Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Additionally, Ed Champion is reporting that Amazon has finally broken today's silence to comment on the matter to him, 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."
I clicked on the link 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".
That'll teach me for trying to RTFA.
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 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! 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?
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!