Was the Amazon De-Listing Situation a Glitch Or a Hack?

Miracle Jones writes "As Amazon struggles to re-list and re-rank gay, lesbian, and adult books on their website after massive public outcry against the secretive partitioning process, they are claiming that the entire situation was not the result of an intentional policy at all, are not apologizing, and are instead insisting that the situation was the result of 'a glitch' that they are now trying to fix. While some hackers are claiming credit for 'amazonfail,' and it is indeed possible that an outside party is responsible, most claims have already been debunked. How likely is it that Amazon was hacked versus the likelihood of an internal Easter weekend glitch? Or is the most obvious and likely scenario true, and Amazon simply got caught implementing a wildly-unpopular new policy without telling anyone?"

Breaking news...

[Miracle Jones]

Additionally, Ed Champion is reporting that Amazon has finally broken today's silence to comment on the matter to him [edrants.com], calling the episode "a ham-fisted cataloging error." From Champion's website: "After multiple attempts to contact Amazon, I have at long last received the following reply from Patty Smith by email: "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles -- in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search. Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future."

The one time I try to RTFA...

[brainfsck]

I clicked on the link [fictioncircus.com] about hackers claiming credit for the Amazon hack expecting to find to find a professional web site about computer security.

Instead, I got a bizarrely colored and (hopefully) satirical blog containing articles titled "Amazon is a Gay-Hating Company for Nazis" [fictioncircus.com].

That'll teach me for trying to RTFA.

Re:To avoid this..

[Nutria]

being gay isn't a personal preference, it's genetic.

Research indicates it more likely to be hormonal.

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who is privy to the inside story here, it's rather tragicomic to see otherwise-intelligent people peddle false information and conspiracy theories when actual, real data is out there.

Please read the link mentioned in the summary, http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp

There's your answer. Sorry, no hackz0rs or clandestine corporate policy changes involved.

Re:who is misrepresenting the truth

[cduffy]

This begs several questions. Is the above email genuine? If genuine, was the statement valid or was it an honest misstatement by a customer service person. If the quoted text is true, does Amazon in fact have a policy of excluding items that it considers porn, and was it this policy that was hacked?

No, it does not beg several questions, it raises them. Beggaring a question is a completely different thing. [end pedantry]

The quote from the customer service person was probably correct, inasmuch as the relevant content was inadvertently flagged as pornographic due to, as Amazon puts it, a ham-fisted cataloging error -- allegedly by Amazon's French office [lilithsaintcrow.com]. I doubt that the customer service type exercised enough initiative to determine whether the flag was set correctly.

The exclusion of pornographic content was a new, intentional policy. The classification of sexual but non-pornographic content was an error.

Amazon have done this before

[Ren.Tamek]

Anyone remember the massive public protest against the stupid Spore DRM scheme? If you look up the game on Amazon, you can still see the extremely low rating [amazon.com] people are giving it.

Well, a couple of weeks later and Amazon had had enough. Even though the concerns about DRM and Starforce were definitely something consumers would want to know before they bought the product, one day the reviews just dissappeared. The cause? A mysterious glitch! [kotaku.com] Sound familiar? The publicity from game news sites was so bad they put the reviews back up almost instantly.

Kind of proves that Amazon haven't really learned their lesson about what kind of behaviour will and won't be tolerated by the public. How many gay and lesbian customers is this incident going to lose them, I wonder? Was is worth it to appease whoever paid them to do it?

Re:Maybe...

[Ren.Tamek]

Yes, it's Amazons favourite excuse as of late. Remember when DRM and Starforce caused a consumer backlash which generated thousands of negative reviews for Spore? [amazon.com] Somehow, they all got lost due to a mysterious glitch [kotaku.com] too!

Every games news site in town reports the selective censoring... and within hours the mysterious glitch is just as mysteriously solved.

let me ask you, what kind of glitch would cause material whose topics are at odds with conservative Christian values not to show up on the main search engine? Not just gay and lesbian titles, but 'Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica' [edrants.com] also. Someone at Amazon has been caught with their pants down i'd say...

Iowa couldn't, actually

[namespan]

Iowa courts issued a ruling and opinion that's at odds with earlier legislation... which the court says is at odds with more fundamental legal issues. That's a far cry from saying the state "could agree on" gay marriage.

Re:For the record...

[calmofthestorm]

The case in the courts now is whether it is a major amendment (gay rights activists' position), since it takes a right away from a minority to the constitution, and thus requires a 2/3 vote rather than the simple majority it barely received, or a minor amendment (gay marriage opponents' position), since it only clarifies a point already provided for in the constitution.

Re:Iowa couldn't, actually

[Pharmboy]

Iowa was also among the first to legalize marriages of blacks and whites. Slavery was never legal in Iowa. Believe it or not, people in "fly over country" are not nearly as backward as some would think. They have been the "first to" do a lot of things. Most of the people I have known from Iowa were pretty progressive in their thinking. Lots of farmers and people who live in the country, yes, but not bigotted.

Re:To avoid this..

[rhakka]

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/118/1/349 [aappublications.org] provides an in depth study. that took all of two minutes to find via google, if the hordes of anecdotal reports over time have not been high in your conciousness.

Scroll about halfway down to the PSYCHOSOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF GAY AND LESBIAN PARENTS AND THEIR CHILDREN section, and you'll find that children raised in such contexts are normal, normal, normal across the board. they quote study after study after study looking for problems and finding none, none, none and none.

Re:Maybe...

[fumblebruschi]

Amazon has an automated feature that tags any book as "adult" if a certain number of people complain about it (using the "report this as inappropriate" button.)

A hacker, apparently as revenge for some delisting on Craigslist for which he blamed gay people, scraped Amazon for books whose metadata tagged them as GBLT, and then mass-reported them as "adult" to get them removed from search rankings. (The details are here: http://pastebin.ca/1390576. [pastebin.ca])

So it was both a glitch *and* a hack: that is, the glitch was that a hacker could take advantage of an automated feature in this way. The reply sent to Mark Probst -- that Amazon excludes adult material from searches -- was perfectly accurate, and simply sent to him at a time when Amazon had not yet realized that this hack was taking place.