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    Workers at Microsoft-Owned Activision Vote to Unionize

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    The group will become the largest union at a video game company in the United States, while Microsoft pledged to stay neutral on the vote.About 600 workers at Activision Publishing, the video game maker owned by Microsoft, are unionizing, forming the largest video game workers’ union in the United States, the Communications Workers of America said on Friday. Microsoft recognized the union after the vote count was finalized.The employees work in quality assurance, testing Activision’s games for bugs, glitches and other defects, and 390 of them voted to form a union, while eight opposed the effort, the union said. About 200 workers did not vote.Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, the maker of Call of Duty and other blockbusters, for $69 billion in October. As part of its lengthy effort to convince regulators to approve the deal, Microsoft signed a first-of-its-kind pact in the industry to remain neutral if workers wanted to unionize with the C.W.A.Managers were trained not to express an opinion about whether unionization was good or bad, and the C.W.A. said Activision’s management upheld the pact and did not interfere in the workers’ organizing efforts.“That has been, organizing-wise, a huge blessing,” said Kara Fannon, a member of the union organizing committee who works for Activision near Minneapolis. “It has helped with a lot of people who were concerned about union busting or potential retaliation.”The new union is the first at Activision since the pact went into effect.“Microsoft’s choice will strengthen its corporate culture and ability to serve its customers and should serve as a model for the industry,” C.W.A.’s president, Claude Cummings Jr., said in a statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Microsoft Word’s Subtle Typeface Change Affected Millions. Did You Notice?

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      A change in Microsoft Word’s default typeface, from Calibri to Aptos, didn’t register for everyone, but fans of typography got excited.When you read — a book, a traffic sign, a billboard, this article — how much do you really notice the letters? If you’re like most people, the answer is probably not at all.But even if you don’t really notice them, you might sense it if something has subtly changed. That’s a feeling some people have had in recent weeks when they turn on their Microsoft Word programs.After 17 years of Calibri as Word’s default typeface, many users suddenly found themselves typing in a new typeface called Aptos. The change is also affecting the look of PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel.Letters are letters, but for designers and typography fans, they matter a lot.Why the change?“We wanted to bring something new and fresh that really was designed natively for the sort of modern era of computing,” said Jon Friedman, the company’s corporate vice president for design and research, who led the effort.(Technically Aptos and Calibri are typefaces, while a “font” refers to a particular face or size, like italics or boldface. But in practice, “font” is often used as a synonym for “typeface,” including by Microsoft employees interviewed for this article.)The big divide in the world of typeface is between serif, or letters with small lines or tails attached to their edges, and sans serif, letters without those lines that have a smoother look.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Technology Companies Are Cutting Jobs and Wall Street Likes It

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      The sector is laying off workers after a hiring boom during the pandemic and their share prices are soaring. Tech giants like Microsoft have continued to cut jobs, even after carrying out a wave of layoffs last year.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockTech giants are set to report quarterly earnings, starting on Tuesday with Alphabet and Microsoft. Wall Street is expecting good news, including more progress on artificial intelligence.But the industry has also relied on another strategy to improve financials: layoffs. The cuts aren’t as widespread as last year, when hundreds of thousands of jobs were eliminated. But they’re a reminder that the tech sector is still trying to find its footing after a boom in hiring during the coronavirus pandemic and finding ways to preserve dizzying stock gains.About 100 companies have cut 25,000 positions this year, according to Layoffs.fyi. By comparison, more than 1,000 companies eliminated about 260,000 last year.So far this month: Microsoft announced 1,900 cuts in its video game division, including at its recently acquired Activision Blizzard; Google laid off hundreds of employees, including in its engineering ranks and its hardware division; and Amazon said it was laying off hundreds, including 35 percent of the work force at its Twitch unit.Not all layoffs are the same, The Times notes:For big tech companies, job cuts have been a way to reduce spending on noncore operations and extract the kind of cost savings that Wall Street loves. Now, those cuts are more targeted: In the case of Meta, that means reducing the number of middle managers at Instagram.For smaller tech businesses, it’s more a matter of survival. Start-ups have been finding it harder to raise capital as risk-averse venture capitalists keep their wallets closed. In the words of Nabeel Hyatt, a general partner at Spark Capital, these fledgling companies “are just trying to gain runway to survive.”The cuts will probably continue so long as investors love them. Wall Street has rewarded tech companies that laid off thousands with higher stock prices. Meta’s shares have soared since it embarked on a self-described “year of efficiency” last year that has made it a third slimmer employee-wise. Those cost savings, coupled with a redoubled bet on A.I., has helped push the tech giant’s market value to over $1 trillion.And venture capitalists have told DealBook that they’re ready to invest in start-ups — but that it helps if those companies have made themselves leaner. That, the investors say, will enable them to operate better in potentially difficult times.In other layoff news: Some tech workers are filming their layoffs and posting them on social media, in the name of catharsis and transparency.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Boeing withdraws efforts to expedite safety approval for a version of its 737 Max jet. The aircraft manufacturer revoked an application it made last year seeking an exemption from a safety standard for a version of its 737 Max 7. Separately, Boeing received some good news amid its latest crisis: The European airline Ryanair, one of its biggest customers, said it would buy more planes if U.S. carriers dropped their orders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      China Sows Disinformation About Hawaii Fires Using New Techniques

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      Beijing’s influence campaign using artificial intelligence is a rapid change in tactics, researchers from Microsoft and other organizations say.When wildfires swept across Maui last month with destructive fury, China’s increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced.The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret “weather weapon” being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign.For China — which largely stood on the sidelines of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections while Russia ran hacking operations and disinformation campaigns — the effort to cast the wildfires as a deliberate act by American intelligence agencies and the military was a rapid change of tactics.Until now, China’s influence campaigns have been focused on amplifying propaganda defending its policies on Taiwan and other subjects. The most recent effort, revealed by researchers from Microsoft and a range of other organizations, suggests that Beijing is making more direct attempts to sow discord in the United States.The move also comes as the Biden administration and Congress are grappling with how to push back on China without tipping the two countries into open conflict, and with how to reduce the risk that A.I. is used to magnify disinformation.The impact of the Chinese campaign — identified by researchers from Microsoft, Recorded Future, the RAND Corporation, NewsGuard and the University of Maryland — is difficult to measure, though early indications suggest that few social media users engaged with the most outlandish of the conspiracy theories.Brad Smith, the vice chairman and president of Microsoft, whose researchers analyzed the covert campaign, sharply criticized China for exploiting a natural disaster for political gain.“I just don’t think that’s worthy of any country, much less any country that aspires to be a great country,” Mr. Smith said in an interview on Monday.China was not the only country to make political use of the Maui fires. Russia did as well, spreading posts that emphasized how much money the United States was spending on the war in Ukraine and that suggested the cash would be better spent at home for disaster relief.The researchers suggested that China was building a network of accounts that could be put to use in future information operations, including the next U.S. presidential election. That is the pattern that Russia set in the year or so leading up to the 2016 election.“This is going into a new direction, which is sort of amplifying conspiracy theories that are not directly related to some of their interests, like Taiwan,” said Brian Liston, a researcher at Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company based in Massachusetts.A destroyed neighborhood in Lahaina, Hawaii, last month. China has made the wildfires a target of disinformation.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesIf China does engage in influence operations for the election next year, U.S. intelligence officials have assessed in recent months, it is likely to try to diminish President Biden and raise the profile of former President Donald J. Trump. While that may seem counterintuitive to Americans who remember Mr. Trump’s effort to blame Beijing for what he called the “China virus,” the intelligence officials have concluded that Chinese leaders prefer Mr. Trump. He has called for pulling Americans out of Japan, South Korea and other parts of Asia, while Mr. Biden has cut off China’s access to the most advanced chips and the equipment made to produce them.China’s promotion of a conspiracy theory about the fires comes after Mr. Biden vented in Bali last fall to Xi Jinping, China’s president, about Beijing’s role in the spread of such disinformation. According to administration officials, Mr. Biden angrily criticized Mr. Xi for the spread of false accusations that the United States operated biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.There is no indication that Russia and China are working together on information operations, according to the researchers and administration officials, but they often echo each other’s messages, particularly when it comes to criticizing U.S. policies. Their combined efforts suggest a new phase of the disinformation wars is about to begin, one bolstered by the use of A.I. tools.“We don’t have direct evidence of coordination between China and Russia in these campaigns, but we’re certainly finding alignment and a sort of synchronization,” said William Marcellino, a researcher at RAND and an author of a new report warning that artificial intelligence will enable a “critical jump forward” in global influence operations.The wildfires in Hawaii — like many natural disasters these days — spawned numerous rumors, false reports and conspiracy theories almost from the start.Caroline Amy Orr Bueno, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security, reported that a coordinated Russian campaign began on Twitter, the social media platform now known as X, on Aug. 9, a day after the fires started.It spread the phrase, “Hawaii, not Ukraine,” from one obscure account with few followers through a series of conservative or right-wing accounts like Breitbart and ultimately Russian state media, reaching thousands of users with a message intended to undercut U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.President Biden has criticized President Xi Jinping of China for the spread of false accusations about the United States and Ukraine.Florence Lo/ReutersChina’s state media apparatus often echoes Russian themes, especially animosity toward the United States. But in this case, it also pursued a distinct disinformation campaign.Recorded Future first reported that the Chinese government mounted a covert campaign to blame a “weather weapon” for the fires, identifying numerous posts in mid-August falsely claiming that MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, had revealed “the amazing truth behind the wildfire.” Posts with the exact language appeared on social media sites across the internet, including Pinterest, Tumblr, Medium and Pixiv, a Japanese site used by artists.Other inauthentic accounts spread similar content, often accompanied with mislabeled videos, including one from a popular TikTok account, The Paranormal Chic, that showed a transformer explosion in Chile. According to Recorded Future, the Chinese content often echoed — and amplified — posts by conspiracy theorists and extremists in the United States, including white supremacists.The Chinese campaign operated across many of the major social media platforms — and in many languages, suggesting it was aimed at reaching a global audience. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center identified inauthentic posts in 31 languages, including French, German and Italian, but also in less prominent ones like Igbo, Odia and Guarani.The artificially generated images of the Hawaii wildfires identified by Microsoft’s researchers appeared on multiple platforms, including a Reddit post in Dutch. “These specific A.I.-generated images appear to be exclusively used” by Chinese accounts used in this campaign, Microsoft said in a report. “They do not appear to be present elsewhere online.”Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, said that China appeared to have adopted Russia’s playbook for influence operations, laying the groundwork to influence politics in the United States and other countries.“This would be Russia in 2015,” he said, referring to the bots and inauthentic accounts Russia created before its extensive online influence operation during the 2016 election. “If we look at how other actors have done this, they are building capacity. Now they’re building accounts that are covert.”Natural disasters have often been the focus of disinformation campaigns, allowing bad actors to exploit emotions to accuse governments of shortcomings, either in preparation or in response. The goal can be to undermine trust in specific policies, like U.S. support for Ukraine, or more generally to sow internal discord. By suggesting the United States was testing or using secret weapons against its own citizens, China’s effort also seemed intended to depict the country as a reckless, militaristic power.“We’ve always been able to come together in the wake of humanitarian disasters and provide relief in the wake of earthquakes or hurricanes or fires,” said Mr. Smith, who is presenting some of Microsoft’s findings to Congress on Tuesday. “And to see this kind of pursuit instead is both, I think deeply disturbing and something that the global community should draw a red line around and put off-limits.” More

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      Biden Makes His Business Case in the State of the Union Address

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      The president took credit for strong job growth and his legislative agenda that’s boosted investment in infrastructure and clean energy projects.“I will make no apologies.”Pool photo by Jacquelyn Martin-Pool/Getty Images.Biden picks his battles President Biden delivered a State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday night that was filled with dramatic moments, meant in part to jump start his 2024 re-election campaign.He also used the speech to press his economic priorities, from bolstering American manufacturing to extending his climate efforts. How far he advanced his causes, however, remains to be seen.Mr. Biden defended his record on the economy. He took credit for falling inflation and strong job growth, and listed promised benefits from his sweeping legislative agenda, including infrastructure, clean energy (even if he did acknowledge, “we’re still going to need oil and gas for a while”) and manufacturing laws that will pour trillions into the economy.He also urged Congress to back initiatives including raising a billionaires tax on the wealthy; expanding a measure in the Inflation Reduction Act that caps the cost of insulin at $35 a month; renewing the expanded child tax credit; and expanding Medicaid and affordable child care.He baited Republicans over social welfare programs. Mr. Biden accused some Republicans of threatening Social Security and Medicare, implying they wanted cuts in exchange for a deal to raise the debt ceiling. (That claim requires a bit of context.) Several lawmakers shouted in response; one, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, yelled “Liar!”Mr. Biden responded that he had somehow gotten unanimity on the issue. “We all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right?” he said, leading a bipartisan round of applause for seniors.He kept up pressure on ripe political targets. Though Mr. Biden didn’t directly address the Chinese spy balloon incident, he pledged to make America more competitive and less reliant on China. “I will make no apologies that we are investing to make America strong,” he said. “Investing in American innovation — in industries that will define the future, and that China’s government is intent on dominating.”Mr. Biden also called out tech companies, demanding stricter limits on their collection of personal data, and oil giants, which he accused of raking in record profits from high energy prices instead of using their huge coffers to increase domestic production.How much cooperation Mr. Biden will get from Republicans and business is unclear. In Republicans’ rebuttal, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas accused him of perpetrating a culture war. Corporate America was more circumspect: Suzanne Clark, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, reiterated her group’s support for the infrastructure law, but urged Biden to focus on striking more trade agreements and pulling back from what she said was overregulation.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING The U.S. trade deficit balloons to $948 billion. The export-import gap jumped 12 percent in 2022, to a record, as Americans continued to spend more on imported goods than travel and entertainment. Trade data also showed growing deficits in goods with the likes of Mexico and South Korea, as manufacturers seek bases outside China.Microsoft announces A.I.-powered consumer internet tools. The tech giant promised versions of its Bing search engine and Edge browser that incorporate chatbots, drawing on a partnership with the ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Microsoft’s ambitions may be bigger: It’s reportedly planning to create software to let companies make their own ChatGPT-powered chatbots.Zoom plans to lay off 15 percent of its staff. The videoconferencing company acknowledged it had hired too many people during its pandemic boom, and needed to retrench as growth has slowed. Its C.E.O., Eric Yuan, said he plans to cut his salary for the coming fiscal year by roughly 98 percent and forgo a bonus.A former Coinbase employee pleads guilty to insider trading. Ishan Wahi, who was a product manager at the crypto exchange, had been accused of tipping his brother and a friend about tokens it planned to list, bringing about $1.5 million in illegal profit. He’s the first crypto insider to admit insider trading.Chobani’s founder urges U.S. companies to fund recovery efforts for the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant, has partnered with the Turkish Philanthropy Funds to aid in recovery from the quake, which has a death toll above 11,000. He told DealBook that he has personally donated $2 million to the cause.Jay Powell sees a “bumpy” path ahead America’s red-hot labor market suggests that the world’s biggest economy may yet avoid recession. But this same dynamic has also thrust the Fed into a policy conundrum, with pressure for higher interest rates to tamp down inflation.In a question-and-answer session at the Economic Club of Washington on Tuesday, the Fed’s chair, Jay Powell, said he could see “the very early stages of disinflation,” but added that the easing in prices was likely to follow a “bumpy” path, particularly with hiring and wage growth proving strong.January’s jobs data surpassed the Fed’s forecasts. Mr. Powell said last Friday’s knockout nonfarm payroll report, which announced that employers added 517,000 new jobs last month, was “certainly strong — stronger than anyone I know expected.”Other data offered more encouraging signs for the U.S. economy. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker forecasts that the U.S. will grow by 2.1 percent in the first quarter; it was predicting 0.7 percent a week ago. And even bearish economists are dialing down their gloomy expectations: “A potential recession in 2023 will likely be short and shallow,” Jeffrey Roach, the chief economist for LPL Financial, wrote to investors on Tuesday, while Goldman Sachs economists this week lowered their estimate of the likelihood of a U.S. recession to 25 percent.Investors were relieved that Mr. Powell gave no hint of a sudden shift in the Fed’s strategy. He reiterated that the central bank planned to keep raising borrowing costs to rein in consumer spending. That was enough to reassure investors that no big policy changes were coming soon: The S&P 500 rallied after his comments, snapping a two-day losing streak.A hedge fund catches meme fever Hudson Bay Capital Management has emerged as the mystery backer of Bed Bath & Beyond’s bold plan to cash in on its meme-stock cachet to raise $1 billion in emergency funds and avert bankruptcy.The hedge fund’s involvement in the deal highlights the meme-stock frenzy’s pull on big institutions. Shares in the struggling retailer, which has closed 400 stores in the past year as revenues slide, are up nearly 86 percent in the past month in extremely volatile trading that’s been largely influenced by day-traders betting on its survival. But the stock nearly halved on Tuesday, after the company announced it would sell a flood of new shares, which will dilute existing shareholders.Hudson Bay has underwritten the initial $225 million worth of shares that Bed Bath & Beyond is selling. It plans to underwrite another $800 million over time, if certain unspecified “conditions are met.” Hudson Bay also receives warrants to buy further stock at an advantageous price, which could prove lucrative if the retailer were to turn its business around.The deal with Hudson Bay came together within the past several weeks, two people familiar with the negotiations told DealBook. Late last month, JPMorgan Chase, which gave Bed Bath & Beyond a lifeline last summer by expanding its credit line, froze the retailer’s credit accounts after deeming the company in breach of the terms of its debt. As Bed Bath & Beyond raced to find cash to pay its debts, it had also been preparing for a bankruptcy — and possible liquidation — if the needed funds didn’t arrive.Whether this only buys Bed Bath & Beyond a temporary reprieve remains to be seen. “The fundamental story for Bed Bath & Beyond is so broken at this point,” said David Silverman, a retail analyst at Fitch Ratings. “I don’t know that a short-term cash infusion that could buy them a few months, a couple of quarters, is going to change their fate.” The Wedbush Securities analyst Seth Basham seconded that opinion, cutting the stock price target to zero.“U.S. hog farmers look at the pictures of those farms in China, and they just scratch their heads and say, ‘We would never dare do that.’” — Brett Stuart, founder of the research firm Global AgriTrends, is worried about disease risks from China’s high-density pig farms, which in some cases pack the animals into tower blocks.Adam Neumann opens up about his next act Since leaving WeWork, Adam Neumann has (largely) kept quiet about his future plans, including Flow, a venture that Andreessen Horowitz invested $350 million in last year. But he is finally revealing more about the start-up, via a talk he gave to an Andreessen Horowitz-organized conference in November.The main — if still vague — takeaway is that Flow owns and operates apartment buildings that aim to persuade tenants to stay longer by making them “feel” as if they’re owners rather than renters. (How is left unsaid.) Mr. Neumann used plumbing to illustrate the business advantages of this approach, according to Bloomberg:An important element of the business proposition is that renters who stay longer are more profitable, Neumann said. His theory is that people who feel a sense of ownership will stick around.The plunger factor would be an added benefit for Flow. “If you’re in an apartment building and you’re a renter and your toilet gets clogged, you call the super,” he said. “If you’re in your own apartment, and you bought it and you own it and your toilet gets clogged, you take the plunger.” That’s the difference, he said, “when feeling like you own something.”THE SPEED READ DealsApollo is reportedly in talks to buy a stake in CS First Boston, the investment bank that will be spun out of Credit Suisse. (WSJ)Carlyle is said to be in negotiations to buy Cotiviti, a health care tech company, from Veritas Capital for nearly $15 billion. (Bloomberg)Oaktree Capital and other hedge funds have snapped up Adani Group bonds in recent days, restoring investor confidence in the beleaguered Indian conglomerate. (Bloomberg)PolicyMarty Walsh, the U.S. labor secretary, reportedly will step down to lead the N.H.L. players’ union. (Daily Faceoff)Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said he wants to make 16 the minimum age to be allowed on social media in the U.S. (NBC News)Russia’s government is said to be pressuring the central bank to loosen fiscal policy as it enters the second year of its invasion of Ukraine. (Bloomberg)Best of the restAmerican start-ups laid off over 3,000 workers last month, up 1,700 percent from a year ago. Relatedly, Washington now has more tech vacancies than Silicon Valley. (Insider, WSJ)“The Secret Saudi Plan to Buy the World Cup.” (Politico)Voice actors say they’re increasingly being asked to sign away the rights to their voices — so they can be duplicated by A.I. (Vice)How Nestlé’s bet on a breakthrough treatment for peanut allergies went south. (Bloomberg Businessweek)LeBron James now owns the N.B.A.’s scoring record. (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Video Game Workers at Microsoft and Activision Take Steps to Unionize

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      Microsoft has remained neutral during a labor organizing bid as the Xbox maker seeks regulatory approval for its Activision acquisition.A few months after Microsoft announced plans to acquire the video game maker Activision Blizzard, the tech giant said it would remain neutral if Activision workers sought to unionize once the deal went through. Now, a major union is testing Microsoft’s appetite for organizing at a company it already owns.A group of more than 300 employees at ZeniMax Media, a Maryland-based video game maker owned by Microsoft, has begun voting on whether to form the company’s only union in the United States.The vote, among quality assurance employees at ZeniMax, which includes prominent studios like Bethesda Game Studios, is taking place under an informal agreement in which Microsoft is staying neutral. Workers can sign a union authorization card, as some began doing last month, or weigh in anonymously for or against unionization on an electronic platform that opened on Friday.The process will conclude at the end of the month and is more efficient than a typical union election, which is overseen by the National Labor Relations Board and can involve legal wrangling over the terms of the election.The same day that voting began at Microsoft, a group of workers in quality assurance, or Q.A., at an Activision-owned studio near Albany, N.Y., won a union vote, 14 to 0. That result followed a successful union vote in May by about two dozen Q.A. workers at an Activision studio in Wisconsin, a first for a major North American video game maker. Activision’s planned acquisition by Microsoft, for about $70 billion, is facing antitrust review by regulators.The organizing campaigns at both companies have been under the auspices of the Communications Workers of America, which also represents employees at telecom companies like Verizon and media companies like The New York Times.Together, the developments appear to add momentum to a wave of union organizing over the past year at previously nonunion companies like Amazon, Starbucks and Apple. The recent campaigns also suggest that video game workers, who for years have complained of long hours, low pay, and sexual harassment and discrimination, may be increasingly receptive to unionization.More on Big TechMicrosoft: The company’s $69 billion deal for Activision Blizzard, which rests on winning the approval by 16 governments, has become a test for whether tech giants can buy companies amid a backlash.Apple: Apple’s largest iPhone factory, in the city of Zhengzhou, China, is dealing with a shortage of workers. Now, that plant is getting help from an unlikely source: the Chinese government.Amazon: The company appears set to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs, in what would be the largest cuts in the company’s history.Meta: The parent of Facebook said it was laying off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work forceA 300-worker union would be “quite groundbreaking” and could propel Q.A. workers, and even other game workers like developers, to unionize at other large studios, said Johanna Weststar, an associate professor at Western University in Ontario who studies labor in the industry.A Microsoft spokeswoman said that the organizing campaign was “an example of our labor principles in action” and that the company remained “committed to providing employees with an opportunity to freely and fairly make choices about their workplace representation.”The union campaign at Microsoft would affect Q.A. workers at several gaming studios that are a part of ZeniMax Media, including Bethesda, which makes hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout.Microsoft, which makes the Xbox series of consoles, acquired ZeniMax for $7.5 billion, a splashy pandemic purchase that helped it compete against rival Sony and its PlayStation consoles, as well as broaden the appeal of Xbox Game Pass, its video game subscription service. The deal closed last year.The first new major, exclusive-to-Xbox game stemming from that purchase, Starfield, is expected to be released next year by Bethesda. Some of the workers who test it may do so as union members.Three ZeniMax employees said that while helping to make video games was a job they had once dreamed of, their Q.A. roles had taken a toll.Victoria Banos, who has worked at one of the company’s studios in Maryland for over four years, said many of her co-workers endured a ritual known as “crunch” a few times each year. It involves working shifts longer than 10 hours during the week and several hours on Saturday, sometimes for weeks in a row, to ensure that a game works properly before the company releases it.“You’re expected to drop whatever you have going on in your life and work whenever they need you to,” said Ms. Banos, who works on The Elder Scrolls Online. She added that ZeniMax had recently made these overtime hours voluntary, but that many employees still felt pressure to work them.She estimated that her hourly wage of $25.50 left her tens of thousands of dollars below what she would earn annually if she performed a similar job at a different kind of software company — like one that makes financial or security software.Other gaming industry Q.A. testers have echoed these points, citing crunch as a continuing problem and arguing that the industry gets away with paying them less because of the allure of its products and the idea that they should be happy to earn an income playing games. Workers say the mind-numbing process of repeatedly testing specific actions for glitches is far different from playing a game for fun.Some ZeniMax workers also said they preferred more liberal policies on working from home, and they complained that the company’s method of allocating training opportunities, additional responsibility and promotions was often arbitrary or opaque. They said they hoped a union would help create more transparent policies.Andrés Vázquez, who has been based at a ZeniMax studio in the Dallas area for more than seven years, said he had yet to be promoted to the next job level, senior Q.A. tester, even though some co-workers who joined the company around the same time had been promoted beyond that level. Whenever he has raised the issue with managers or human resources officials, he said, “I get corporate lip service.”The Microsoft spokeswoman said the company was talking to employees to ensure that they were not taking on too much work, but she did not comment on the other concerns.Still, the workers praised Microsoft for following through on its promise of neutrality. Unlike workers at Starbucks and Amazon, they say, they have not been summoned to meetings in which supervisors seek to dissuade them from unionizing, and they do not feel that the company has retaliated against them for trying to form a union. (Starbucks and Amazon have denied accusations of retaliation.)“It’s been an incredible weight lifted off our shoulders,” said Autumn Mitchell, another Q.A. employee based in Maryland, who has worked on Starfield, the forthcoming game.Workers at the studio near Albany also cited concerns over pay and hours in their decision to unionize, as well as accusations of harassment and discrimination at the company.Amanda Laven, a Q.A. employee involved in the union campaign at the studio, said workers were frustrated that the company had tried to stop their union election on the grounds that it involved only Q.A. workers rather than the whole studio. The National Labor Relations Board had rejected Activision’s attempts to stop the union election at its Wisconsin studio on similar grounds, but the company appealed to the labor board in this case as well.“It’s just a stall tactic,” Ms. Laven said in an interview before the vote count.An Activision spokesman said that the company’s operations in New York and Wisconsin were “very different” in their setup and that it believed the entire Albany studio should be eligible to vote. The spokesman said the company was “considering various legal options,” including seeking to overturn the election.Activision workers seeking to unionize could find the company more receptive in the future.In June, Microsoft announced an agreement with the Communications Workers of America in which it pledged to stay neutral if any of Activision’s U.S. employees sought to unionize after it completed its acquisition. Activision has about 7,000 employees in the country, most of whom are eligible to unionize.Microsoft had a motive for seeking the neutrality agreement: The politically powerful communications workers union had raised questions about the acquisition, which regulators were vetting. The union said its concerns about the acquisition had been resolved after it reached the neutrality agreement.The company hinted at the time that it would extend the neutrality agreement to current Microsoft employees, saying it was prepared to “build on” the deal. The union essentially tested that proposition when it sought to organize Q.A. workers at ZeniMax, and Microsoft followed through.Microsoft may have had an additional reason to take a neutral stance. Showing that it has a healthy relationship with organized labor could help the company navigate the acquisition under the union-friendly Biden administration as scrutiny of the deal intensifies.As if to underscore the point, the union’s president, Chris Shelton, met with the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission in October and urged regulators not to block the deal.Karen Weise More

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      Project Veritas Says Justice Dept. Secretly Seized Its Emails

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      In a court filing, the conservative group assailed prosecutors for concealing the action in a proceeding from the investigation of how it acquired Ashley Biden’s diary.The conservative group Project Veritas said on Tuesday that the Justice Department began secretly seizing a trove of its internal communications in late 2020, just weeks after learning that the group had obtained a copy of President Biden’s daughter’s diary.In a court filing, a lawyer for Project Veritas assailed the Justice Department’s actions, which involved subpoenas, search warrants and court production orders that had not been previously disclosed and gag orders imposed on Microsoft, whose servers housed the group’s emails.The disclosure underscored the scope and intensity of the legal battle surrounding the Justice Department’s investigation into how Project Veritas, in the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, came into possession of a diary kept by Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter, and other possessions she had stored at a house in Florida.And it highlighted how the Justice Department has resisted demands by the conservative group — which regularly engages in sting operations and ambush interviews against news organizations and liberal groups and has targeted perceived political opponents — to be treated as a news organization entitled to First Amendment protections.It is highly unusual for the Justice Department to obtain the internal communications of journalists, as federal prosecutors are supposed to follow special guidelines to ensure they do not infringe on First Amendment rights.Since the investigation was disclosed last fall, federal prosecutors have repeatedly said that because they have evidence that the group may have committed a crime in obtaining Ms. Biden’s belongings, Project Veritas is not entitled to First Amendment protections.But Project Veritas, in its filing on Tuesday, said that prosecutors had failed to be forthcoming with a federal judge about the nature of their inquiry by choosing not to disclose the secret subpoenas and warrants.“This is a fundamental, intolerable abridgment of the First Amendment by the Department of Justice,” James O’Keefe, the group’s founder and leader, said in a video.In its court filing, Project Veritas asked a federal judge to intervene to stop the Justice Department from using the materials it had obtained from Microsoft in the investigation. The group said that federal prosecutors had obtained “voluminous materials” — which in many cases included the contents of emails — from Microsoft for eight of its employees, including Mr. O’Keefe.The group also disclosed that Uber had told two of its operatives who are under investigation — Spencer Meads and Eric Cochran — that it had handed over information from their accounts in March of last year in response to demands from the government.Microsoft said in response to questions about the matter that it had initially challenged the government’s demands for Project Veritas’s information, but the company declined to describe what that entailed.“We’ve believed for a long time that secrecy should be the exception and used only when truly necessary,” said Frank X. Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft. “We always push back when the government is seeking the data of an enterprise customer under a secrecy order and always tell the customer as soon as we’re legally able.”According to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, Microsoft had pushed back on the Justice Department’s subpoenas and warrants when the company was served with them in late 2020 and early 2021. But the government refused to drop its demands and Microsoft handed over the information that prosecutors were seeking, the person said.Because of gag orders that had been imposed, Microsoft was barred from telling Project Veritas about the requests, the person said.Shortly after the existence of the investigation was revealed publicly last fall, Microsoft asked the Justice Department whether it could tell Project Veritas about the requests, the person said. The department refused to lift the gag orders, the person said.In response, Microsoft drafted a lawsuit against the Justice Department to try to get the gag orders lifted and told department officials that the company was prepared to file it. Soon afterward, the department went to court and had the gag orders lifted.A little more than a week ago, Microsoft told Project Veritas about the warrants and subpoenas, the person said.Project Veritas paid $40,000 for Ms. Biden’s diary to a man and a woman from Florida who said that it had been obtained from a home where Ms. Biden had been staying until a few months earlier. Project Veritas also had possession of other items left at the house by Ms. Biden, and at the heart of the investigation is whether the group played a role in the removal of those items from the home.Project Veritas has denied any wrongdoing and maintained that Ms. Biden’s belongings had been abandoned. The group never published the diary.Search warrants used in raids last fall on the homes of Mr. O’Keefe and two other Project Veritas operatives showed that the Justice Department was investigating conspiracy to transport stolen property and possession of stolen goods, among other crimes.In response to the searches, a federal judge, at the urging of Project Veritas, appointed a special master to oversee what evidence federal prosecutors could keep from the dozens of cellphones and electronic devices the authorities had obtained.Project Veritas said in its filing on Tuesday that at the time the special master was appointed the government should have revealed that it had conducted other searches that could have infringed on the group’s First Amendment rights or could have been protected by attorney-client privilege.In the final year of the Trump administration, prosecutors in Washington, who were investigating a leak of classified information, secretly obtained court orders demanding that Google, which houses The New York Times’s email accounts, hand over information from four Times reporters’ accounts. In response to requests from Google, the Justice Department allowed it to alert The Times to the demands so the newspaper could fight the orders. A lawyer for The Times, David McCraw, secretly fought the demands, which the government ultimately dropped. More

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      Preparing for Retaliation Against Russia, U.S. Confronts Hacking by China

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPreparing for Retaliation Against Russia, U.S. Confronts Hacking by ChinaThe proliferation of cyberattacks by rivals is presenting a challenge to the Biden administration as it seeks to deter intrusions on government and corporate systems.Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, last month. He said on Thursday that the White House was “closely tracking” reports that the vulnerabilities exploited in the Microsoft hacking were being used in “potential compromises of U.S. think tanks and defense industrial base entities.”Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesDavid E. Sanger, Julian E. Barnes and March 7, 2021Updated 9:42 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Just as it plans to begin retaliating against Russia for the large-scale hacking of American government agencies and corporations discovered late last year, the Biden administration faces a new cyberattack that raises the question of whether it will have to strike back at another major adversary: China.Taken together, the responses will start to define how President Biden fashions his new administration’s response to escalating cyberconflict and whether he can find a way to impose a steeper penalty on rivals who regularly exploit vulnerabilities in government and corporate defenses to spy, steal information and potentially damage critical components of the nation’s infrastructure.The first major move is expected over the next three weeks, officials said, with a series of clandestine actions across Russian networks that are intended to be evident to President Vladimir V. Putin and his intelligence services and military but not to the wider world.The officials said the actions would be combined with some kind of economic sanctions — though there are few truly effective sanctions left to impose — and an executive order from Mr. Biden to accelerate the hardening of federal government networks after the Russian hacking, which went undetected for months until it was discovered by a private cybersecurity firm.The issue has taken on added urgency at the White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies in recent days after the public exposure of a major breach in Microsoft email systems used by small businesses, local governments and, by some accounts, key military contractors.Microsoft identified the intruders as a state-sponsored Chinese group and moved quickly to issue a patch to allow users of its software to close off the vulnerability.But that touched off a race between those responsible for patching the systems and a raft of new attackers — including multiple other Chinese hacking groups, according to Microsoft — who started using the same exploit this week.The United States government has not made public any formal determination of who was responsible for the hacking, but at the White House and on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Wash., the fear is that espionage and theft may be a prelude to far more destructive activity, such as changing data or wiping it out.The White House underscored the seriousness of the situation in a statement on Sunday from the National Security Council.“The White House is undertaking a whole of government response to assess and address the impact” of the Microsoft intrusion, the statement said. It said the response was being led by Anne Neuberger, a former senior National Security Agency official who is the first occupant of a newly created post: deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies.The statement said that national security officials were working throughout the weekend to address the hacking and that “this is an active threat still developing, and we urge network operators to take it very seriously.”Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, said on Twitter on Thursday that the White House was “closely tracking” the reports that the vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange were being used in “potential compromises of U.S. think tanks and defense industrial base entities.”The discovery came as Mr. Biden’s national security team, led by Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Neuberger, has moved to the top of its agenda an effort to deter attacks, whether their intent is theft, altering data or shutting down networks entirely. For the president, who promised that the Russian attack would not “go unanswered,” the administration’s reactions in the coming weeks will be a test of his ability to assert American power in an often unseen but increasingly high-stakes battle among major powers in cyberspace.A mix of public sanctions and private actions is the most likely combination to force a “broad strategic discussion with the Russians,” Mr. Sullivan said in an interview on Thursday, before the scope of the Chinese attack was clear.“I actually believe that a set of measures that are understood by the Russians, but may not be visible to the broader world, are actually likely to be the most effective measures in terms of clarifying what the United States believes are in bounds and out of bounds, and what we are prepared to do in response,” he added.From the first day of the new administration, Mr. Sullivan has been reorganizing the White House to fashion such responses. The same order he issued on Jan. 20, requiring the military to advise the White House before conducting drone strikes outside war zones, contained a paragraph with separate instructions for dealing with major cyberoperations that risk escalating conflict.The order left in place, however, a still secret document signed by President Donald J. Trump in August 2018 giving the United States Cyber Command broader authorities than it had during the Obama administration to conduct day-to-day, short-of-war skirmishes in cyberspace, often without explicit presidential authorization.Under the new order, Cyber Command will have to bring operations of significant size and scope to the White House and allow the National Security Council to review or adjust those operations, according to officials briefed on the memo. The forthcoming operation against Russia, and any potential response to China, is likely to fall in this category.The hacking that Microsoft has attributed to China poses many of the same challenges as the SolarWinds attack by the Russians that was discovered late last year.Credit…Swayne B. Hall/Associated PressAmerican officials continue to try to better understand the scope and damage done by the Chinese attack, but every day since its revelation has suggested that it is bigger, and potentially more harmful, than first thought.“This is a crazy huge hack,” Christopher C. Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, wrote on Twitter on Friday.The initial estimates were that 30,000 or so systems were affected, mostly those operated by businesses or government agencies that use Microsoft software and run their email systems in-house. (Email and others systems run on Microsoft’s cloud were not affected.)But the breadth of the intrusion and the identities of the victims are still unclear. And while the Chinese deployed the attack widely, they might have sought only to take information from a narrow group of targets in which they have the highest interest.There is little doubt that the scope of the attack has American officials considering whether they will have to retaliate against China as well. That would put them in the position of engaging in a potentially escalating conflict with two countries that are also its biggest nuclear-armed adversaries.It has become increasingly clear in recent days that the hacking that Microsoft has attributed to Beijing poses many of the same challenges as the SolarWinds attack conducted by the Russians, although the targets and the methodology are significantly different.Like the Russians, the Chinese attackers initiated their campaign against Microsoft from computer servers — essentially cloud services — that they rented under assumed identities in the United States. Both countries know that American law prohibits intelligence agencies from looking in systems based in the United States, and they are exploiting that legal restriction.“The Chinese actor apparently spent the time to research the legal authorities and recognized that if they could operate from inside the United States, it takes some of the government’s best threat-hunters off the field,” Tom Burt, the Microsoft executive overseeing the investigation, said on Friday.The result was that in both the SolarWinds and the more recent Chinese hacking, American intelligence agencies appeared to have missed the evidence of what was happening until a private company saw it and alerted the authorities.The debate preoccupying the White House is how to respond. Mr. Sullivan served as Mr. Biden’s national security adviser while he was vice president, as the Obama administration struggled to respond to a series of attacks.Those included the Chinese effort that stole 22.5 million security-clearance records from the Office of Personnel Management in 2014 and the Russian attack on the 2016 presidential election.In writings and talks over the past four years, Mr. Sullivan has made clear that he believes traditional sanctions alone do not sufficiently raise the cost to force powers like Russia or China to begin to talk about new rules of the road for cyberspace.But government officials often fear that too strong a response risks escalation.That is a particular concern in the Russian and Chinese attacks, where both countries have clearly planted “back doors” to American systems that could be used for more destructive purposes.American officials say publicly that the current evidence suggests that the Russian intention in the SolarWinds attack was merely data theft. But several senior officials, when speaking not for attribution, said they believed the size, scope and expense of the operation suggested that the Russians might have had much broader motives.“I’m struck by how many of these attacks undercut trust in our systems,” Mr. Burt said, “just as there are efforts to make the country distrust the voting infrastructure, which is a core component of our democracy.”Russia broke into the Democratic National Committee and state voter-registration systems in 2016 largely by guessing or obtaining passwords. But they used a far more sophisticated method in the SolarWinds hacking, inserting code into the company’s software updates, which ushered them deep into about 18,000 systems that used the network management software. Once inside, the Russians had high-level access to the systems, with no passwords required.Similarly, four years ago, a vast majority of Chinese government hacking was conducted via email spear-phishing campaigns. But over the past few years, China’s military hacking divisions have been consolidating into a new strategic support force, similar to the Pentagon’s Cyber Command. Some of the most important hacking operations are run by the stealthier Ministry of State Security, China’s premier intelligence agency, which maintains a satellite network of contractors.Beijing also started hoarding so-called zero-days, flaws in code unknown to software vendors and for which a patch does not exist.In August 2019, security researchers got their first glimpse of how these undisclosed zero-day flaws were being used: Security researchers at Google’s Project Zero and Volexity — the same company in Reston, Va., that discovered the Microsoft attack — found that Chinese hackers were using a software vulnerability to spy on anyone who visited a website read by Uighurs, an ethnic minority group whose persecution has drawn international condemnation.For two years, until the campaign was discovered, anyone who visited the sites unwittingly downloaded Chinese implants onto their smartphones, allowing Beijing to monitor their communications.Kevin Mandia of FireEye, Sudhakar Ramakrishna of SolarWinds and Brad Smith of Microsoft testified last month in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the Russian hacking.Credit…Drew Angerer/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/Afp Via Getty ImagesThe Chinese attack on Microsoft’s servers used four zero-days flaws in the email software. Security experts estimated on Friday that as many as 30,000 organizations were affected by the hacking, a detail first reported by the security writer Brian Krebs. But there is some evidence that the number could be much higher.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More