Amazon warehouse workers in New York City voted in favor of joining a trade union on Friday, marking the first-ever successful union campaign against the tech giant in its history.

The election was held by staff at Amazon's JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, New York: 2,654 votes were cast by the facility's workers in favor of joining the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) versus 2,131 votes against the move. About 8,300 in total were eligible to vote, and the results need to be signed off by US labor officials. The White House applauded the outcome:

Psaki says Pres. Biden was “glad” to see Amazon workers in New York City forming the company’s first U.S. union. “He believes firmly that every worker in every state must have a free and fair choice to join a union and the right to bargain collectively with their employer." pic.twitter.com/3o3DhPKytu

The ALU is an independent union made up of current and former workers of JFK8. Formed in April 2021, it's led by president Christian Smalls, an ex-Amazon employee who was fired for organizing protests over working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Smalls and his colleagues filed a petition to hold a union election with America's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in October last year.

After months of fundraising and campaigning, the ALU successfully persuaded a majority of workers to join the union. The groundbreaking victory marks the first time Amazon has failed to quash unionization efforts since the internet titan was founded over a quarter of a century ago, paving the way for other warehouses to follow suit. JFK8 is Amazon's biggest warehouse in New York.

The campaign reportedly rattled Amazon enough that they not only bombarded staff at the facility with anti-union messaging, bosses discussed Smalls in rather uncharitable terms internally while planning a PR blitz to sink the unionization attempt.

"We worked had fun and made history," Smalls tweeted this morning. "ALU for the win. Welcome the 1st union in America for Amazon."

The ALU wants Amazon to bump wages by 7.5 percent to match inflation, reinstate 20-minute breaks, and provide a private shuttle service for employees.

Previous attempts at unionizing have failed. Warehouse workers represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in Bessemer, Alabama, lost an election held last April. After that union filed objections to the NLRB, claiming Amazon illegally interfered with the vote and intimidated workers, the group was granted another opportunity to run the election. Ballots were cast on Thursday, and the results have yet to be confirmed.

Although JFK8 workers have secured a victory against Amazon, it'll be an uphill battle to get the biz to recognize the union. "We're disappointed with the outcome of the election in Staten Island because we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees", a spokesperson for the web goliath told CNBC.

"We're evaluating our options, including filing objections based on the inappropriate and undue influence by the NLRB that we and others (including the National Retail Federation and US Chamber of Commerce) witnessed in this election."

The ALU was jubilant and undeterred.

"We're extremely pleased with the outcome and it's a historic victory. We hope it'll set off a wave of organizing in the country," ALU's Connor Spence, VP of membership, told The Register. Regarding Amazon's threat to appeal the vote outcome, Spence added: "I don't foresee it going anywhere. It's just a way to forestall our unionization." ®

Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft often support privacy in public statements, but behind the scenes they've been working through some common organizations to weaken or kill privacy legislation in US states.

That's according to a report this week from news non-profit The Markup, which said the corporations hire lobbyists from the same few groups and law firms to defang or drown state privacy bills.

The report examined 31 states when state legislatures were considering privacy legislation and identified 445 lobbyists and lobbying firms working on behalf of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with industry groups like TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition.

America's financial watchdog is investigating whether Elon Musk adequately disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares last month, just as his bid to take over the social media company hangs in the balance. 

A letter [PDF] from the SEC addressed to the tech billionaire said he "[did] not appear" to have filed the proper form detailing his 9.2 percent stake in Twitter "required 10 days from the date of acquisition," and asked him to provide more information. Musk's shares made him one of Twitter's largest shareholders. 

Musk quickly moved to try and buy the whole company outright in a deal initially worth over $44 billion. Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion and bagged another $7.14 billion from investors to help finance the $21 billion he promised to put forward for the deal. The remaining $25.5 billion bill was secured via debt financing by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. But the takeover is not going smoothly.

Cloud security company Lacework has laid off 20 percent of its employees, just months after two record-breaking funding rounds pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion.

A spokesperson wouldn't confirm the total number of employees affected, though told The Register that the "widely speculated number on Twitter is a significant overestimate."

The company, as of March, counted more than 1,000 employees, which would push the jobs lost above 200. And the widely reported number on Twitter is about 300 employees. The biz, based in Silicon Valley, was founded in 2015.

A researcher at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence team found eight vulnerabilities in the Open Automation Software (OAS) platform that, if exploited, could enable a bad actor to access a device and run code on a targeted system.

The OAS platform is widely used by a range of industrial enterprises, essentially facilitating the transfer of data within an IT environment between hardware and software and playing a central role in organizations' industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) efforts. It touches a range of devices, including PLCs and OPCs and IoT devices, as well as custom applications and APIs, databases and edge systems.

Companies like Volvo, General Dynamics, JBT Aerotech and wind-turbine maker AES are among the users of the OAS platform.

Nvidia is expecting a $500 million hit to its global datacenter and consumer business in the second quarter due to COVID lockdowns in China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite those and other macroeconomic concerns, executives are still optimistic about future prospects.

"The full impact and duration of the war in Ukraine and COVID lockdowns in China is difficult to predict. However, the impact of our technology and our market opportunities remain unchanged," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and co-founder, during the company's first-quarter earnings call.

Those two statements might sound a little contradictory, including to some investors, particularly following the stock selloff yesterday after concerns over Russia and China prompted Nvidia to issue lower-than-expected guidance for second-quarter revenue.

HPE is lifting the lid on a new AI supercomputer – the second this week – aimed at building and training larger machine learning models to underpin research.

Based at HPE's Center of Excellence in Grenoble, France, the new supercomputer is to be named Champollion after the French scholar who made advances in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 19th century. It was built in partnership with Nvidia using AMD-based Apollo computer nodes fitted with Nvidia's A100 GPUs.

Champollion brings together HPC and purpose-built AI technologies to train machine learning models at scale and unlock results faster, HPE said. HPE already provides HPC and AI resources from its Grenoble facilities for customers, and the broader research community to access, and said it plans to provide access to Champollion for scientists and engineers globally to accelerate testing of their AI models and research.

HR and finance application vendor Workday's CEO, Aneel Bhusri, confirmed deal wins expected for the three-month period ending April 30 were being pushed back until later in 2022.

The SaaS company boss was speaking as Workday recorded an operating loss of $72.8 million in its first quarter [PDF] of fiscal '23, nearly double the $38.3 million loss recorded for the same period a year earlier. Workday also saw revenue increase to $1.43 billion in the period, up 22 percent year-on-year.

However, the company increased its revenue guidance for the full financial year. It said revenues would be between $5.537 billion and $5.557 billion, an increase of 22 percent on earlier estimates.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is lining up yet another investigation into Google over its dominance of the digital advertising market.

This latest inquiry, announced Thursday, is the second major UK antitrust investigation into Google this year alone. In March this year the UK, together with the European Union, said it wished to examine Google's "Jedi Blue" agreement with Meta to allegedly favor the former's Open Bidding ads platform.

The news also follows proposals last week by a bipartisan group of US lawmakers to create legislation that could force Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook, and Amazon to divest portions of their ad businesses.

Microsoft has hit the brakes on hiring in some key product areas as the company prepares for the next fiscal year and all that might bring.

According to reports in the Bloomberg, the unit that develops Windows, Office, and Teams is affected and while headcount remains expected to grow, new hires in that division must first be approved by bosses.

During a talk this week at JP Morgan's Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Rajesh Jha, executive VP for the Office Product Group, noted that within three years he expected approximately two-thirds of CIOs to standardize on Microsoft Teams. 1.4 billion PCs were running Windows. He also remarked: "We have lots of room here to grow the seats with Office 365."

Enterprises are still kitting out their workforce with the latest computers and refreshing their datacenter hardware despite a growing number of "uncertainties" in the world.

This is according to hardware tech bellwethers including Dell, which turned over $26.1 billion in sales for its Q1 of fiscal 2023 ended 29 April, a year-on-year increase of 16 percent.

"We are seeing a shift in spend from consumer and PCs to datacenter infrastructure," said Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman and co-chief operating officer. "IT demand is currently healthy," he added.

GitHub has revealed it stored a "number of plaintext user credentials for the npm registry" in internal logs following the integration of the JavaScript package registry into GitHub's logging systems.

The information came to light when the company today published the results of its investigation into April's unrelated OAuth token theft attack, where it described how an attacker grabbed data including the details of approximately 100,000 npm users.

The code shack went on to assure users that the relevant log files had not been leaked in any data breach; that it had improved the log cleanup; and that it removed the logs in question "prior to the attack on npm."

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