Science and 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,…

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…

A private mission launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Thursday.Unlike on earlier such flights, none of the passengers are wealthy space tourists paying their own way to orbit. Instead, three of the crew members are sponsored by their nations — Italy, Sweden and Turkey. For Turkey, the crew member is the country’s first astronaut.The flight, by Axiom Space of Houston, is part of a new era where nations no longer have to build their own rockets and spacecraft to undertake a human spaceflight program. Now they can simply purchase rides from a commercial company, almost like buying…

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…

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.…

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…

The Justice Department charged eBay on Thursday with stalking, witness tampering and obstruction of justice in a rare criminal case against a well-known Silicon Valley company.The charges, which will be dropped under a deferred prosecution agreement if eBay maintains a good record for the next three years, stem from actions taken by the company in 2019 to undermine and silence the writers of an e-commerce newsletter that was mildly critical of some of its behavior. The intimidation efforts included various forms of cyberstalking and harassment that were continuing when the perpetrators were arrested.In its agreement with the government, eBay will…

When Microsoft opened an advanced research lab in Beijing in 1998, it was a time of optimism about technology and China.The company hired hundreds of researchers for the lab, which pioneered Microsoft’s work in speech, image and facial recognition and the kind of artificial intelligence that later gave rise to online chatbots like ChatGPT. The Beijing operation eventually became one of the most important A.I. labs in the world. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder, called it an opportunity to tap China’s “deep pool of intellectual talent.”But as tensions between the United States and China have mounted over which nation will lead…

The first NASA-financed commercial mission to send a robotic spacecraft to the surface of the moon will most likely not be able to make it there.The lunar lander, named Peregrine and built by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, encountered problems shortly after it lifted off early Monday morning from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The launch of the rocket, a brand-new design named Vulcan, was flawless, successfully sending Peregrine on its journey.But a failure in the lander’s propulsion system depleted its propellant and most likely ended the mission’s original lunar ambitions.“The team is working to try and stabilize the loss, but given the…

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…