With brief, occasional, italicized and sometimes gratuitous commentary…
• From Reuters:
"California Attorney General Xavier Becerra on Monday petitioned a court to force Amazon.com Inc to comply with outstanding subpoenas over a state investigation into its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
"The petition, filed with the Sacramento County Superior Court, accused Amazon of failing to adequately follow the state’s information requests as part of an investigation into the company’s coronavirus protocols and status of COVID-19 cases at its California facilities … The subpoenas seek information about Amazon’s sick-leave policies, sanitation measures and data about the spread of the virus at the company’s California warehouses."
“Amazon has delayed responding adequately to our investigative requests long enough,” Becerra, said in the petition.
Amazon said that it has been cooperating and is "puzzled by the attorney general’s sudden rush to court. ... Their claims of noncompliance with their demands don’t line up with the facts."
One reason for the rush b might be that Becerra could be leaving his AG post - he's been nominated by President-elect Joe Biden to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).
• GeekWire reports that "Amazon plans to open its seventh Amazon Go store location in Seattle, expanding its brick-and-mortar grocery footprint despite the ongoing pandemic.
"An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the new convenience store, located at 1423 4th Ave. in the heart of downtown Seattle. It’s unclear when the store will open but signage has gone up. The 1,475 square-foot location previously housed an Office Depot retail location that closed in 2016."
The original Amazon Go opened almost three years ago about 1.5 miles away from the new one. The story notes that "Amazon now has more than 25 Amazon Go locations across Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle. Most remain open but a few are temporarily closed."
• From the Washington Post:
"A host of Alphabet services were knocked offline Monday in a worldwide outage spanning the tech giant’s major platforms - including YouTube, Google Drive and Gmail - suspending work and school accounts for tens of millions of users … Google blamed an 'internal storage quota issue' for the outage."
The outage began at 6:55 am EST yesterday and lasted less than 45 minutes.
I've occasionally run out of hard drive space, but I never expected it to happen to Google. Must be all that customer data that it has been hiding behind a shroud of secrecy…
