Was the Amazon De-Listing Situation a Glitch Or a Hack? 396
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?"
Wildly unpopular? (Score:1, Interesting)
So a few people get upset, make some noise, and it's suddenly wildly unpopular? I bet less than .1% of Amazon's customer base cares.
Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
If this was an outside job, it's quite clever and the timing was perfect.
If nothing else, it's a major wake-up call as to just how much power Amazon has amassed over the media as we know it. If we were looking at an upcoming Orwellian future, Amazon is certainly one possible cornerstone for total information control, right next to sites like Google.
Perhaps it's time to step back a really take a good hard look at how exactly we get all our information and how easily it could be taken away from us.
(That said, I know Amazon doesn't have a monopoly, but their role is still significant, none-the-less...)
Re:type 'homosexuality' into the amazon search bar (Score:1, Interesting)
Maybe their anti-homosexuality books are just more popular?
Searching for "heterosexuality" brings up books critical of heterosexuality (as a norm or ideal) as well.
Re:To avoid this.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Simple solution - A quick prick from a syringe incorporated into your keyboard and they can tell if you're into gay literature. Or whether you're a potential alcoholic and should be banned from the wine-of-the-month-club. Or whether you've damaged your DNA with LSD and should be barred from buying mushroom spores from Seattle.
Why are we so short sighted?
[/sarc]
Seriously though, Amazon is one of 2 companies that makes their claim-to-fame via the Internet that I actually have faith in (I'm an admitted Google fan-boi, in spite of their over-seas policies). They seem pretty willing to sell whatever will fetch a price and do it at reasonable rates. When Fahrenheit 451 and Animal Farm drop off their list, I'll start whining. Until then, I actually believe them. Bitch at Amazon that you can't get what you want - From my experience, they'll find it. They want to sell everything to everyone.
who is misrepresenting the truth (Score:3, Interesting)
Within this blog entry the following assertion was made:
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?
I the policy does exist, isn't it much more likely that Amazon was modifying this policy and there was some sort of error in the code, or perhaps a over active coder introduced the feature.
Re:To avoid this.. (Score:5, Interesting)
being gay isn't a personal preference, it's genetic.
If you try to tell some gay people that they're gay because they made a choice, they'll claim it's genetic (thereby forestalling comments about their having made a bad choice.) If you try to tell them it's genetic, they get upset because they think you're saying their brains are defective, and insist they're exercising a personal preference instead. Like arguing religion or politics, it's not an argument that can ever be won.
Me, I have no problem accepting that I'm straight because it's in my genes. Whatever, doesn't really matter: as the Great Popeye once said, "I am what I am, what's all that I am." Sexuality is one of the most fundamental aspects of the human psyche, one that is vitally important to us for most of our lives, no matter what side of the fence we're on. To say it's simply "a choice" is demeaning on the face of it. It's too much a part of who we are.
Eventually, technology is going to make our very genes a matter of personal preference. It will be interesting to see which side the gay community comes down on then, since even if homosexuality really is a strictly hereditary phenomenon, there will truly be a choice. Of course, that will work both ways.
Hacked internally? (Score:1, Interesting)
What if it wasn't an official policy, but someone with database access decided to go on a crusade on this point?
Griefers. (Score:5, Interesting)
"It's obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as "adult" after too many people have complained about it. ... So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find. To the outside world, this looks like deliberate censorship on the part of Amazon, since Amazon operates the web application in question.""
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/index.html [antipope.org]
Re:Interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
If nothing else, it's a major wake-up call as to just how much power Amazon has amassed over the media as we know it.
No, this was a major wake-up call as to just how much havoc less than 140 characters can wreak upon a keystone business in less than 24 hours.
When did "bug" become "glitch" ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've noticed a growing trend of people replacing the word "bug" with "glitch," in ever increasingly frequency. Anyone else noticed this? I am active in an open source fps (http://sauerbraten.org/ [sauerbraten.org]), and paying attention to questions and comments by new users has really highlighted this trend. What's the cause in this shift? World of Warcraft? (Don't laugh - a game with that kind of userbase can have an impact, at the scale they operate at).
Re:I don't think "hack" is the right word (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems like a hack to me, assuming it's true of course.
http://pastebin.ca/1390576 [pastebin.ca]
Oh hey Owen Thomas! How you doin?
Hay dude. Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code".
I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like "looking to get tarred and pleasured" and "Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence's lexical subject" kept getting flagged. The audacity of the San Francisco gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for "pnp" or "tina" reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. So I decided to get them back, and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.
I'm logged into Amazon at the time and see it has a "report as inappropriate" feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.
I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.
So I script some quick bash. /tmp/amazon
#!/bin/bash
let count = 1
while true; do
links -dump 'http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=0/?ie=ASCII&rs=1000&keywords=Gay_and_Lesbian&rh=n%3A!1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHomosexuality&page='`echo $count`|grep \/dp\/ >>
((count++))
done
There's some quick code to grab all the Gay and Lesbian metadata-tagged books on amazon. Then I pull out all the IDs of the given books from those URLs:
cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//
and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.
Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called "Cross-site request forgery'. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.
I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.
I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. If you ever need a service like that, you can find them in a post like this advertising in the comments:
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/solving-captchas-for-cash/ [ckers.org]
Then they would log into the accounts, save the cookies in a cookie file and send it to me.
Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books:
for i in `cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//`; do lynx -cookie_file=/home/avex/cookie1 http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/ [amazon.com]`echo $i`/;done
The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.
I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay and outrage across the blogosphere ain't so bad.
The only person to figure it out was dely from Six Apart:
http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html [livejournal.com]
but he has been ground zero at my work, cleaning up my messes before.
So just letting you know the chain of events. if you choose to report on this, please don't disclose my identity/email address. Thanks!
Re:type 'homosexuality' into the amazon search bar (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Has to have been intentional (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:To avoid this.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:To avoid this.. (Score:5, Interesting)
As for sexuality being a choice - I challenge you to (assuming you're straight and male, adjust genders as appropriate if not) look up some gay porn and find it arousing.
Here's an experiment for you - find some random object/picture and stare at it while jacking off. Do that enough times, and you'll start to get horny when you see the object. It's a conditioned response involving brain chemistry and hormones. See also: Pavlov.
Homosexuality is not "acceptable"?
A viewpoint held by a large number of people in society, is that homosexuality is not a good lifestyle choice.
You remind me of a guy I used to work with, who said that gay couples shouldn't be allowed to adopt because "then the kids would grow up thinking it's OK".
Hmm. There are a number of disqualifying criteria for adoption, in various states. For example, if someone's primary occupation is as the owner of a strip club or as an exotic dancer, they're likely to be rejected. Some states only look for married couples to adopt. If someone has a history of being a gang member, I'd probably rather they not adopt because they have a higher likelihood of teaching the kid that gang membership and associated behavior (drug use, crimes, etc) is ok. Again, if someone's position is that homosexuality is not something society has vested interest in promoting, then the question of handing kids off to gays (as single or pair) is somewhat dicey is it not?
This is a scary viewpoint.
Have you ever considered that it is possible to examine a subject dispassionately, and put yourself in the other person's shoes to see things from their perspective, rather than having to attack anyone who disagrees with you and call them names or insult them?
Here's a not-so-subtle hint: if you approach people who disagree with you by calling them names, dropping epithets like "scary" and dismissing their viewpoint out of hand, they are quite likely to treat you in the same manner.
Maybe so that those kids are more likely to think "bob likes holding hands with other boys, because he's gay, but he's still a person just like everyone else" rather than "look! it's a faggot, lets kill it!"
Interesting. Where would a kid have learned the phrase "faggot"? For that matter, there are plenty of grade-schoolers (or younger or older) who hold hands. At that age, the gender differences between kids, left to their own devices, pretty much boil down to "boys can write their name in the snow in pee, and girls can't." Until puberty or later pre-pubsecence, the rest of any "gender preferences" in terms of toys/games/recreation seem to be the result of cultural expectations enforced implicitly or explicitly by the surrounding adults (example: the women wear dresses, therefore the girls want to wear dresses), rather than anything hard-wired.
It sounds more to me like the problem is in exposing the youngest minds to sexual propaganda in general, including the pro-gay stuff.
Re:To avoid this.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why, if homosexuality is "fixed", are pro-gay groups working so hard to get books promoting their lifestyle into kindergartens if not that they're trying to propagandize kids the same way and pick up some numbers?
Being gay and realizing it are very different things. I get that you probably don't realize it (you seem to be a little confused), because it's not something you've had to face. I have.
When I was young, all I was exposed to were heterosexual relationships. For a long time, it was all I thought could happen; hell, I remember not evening knowing what 'gay' and 'homosexual' actually meant. That didn't stop me and my peers from using those words as insults, of course. So, naturally, the early development of my sexuality was toward being heterosexual. Later, I learned about gay people a little. As a result of all of the negative stigma that I had learned before, and was still being exposed to, I was terrified (without quite recognizing my feelings as such) that I might be gay; I refused to consider it; I tried to crop the guys out of the porn I surreptitiously downloaded. I was a homophobe in the very literal sense of the word. It wasn't until high school that I actually got a better concept of what being gay was like and shook off some of my fear of being judged by people. Over the course of a year or more, I wrestled with my sexuality until I finally realized that I was gay.
I'm not the best storyteller, but hopefully I've managed to convey a bit of how long and confusing that process was for me. Looking back, I realize I was gay the whole time, I just alternately didn't understand that and refused to consider it. If my upbringing had included more exposure to the idea of gay relationships and the fact that it's okay to be gay, I think that I would have been spared a lot of stress and confusion. And I think that exposing kids now to the idea of gay people will save the gay ones a lot of trouble too, and hopefully teach the straight ones a little tolerance. It's not going to 'turn' any straight kids into gay ones; that's just not how sexual orientation generally works.
I think you've really got the wrong idea about that sort of thing, and I'd be happy to address any specific conceptions you have about homosexuality. I can only speak from my own experience, but that's more than 90% of the population is able to do.
(Side note: my CAPTCHA is 'mating.' How does Slashdot get these things so eerily on-topic?)
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
It very well could be a glitch. At the same time it is likely an intentional filtering system. Other countries that Amazon operates in probably have restrictions that they need to follow. My guess is that they were updating the filter for some country and accidentally messed it up for the US market.
Re:To avoid this.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's an experiment for you - find some random object/picture and stare at it while jacking off. Do that enough times, and you'll start to get horny when you see the object. It's a conditioned response involving brain chemistry and hormones. See also: Pavlov.
Here's an experiment for you - try doing exactly what I said before. Go watch gay porn and see if it excites you. I'm pretty sure it won't. Given that people have (unsuccessfully) tried all sorts of things from electro-shock therapy to hypnosis to 'cure' homosexuality, I'd be very surprised if simple classical conditioning is able to change sexual orientation.
Again, if someone's position is that homosexuality is not something society has vested interest in promoting, then the question of handing kids off to gays (as single or pair) is somewhat dicey is it not?
The question is whether your unfounded assertion that "homosexuality is against society's interests" is either correct or helpful to society as a whole.
Here's a not-so-subtle hint: if you approach people who disagree with you by calling them names, dropping epithets like "scary" and dismissing their viewpoint out of hand, they are quite likely to treat you in the same manner.
I was addressing your viewpoint as scary, not your person. You're quite welcome to treat my viewpoint (that tolerance is generally good for a free society) similarly if you wish. If you re-read my post, you'll see that I was disagreeing with you, not attacking you.
Until puberty or later pre-pubsecence, the rest of any "gender preferences" in terms of toys/games/recreation seem to be the result of cultural expectations enforced implicitly or explicitly by the surrounding adults (example: the women wear dresses, therefore the girls want to wear dresses), rather than anything hard-wired.
You're asserting that social cultural elements like style of dress or choice of toys, are determined in exactly the same way that sexual preference is determined? That's a pretty big call.
Re:To avoid this.. (Score:4, Interesting)
The questions being asked are pretty similar, actually. Should a person be allowed to marry (and enjoy the related benefits thereof) the person he/she loves regardless of [skin color|gender]?
One of the handful of countries to legalize gay marriage is South Africa. Most african cultures have as much machismo as any other (for example polygamy is fairly common throughout the continent, even in non-muslim areas). Yet SA is the only non-western and non 1st-world country to legalize gay marriage. Maybe it is a coincidence. Or maybe it is because their experience with overcoming apartheid has made the people there especially cognizant of civil rights and that they do see sexual discrimination as the same as ethnic discrimination.
Re:To avoid this.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not the best storyteller, but hopefully I've managed to convey a bit of how long and confusing that process was for me.
On the contrary, that was very articulate and informative. Bravo, sir !
Re:Maybe... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, but there are more factors. First, Amazon, if they did this on purpose, pissed off more than the LGBT community. Most plenty of people who aren't gay support gay rights. Not all of them are likely to boycott or anything, but some will, and others will file information about what was done away to be added to any other anti-amazon feelings they may have. Second, there's online patterns which suggest that more pro-LGBT types are online than anti-LGBG. Finally there's the question of who buys more books, which again I tend to think would be slanted toward the pro-LGBG crowd. I'm making statements without numbers of course, but I think I am likely correct in most of those statements. Seems to me that if Amazon did this on purpose, they did pissed a demographic that is:
1) More likely to be a customer
2) More likely to be a good customer
3) Very vocal
4) Able to make it's opinions known
to placate a demographic that is:
1) Less likely to be a customer
2) Less likely to be a good customer
3) Very Vocal
4) Able to makes it's opinions known
5) But hadn't really been complaining
Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe Amazon got infiltrated by the radical right while no one was looking, but a glitch seems more likely to me.