and answers to Cortana, this wouldn’t make much sense on all devices, and Microsoft most likely tries to keep this feature locked to make sure that it doesn’t expose too many of the files currently being used by the digital assistant.
On its way to Windows 10
Cortana has quickly become one of the key features of Windows Phone, and since Microsoft really invests big in this particular option, desktop users could get it as well with the release of Windows 10.
Cortana for Windows 10 is already available in some early builds of the new operating system and testers might be allowed to give it a shot in the upcoming Technical Preview builds or in the Developer Preview version prepared for April 2015.
Next month, Microsoft is expected to unveil the so-called Windows 10 January Technical Preview, an improved version of the original testing build that would come with a number of changes, including an upgrade to kernel version 10.
According to sources, Microsoft should break the news on the January Technical Preview sometime this month, so expect an official announcement on this build by Christmas.
