Technology

An elite hacking group sponsored by Russian intelligence gained access to the emails of some of Microsoft’s senior executives beginning in late November, the company disclosed in a blog post and regulatory filing on Friday.Microsoft said it had discovered the intrusion a week ago and was still investigating. The hackers appeared to focus on combing through Microsoft’s corporate email accounts to look for information related to the hacking group, which Microsoft’s researchers called Midnight Blizzard.The hackers looked through emails from Microsoft’s senior leadership team as well as employees in cybersecurity, legal and other groups, and took some emails and attachments, the company said. The company, which had worked with cybersecurity firms and governments to investigate previous attacks...

When Apple released the Apple Watch in 2015, it was business as usual for a company whose iPhone updates had become cultural touchstones. Before the watch went on sale, Apple gave early versions of it to celebrities like Beyoncé, featured it in fashion publications like Vogue and streamed a splashy event on the internet trumpeting its features.But as Apple prepared to sell its next generation of wearable computing, the Vision Pro augmented reality device, it marched far more quietly into the consumer marketplace.The company said in a news release this month that sales of the device would begin Friday. No big product event was scheduled, though Apple has created a catchy commercial about the device and offered individual demonstrations of it to tech reviewers. And in a departure for the sec...

A spacecraft that was headed to the surface of the moon has ended up back at Earth instead, burning up in the planet’s atmosphere on Thursday afternoon.Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh announced in a post on the social network X that it lost communication with its Peregrine moon lander at 3:50 p.m. Eastern time, which served as an indication that it entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the South Pacific at around 4:04 p.m. “We await independent confirmation from government entities,” the company said.It was an intentional, if disappointing, end to a trip that lasted 10 days and covered more than half a million miles, with the craft traveling past the orbit of the moon before swinging back toward Earth. But the spacecraft never got close to its landing destination on the near side of the ...

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, stunned investors by demanding that the company’s board give him shares worth more than $80 billion if it wants him to continue developing products based on artificial intelligence.In the latest demonstration of his disregard for conventional ways of communicating with investors, Mr. Musk said late Monday on X, the social media site he owns, that he needed to own 25 percent of Tesla to avoid takeovers and have enough control of the company as it develops robots and other artificial intelligence technology.If his demands are not met, Mr. Musk said, he would pursue unspecified ventures outside of Tesla. In addition to electric cars, Tesla has been developing a humanoid robot called Optimus, and uses artificial intelligence to develop self-driving tech...

Breana Newton, a legal coordinator in Princeton, N.J., who posts regularly about books on TikTok, was one of the people who responded to Ms. Blalock’s video. “I am going to show you bookshelf wealth,” Ms. Newton, 33, says in a video of her own. “Ready?”She then gives viewers a brief tour of her home, showing books everywhere — on shelves, in overflow piles here and there, and strewed across the bed. Absent is the sense that the rooms have been staged, or that the books were bought with the consideration of how they would look on Instagram.In an interview, Ms. Newton said that she worried trends like bookshelf wealth encourage overconsumption. This year, she added, she is trying not to buy any new books.Another critic of the trend, Keila Tirado-Leist, said in a reaction video: “Who does it ...

For more than a decade, Apple was the stock market’s undisputed king. It first overtook Exxon Mobil as the world’s most valuable public company in 2011 and held the title almost without interruption.But a transfer of power has begun.On Friday, Microsoft surpassed Apple, claiming the crown after its market value surged by more than $1 trillion over the past year. Microsoft finished the day at $2.89 trillion, higher than Apple’s $2.87 trillion, according to Bloomberg.The change is part of a reordering of the stock market that was set in motion by the advent of generative artificial intelligence. The technology, which can answer questions, create images and write code, has been heralded for its potential to disrupt businesses and create trillions of dollars in economic value.When Apple replac...

Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTubeCasey is taking his newsletter Platformer off Substack, as criticism over the company’s handling of pro-Nazi content grows. Then, The Wall Street Journal spoke with witnesses who said that Elon Musk had used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, worrying some directors and board members of his companies. And finally, how researchers found a new class of antibiotics with the help of an artificial intelligence algorithm used to win the board game Go.Today’s guests:Kirsten Grind, enterprise reporter for The Wall Street JournalFelix Wong, postdoctoral fellow at M.I.T. and co-founder of Integrated BiosciencesAdditional Reading:Credits“Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and produced by Davis Land and Rach...

Amazon is laying off hundreds of employees at its studio division as well as its subsidiary Twitch to reduce costs, the latest in a wave of new job cuts hitting the tech industry.Twitch, a video streaming platform, will cut just over 500 roles, or 35 percent of its work force, according to a blog post on the company’s website. Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios will eliminate hundreds of jobs, said an email sent to staff on Wednesday.Since late 2022, Amazon has laid off 27,000 workers, as the company has slashed costs in an effort to recover from overexpansion during the pandemic.“It’s important that we prioritize our investments for the long-term success of our business, while relentlessly focusing on what we know matters most to our customers,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prim...

The videogame software provider Unity Software said on Monday that it would cut its work force by 25 percent, or roughly 1,800 jobs, in one of the first major tech industry layoffs this year.In a securities filing, Unity said the cuts would allow it to restructure and refocus “on its core business, and to position itself for long-term and profitable growth.” The company added in a statement that teams across the company would be affected.Last week, Xerox said it would lay off 15 percent of its 23,000-member global staff in the first quarter of 2024, an effort to further shift its focus to services and away from photocopiers.The cuts signal what could be the start of another tough year for the tech industry, which last year laid off tens of thousands of employees in the wake of challenging ...

This time of year, everyone asks what you like least about your life, but they phrase it as, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?”My biggest regret of 2023 was my relationship to my smartphone, or my “tech appendage” as I’ve named it in my iPhone settings. My Apple Screen Time reports regularly clocked in at more than five hours a day.That’s only an hour more than the average American, but I still found it staggering to think that I spent the equivalent of January, February and half of March looking at that tiny screen (April too, if we only count waking hours).Sure, some (much?) of that time was gainfully spent on activities that enrich my life or are unavoidable: work, family text threads, reading the news and keeping up with far-flung friends. But I reached for the device more than 100 t...