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So far, the problem has been blamed on malice, hackers, and the French. I suspect we'll move to Confickr, global warming, illegal immigration, and the vernal equinox before this is all sorted out.
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@Coles_Law: oh god, the ultimate dilemma for the christian conservatives: illegal immigration causing homosexuals to be discriminated against.
\"get the fuck outta my countr... wait, you did what? oh... oh GOD thank you but wait... get the fuck...\" etc, etc, etc
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It feels more like a publicity stunt, by Amazon...
Free advertising everywhere.
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@webreacher: Yeah, right. This is great publicity. Just look at some of the responses to this fiasco amongst the posters here. For some, there is nothing that Amazon can do or say that will convince them that they are nothing more than hateful bigots.
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@webreacher:
DING
DING
DING
They come out smelling like roses too becauseit wasn't their fault but they fixed it now some come on back gay people. It also alerts those so inclined that there's a shit ton of gay lit. on Amazon which who knows maybe someone didn't know it already and wanted to find some.
To the anti gays they'll see it as Amazon hates the gays and they're just saving face for the public.
I blame Rush Limbaugh! Well, I blame him for most everything anyway and this is right up his alley. I mean, his hot air is warming the planet! !!
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Blame Canada!
The French did it. I didn't see that coming. Works for me, though. Those damned French!!
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@HiPwr: Blame Canada! (Well, Québéc, anyway?)
Okay, now let's get serious. While I am not surprised to see English-language books on amazon.fr, one might think that amazon.fr would maintain a separate database from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk or amazon.com.au, so that misunderstandings caused by an obvious language barrier can't happen.
@kc2idf: You'd be surprised. It can be a lot easier to maintain a single product listing database with flags that tell what language to display something in. That way, global updates can be rapidly applied rather than trying to coordinate with all your various divisions. Of course, if you don't have the right safeguards in place, this happens.
Customer databases I can see as being seperate for each site because each regional customer service center will access data from them and it's easier not to be searching through a global database when you're helping someone.
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How does this change the fact that they have been delisting titles for months now under the new policy to delist \"adult\" titles.
Sure this weekend was a \"glitch\" ok, but it doesn't change the policy change that precipitated it.
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Of course was the French. Those cheese eating surrender monkeys.
Am I the only one who could care less about this whole hubbub? I mean, does Amazon still have some of the best deals on the net? Yes, my most recent order from their store night proved that. But until the shipping boxes have swastikas on them, I'll still be doing my online shopping there.
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@MercyEleusis: Oooh, you COULD care less, eh? That means you have room to care, right?
Oh, you mean couldn't care less. Gotcha.
@nakedscience: I'll never understand why the misbegotten cretins of the Internet have turned this logical saying around. Allow me to educate those that seem to think they are the ones toting the education around here. To care less; that means your level of caring CAN drop further. You can't care less; you are at a specific level of care. THAT MEANS YOU CARE. Now you can return to what ever dark corners you came from.
@MercyEleusis: ... or, um, you couldn't care less because you aren't caring at all. you can't have negative care.
logic: we can has.
@MercyEleusis: yes, because you still have care to give. there are those, whoever, who couldn't care less.
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 the troll dude did it and Amazon doesn't want to admit it.
@michaelthegreat: ... wait, you searched for \"anal sex\" in the \"movies\" section and thought the results were inappropriate?
am i missing something here?
Can anyone point me at a page that has the 'report as offensive' link, or whatever it is?
It seems the main reason to not believe the supposed hacker was that the link to report an item doesn't exist, but the guy says they pulled it after his shenanigans.
I guess I'm wondering, is it still possible to report items, or did the report links coincidentally disappear after someone claims to have exploited them? Can someone point me at an instance of one of these links?
Was this really that big a deal?
I guess I'm the only one who believes Amazon when they say it was an error. It makes absolutely no sense why, after raking in the cash for over a decade and remaining wildly profitable during recession, they would intentionally de-list thousands of items out of nowhere and royally piss off an entire demographic. Jeff Bezos is more interested in making money than he is about pushing an anti-gay agenda.
@HooFoot: I'm still waiting to find more info. I hope it was just an error; Amazon is very useful. But it sure was a convenient error.
@HooFoot: I believe it was deliberate by someone, but I've actually never thought it was a policy set in place by the upper levels of Amazon management. This France explanation seems a little fishy to me, but my personal guess was always that a reasonable policy (let's hide some of the porniest stuff) was taken advantage of by somebody a little farther down the line with an agenda to push.
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@HooFoot: I agree, I actually do believe Amazon. I think something got lost in the translation, but I don't think they're lying.
@HooFoot:
I agree - if anything, Bezos tilts Democratic, at least of late, although his donations have just been to the two Washington Senators and to the Amazon PAC.
After rereading the original hacking claim, I'm pretty certain it was hacked. If the problem was really miscategorization by someone, the ability for users to flag something as inappropriate shouldn't have been affected. The steps to accomplish this sort of thing are pretty easy.
first, grab the page and extract the ids. While he isn't very explicit with his regular expressions, it doesn't matter. He Presented pseudocode, not actual code.
second, find the destination that the 'report' POSTs to, and build a template that you can plug variables into. This, again, is easy as hell. The address he provided can no longer be reached, because amazon pulled down the entire reporting system, despite it supposedly not being the cause. hmmm...
third, start forging those requests. This is done two ways, as he explained. Making a page do an ajax request when someone visits is easy. And unless you explicitly go out of your way to show them the output, they'll never know, short of watching the headers the browser sends.
also possible, getting lots of offshore help to register accounts and send cookies. On a lot of sites, this wouldn't work, but I was able to log into amazon, change my ip, and continue using my cookie. This means they don't even check the IP address to make sure you are the one they issued the cookie to. This is a pretty big hole, and with even the simplest check on userdata, this could be thwarted. But there is NO CHECKING.
This whole thing is plausible, and given the hole in their session handling (get a cookie and you can log in as someone anywhere. Oops) the hole in the handling of reports wouldn't surprise me. If they can't be bothered to handle a simple hash to check on a cookie, the basis of security for the entire site, which includes credit card processing, then why would they hash/check userdata for a user reporting a book?
If the same team worked on both of those things, they probably have the same hole. No integrity check.
And how convenient it is that no one can verify because the 'not to blame' reporting system was taken offline.
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@dieselmachine: All of that versus: type up a 1/2 page email filled with hacker buzzwords and send to gullible reporters.
Which do you think is more likely?
@Trai_Dep:
I'm just saying, every part of the claim checks out, except the one part we can't verify. Which Amazon pulled offline, despite it 'not being the problem'.
The claim wasn't buzzwords. It was a full procedure, from start to end, but with the tedious parts 'explained' instead of actually coded.
I think he did it.
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So the email that authors have purported to have received from Amazon saying that their books were de-listed were lies?
Is Amazon saying that the authors are lying?
This doesn't answer why were books on gay sexuality singled out to start with, though. It has been reported that books with a topic related to heterosexuality, even very graphic books, were still listed... if this is a translation problem, why were those \"adult\" books not de-listed with the gay ones?
Amazon will keep throwing stuff at the wall 'til something sticks, I guess.
Wonder what's next... Immigrants? Pirates? Decaf coffee?
Here's the thing that I don't understand: it just wouldn't make sense for Amazon to do this. They've been selling gay-themed books for years, there's no evidence there's been any pressure on them about it, there's no evidence that there's been a shift in control at the company, they're based in Seattle, not Alabama, it just doesn't add up.
While it's sometimes better to blame malice than incompetence, in this case, I'm going with incompetence.
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@marsneedsrabbits: Bingo. I bitched at Amazon about this and was one of those who got the \"ham-fisted\" reply. But it still doesn't explain their original response from the soon-to-be-famous Ashlyn D...
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude \"adult\" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
If Amazon had stuck with the hacker story they might have gotten away with a fake Ashlyn D sending this out but they didn't.
Sorry Amazon. You're either bigots or liars or both.
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@Hands: Or CSRs were responding to what they thought were standard queries about \"adult\" material and weren't paying attention to the details of the questions. I can imagine a CSR seeing a \"why isn't my book on a list?\" question, checking for a tell-tale tag, seeing \"adult,\" and without ever looking at the title or the subject matter responding with boilerplate about content policies.
In that scenario, it could go on for months without ever being seriously investigated by anyone at Amazon, until something like AmazonFail happens and a critical mass is reached that bypasses the CSR wall.
Never assign to malice would could be explained by stupidity.
So when the the LBGT people admit life doesn't center around them?
@Corporate_guy: [livesteez.com]
And maybe when stuff like that stops happening. I can come up with more links, if you'd like. How 'bout some gay bashing resulting in gay people being murdered?
Yeah. We totally think the world revolves around us. Totally.
@nakedscience: But what does that have to do with a problem that effects more than just gay books? These people saw their books effected and assumed it was about them. I would hope they have better judgment in the future. Next time make sure it's only you before ranting about it. Now the whole lbqt community is no different than those people who go to small towns to look for places without handicapped ramps just to sue them. They aren't oppressed enough so they have to invent oppression.
@Corporate_guy: LMAO, right, right.
I bet you don't go to a club and get yelled \"FAG, you're going to hell dirty fag!\" do you? Or, \"Dirty dyke!\" Because, I have. Your white male privilige, it's showing!
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@Corporate_guy: Right around the time our secular government stops calling them unnatural sinners. Just an idea.
Yeah, that's totally what they think, with their demands for that super-special super-marriage they looking for... or not.
@Corporate_guy:
I dunno, prolly around the same time \"corporate guys\" admit life doesn't center around them either?
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@undefined: @michaelthegreat: Are you Michael Scott? That was hilarious, I have to use that joke sometime.
I'm someone who thinks Amazon is doing this for publicity.
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@kylo4iskyle4: Maybe they're trying to take far-right business away from the Christian Family Bookstore places. \"See?! We hate gays twice as much as they do AND our prices are better!\" In a sick way that is marketing genius.
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DEATH RACE 2000 - Mr. President: \"The treacherous French who crippled our once-great economy and wrecked our telephone system!!\"
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Next on the list of people to blame: Some Puerto Rican guy.
Why doesn't Amazon tell their employees to not say anything until some phony BS PR story is put out?
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@Corporate_guy: lol homos want special priveledges like being allowed to see their wife in the hospital if she's dying or sharing health benefits lololol
@sockrockinbeats: None of those legitimate issues has anything to do with this problem. But the easiest way to lose credibility on the real issues is to make up issues.
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LOL! Good. That little attention seeker is a nobody again.
@savdavid: Yet, he's still just as ugly.