Thanks in return.

"How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code"? More like "how to make a bunch of Twitterers blow things out of proportion by pretending to stick up for their gay buddies and cause massive anti-corporate rebellion in the Internets".

Someone needs to find Weev and give him a taste of his own medicine.

"Hello,

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."

10 out of 10, Amazon. Nice going.

I used the "mark as inappropriate" button on Amazon last week. (search for anal sex in the movies section--I thought a couple of those that display hardcore porn pictures were highly inappropriate). It's no longer there. I think he's telling the truth.

Jesus, even Jason Fortuny has more credibility than him and that's saying something.

The suggestion here is that Amazon's de-ranking was based on user 'votes'. So, yeah, it's been going on since 2008, because some authors had their books voted 'inappropriate' by users, and sure they didn't like it. But most people weren't paying attention. Then, hypothetically, this guy or someone else, caused many many books to get voted inappropriate, including some that 'reasonable people' wouldn't think were inappropriate or 'adult'.

It's completely plausible.

But who gets to decide what's 'adult'? Apparently anyone on Amazon that feels like it.

Unless Amazon changes the system, now that we know this, Amazon's in for some fun. You don't even need a cross-site attack. Any book you don't like, just get all your friends to quite legitimately vote it 'inappropriate'.

Which is probably exactly what happened to those authors who 'brought it to Amazon's attention' a year ago. Except when it was just a couple freaky authors, nobody cared.

@HiPwr: I know corporations are terrible. Providing billions of dollars in taxes and employing millions of people the way they do. Those evil bastards.

Corporations are about making money. That doesn't always mean that what they do is in the "best interest" of the public, but that's the way it is. It's our perogative to reward them with our dollars when we like what they do and punish them when we don't by spending it on their competitors that are more "civic-minded".

What we have is a conservative step-in at the Amazon Shops, a public outrage, and Amazon covering its tracks as hard as possible. This "Weev" character is likely either A: A hire-on, or B: a complete falsehood. Really. Read the post. While Poe's Law applies, I doubt very seriously that it applies here. Amazon is manufacturing something completely off the wall to try and cover the tracks of their own staff, in a way, trying to make the removal "Hush-hush", and finding out that hey, the internet pays attention.

If this were true, there would already have been arrests made, and there would be pending charges against this person by Amazon under the Computer Fraud and Abuse act of 1986, as well as under more recent statutes. Which there don't seem to be.

Amazon, you fail again, and you, again, lose my funding.

I don't buy it. I think he is a troll, trying to get some bizarre attention for something he didn't do.

Occasional complaints about books marked "adult" here and there? Easy to ignore. After all, any one dissatisfied author doesn't have that much power. Amazon could have believed that the ratio of abuse:benefit was low enough to continue business as usual.

But the sudden delisting of 60,000 books, a good portion of which happen to be gay-and-lesbian-themed? Well, finally you and the whole world knows that your system is broken. Congratulations, Amazon, you now have a veritable PR clusterfuck on your hands.

At least he does heroin, so if Amazon doesn't get him, at least he'll end himself.

He makes me facepalm.

@traeblain: Well said, sir.

Nobody speaks for me but me.

Maybe this is a glitch on Amazon, but this Weev guy is still a giant douchebag.

"Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence's lexical subject"

That's not even proper grammar. The subject of any sentence using the Declarative tense ("I am...") is "I" - "heroine" is the object of that sentence, not the subject.

Generation X is responsible for 95% of the internet; pretty much everything beyond TBL.@FuryOfFirestorm:

Also: I'm still willing to believe that this is POSSIBLE, even if the problems did start months ago. I think it's pretty obvious that the majority of books got hit this past weekend, the previous ones could have been flagged by random jerks. Who knows. This guy looks like a toad.

The affected author's book got flagged as "Adult", which caused the ranking to be dropped, which is what the reply addressed.

Yeah, geez. Why would a company trust it's consumer base? Why did they try to be friendly to their user base? They should lock stuff like that down and treat their customers like crap, like all the other companies out there.

This person even mentioned that it was another site and not this one that made him"upset" and chose to attack a non-affiliated site. Amazon does have rights for a civil suit, as it is clear that it affected their reputation and their sales.

To someone like me, I laugh because I think it's hilarious and agree with them more than I disagree with them.

Gays are apparently easy to troll.

Oh, that and internet outrage.

Think of this- Your friend smells.

One person could pull him aside and suggest that he use deodorant.

One person could bring him to a bar where women will heckle him openly and publicly humiliate him.

Both get the job done, but a troll's justice is made partly for an audience and entertainment.

@NotChoinski:

Neither of those examples are valid to what he did.

He didn't break into the system.
He didn't change any code.

He used existing code to do something the way Amazon designed it, with results that Amazon wasn't expecting.

They might try to claim that because he 'automated' the flagging that it consitutes a "denial of service" attack, but that would really be stretching that definition.

I think even the authors would have a hard time proving damage, unless the sales data showed a marked difference from one day to the next. Which I would doubt since most people wouldn't buy a book based on the sales rank.

Ultimately I think Amazon will have to rethink some of it's systems.

And that is all presuming what this guy says is true.

Yep I agree with you, and what's worse is, even if it turns out to be not true on the part of Amazon - they'll still be tainted to me and I will not shop there.

@Rectilinear Propagation: I have some familiarity with the things he has done, and he has pulled off much, much bigger things before. I don't doubt it.

He may be good with hacking into major corporations, but can he make my slow computer run faster?

@nerdtalker: It's Weevlos. I'm not surprised by him anymore.

@WhiteGuyOnWebCam_GitEmSteveDave:

Really? If I forget to lock my apartment door and someone walks in uninvited at 2 AM they aren't doing anything illegal?

If they decide to climb through a window are they just exploiting a system?

Whether he did it, or not, the damage is done. There are perpetual victims out there that will always believe the worst about corporate America regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

If true, what a d-bag.

Also if true, he should be sued for loss of income by the authors of titles affected by the action. I'm sure there is some formula relating search results with sales that could be applied.

It would certainly make a dent in his hot pockets and bawls allowance he gets from his mom.

so not buying it.

@Applekid: Trolling in a thread about trolls - awesome!

if this is the case and amazon ignored the fact that someone was manipulating their system in a way detrimental to their sales and sellers... i'm still not going to be confident in them after that.

whether it was intentional, glitch or hack - i'm waiting for the public apology to everyone whose work was affected.

I find it difficult to believe anyone who would include the following in his "confession":

"This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with."

@Rectilinear Propagation: Why don't you believe him?

Funny thing is, if the loser posted a lying press release that had no basis in reality, he STILL gets his toadlike mug blasted across the interwebs, which is his purpose.

I think that is the more likely reality. Amazon's initial statement telling an affected author makes me think this one's all Amazon.

I know I'm not the only person that has posted a completely legitimate post on Craigslist only to have it taken down due to people flagging it. Also, eBay has taken down legitimate auctions while spammy ones thrive. Using these trust-based system that's open to anyone causes the trustworthy to be squished out by the nefarious. Just like this amazon thing. This exploit also holds well with this guys theory of testing it out in February, as people have said they've seen.

These flag/trust-based systems always need a human filter, which costs money, which is why these systems were put into place in the first place.

At any rate, I truly believe this was a glitch/"hack" as Amazon wouldn't be so stupid to intentionally do this.

If this guy represents the next generation, we are so fucked. First came Gen X, then Gen Y , now here's Gen MOAR EPIC FAIL...

2) It's probably not true. Weev is just like every petty terrorist warlord who comes out and claims responsibility for any normal plane crash or railway accident.

3) If this started in February as is being reported, and Amazon was aware of what was happening then, the facts do not support the hacker story.

This is shoddy reporting of the worst kind. At least find a better source than the community of hackers who are themselves claiming credit. On something this big, you should at least double source your story for God's sake.

But why claim responsibility? You're just asking for problems at that point.