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

Posted by Soulskill on from the can't-it-be-both dept.

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?"

48 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe... by milas · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...it was a glitchy hack?

    1. Re:Maybe... by fractoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It sounds like "technical glitch" is the new get-out-of-jail-free card for any big corporation that makes a bad call and wants to avoid public backlash.

      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
    2. Re:Maybe... by Ren.Tamek · · Score: 4, Informative

      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? Somehow, they all got lost due to a mysterious glitch 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' also. Someone at Amazon has been caught with their pants down i'd say...

      --
      "If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
    3. Re:Maybe... by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't think if Amazon had intentionally done this, and had announced that they'd one it, that it would be that unpopular. California, of all places, couldn't agree on gay marriage. Imagine then the rest of the country.

      On the other hand, since Amazon is a for profit company, they have absolutely no reason to alienate a fraction of their customers by implementing this policy silently. They're not attracting right wing sales, nor "think of the children" types of all mentalities...they'd just be pissing off a segment of the market.

      So it seems like it's probably a hack, because if it isn't they'd be being uncharacteristically stupid in the only dimension they'd ever shown any real passion about.

    4. Re:Maybe... by Dutchmaan · · Score: 5, Funny

      California, of all places, couldn't agree on gay marriage. Imagine then the rest of the country.

      Iowa, of all places, could agree on gay marriage. Imagine then the rest of the country.

    5. Re:Maybe... by bdenton42 · · Score: 4, 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.

    6. Re:Maybe... by calmofthestorm · · Score: 5, Funny

      I don't know, one time I was writing a Huffman compressor for an applied information theory class and I couldn't find this weird bug where it would email racist statements to everyone in your address book every time you tried to compress a file larger to 50kb. Took me several hours to fix, and my solution was under 100 lines of Python.

      I can fully sympathize with companies who have to deal with overly sensitive people who think that bugs like this, which emerge quite frequently in sufficiently complex systems, are the result of bad calls or poor intent, rather than the simple technical glitches that they are.

      --
      93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
    7. Re:Maybe... by fumblebruschi · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.)

      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.

  2. To avoid this.. by tjstork · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Services like Amazon could just have a personal preferences for users that allows them to selectively exclude either gay content or content from gay authors. Problem solved.

    --
    This is my sig.
    1. Re:To avoid this.. by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    2. Re:To avoid this.. by Nutria · · Score: 4, Informative

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

      Research indicates it more likely to be hormonal.

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
    3. Re:To avoid this.. by gnick · · Score: 4, 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.

      --
      He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
    4. Re:To avoid this.. by sudotron · · Score: 5, Insightful

      *sigh*

      Not sure if you were being serious or not, but either way I'm going to respond with my usual rant on the subject because I think it's important: Whether or not being gay is genetic shouldn't matter in the context of any policy whatsoever. It appalls me to no end that people debate about this when the real issue at hand is that adults ought to be able to have consensual sex with whomever they want. What I do in the bedroom is between me and whomever I'm in there with.

    5. Re:To avoid this.. by ScrewMaster · · Score: 4, 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.

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    6. Re:To avoid this.. by MindlessAutomata · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Homosexuality is and isn't a choice. The behavior is a choice, but the actual attraction is not. If I could choose who I was sexually attracted to then I would make myself asexual because like most Slashdot nerds I ain't gettin' any.

      Ask yourself a simple question: if homosexuality were not a choice, why are the two most common insults directed at anyone who is against public promotion of homosexuality "well you must be in the closet" and "you must be afraid you'll try it and like it"? The mask slips just a tad too often, showing that the "it's not a choice" propaganda is pure lies.

      This is because, or at least because it is perceived to be true, that many gay men in the closet deny their homosexuality for social reasons and to try to hide it or excuse for it or "make up for it" they crusade against homosexuality which they have been brought up to think is wrong. Does Ted Haggard ring a bell...?

    7. Re:To avoid this.. by Walkingshark · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Lets just take it from the top.

      First up, you try to back up a claim by linking to a fluff piece interview with an WNBA basketball star. You then talk a bunch of other shit that is essentially just repeating the same assertion over and over again supported with variations of "becuase I said so." Then, you claim that we should make policy on something because you said so.

      Your finaly gem is this bit about closeted self hating gays being a common phenomenon:

      Ask yourself a simple question: if homosexuality were not a choice, why are the two most common insults directed at anyone who is against public promotion of homosexuality "well you must be in the closet" and "you must be afraid you'll try it and like it"? The mask slips just a tad too often, showing that the "it's not a choice" propaganda is pure lies.

      You're saying that because it is a widely observed phenomenon that some of the most anti-gay people are actually gay themselves (Ted Haggard being one of the more recent and spectacular flameouts), this somehow supports your "being gay is a choice" assertion. Again, because you said so.

      Look, I know you're not smart enough to understand whats happening here, so I'll spell it out for you:

      When people suggest that homophobes are closeted self-loathing gays, it in no way implies that they think that inward sexual orientation is a choice, it means that they are saying that lots of people are gay but that they lie about it.

      You know, lies. You might have heard of them. Hell, you're probably lying to yourself right now. About how much you like cock.

      --
      The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
    8. Re:To avoid this.. by Walkingshark · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      If you're making a veiled threat at lesbian porn there is going to be fucking hell to pay.

      --
      The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
    9. Re:To avoid this.. by Moryath · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Interesting thought.

      Culture influences what you think of as "attractive" as much as anything else. Compare Indian pornography to Japanese, to Chinese, to European, to American, to South American, to African, and compare not only from the 20th/21st century but also go back in history in the various places.

      Compare modern Persian culture from Iran (heavily influenced/controlled by Islamic "thought") to the much richer, more vibrant Persian culture prior. You'll find that the Persians were much more open about sexuality and what they considered erotic, and you'll find just as much that the "tastes" have been changed.

      Consider the cultural issues that made Westerners have such a weird place when the Japanese first saw them - to a culture where moderately dark skin and hair are the norm, but where the art forms venerated the lightest skin and hair tones as beautiful, to all of a sudden see very pale people and a number of red and gold hair tones among them.

      Take the phenomenon of black males in America (as opposed to most African nations) who carry a sexual fetish for paler, light haired women. Amazing amounts of pornography are devoted to this, but only in America. Why is this? Because in America, those women are put forth as the ideal of "beauty", and with very few exceptions, even the successful models of black/african heritage have lighter than normal (for their genotype) skin tone and tend to do things like color their hair, towards either golden tones or golden highlights.

      Now, take even a second-generation (child of immigrant parents but born in, or imported before say age 5) individual. What do you find? More likely than not, they do not as a rule share their parents' cultural kinks, either in regard to sexuality or otherwise, unless they've been held in an environment that is very similar to where their parents grew up (for instance, chinese raised in a "chinatown" area, or latino raised in a largely latino neighborhood).

      Given the preceding, why is it unfair that parents (whose interest is in seeing their kids marry and produce the next generation) would be worried about their kids being told that homosexuality was "perfectly normal", "acceptable", or something else? You can propagandize impressionable minds into thinking that "sexual attractiveness" is a schoolgirl in a fuku. Or, for that matter, something a little more realistic of most of the population. 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?

    10. Re:To avoid this.. by wickerprints · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Homosexuality" is not a behavior, at least no more so than "heterosexuality" is a behavior. It is an intrinsic identification regarding one's sexuality. It is misleading and incorrect to conflate sexual orientation and sexual activity by using the same word to describe both.

      Furthermore, being "in the closet" is not a denial of one's homosexuality per se. It is merely the set of actions (or in some cases, lack of action), that lead others to presume that the given individual is heterosexual. Such actions range from simply doing nothing--the assumption is preexisting--to active denial, which is the case you described. There is an entire spectrum in between those extremes that you fail to take into account.

      The question of whether homosexuality is a choice is in itself a loaded one, because it assumes that the answer is germane to how GLBTs (i.e. anyone who isn't heterosexual) ought to be treated by society. GLBTs don't present the question of whether heterosexuality is a choice. Neither do the heterosexuals who are so apparently fascinated with the analogous question as it applies to gays. To GLBTs, it is as if society asked, "Is being blue-eyed a choice" as a precursor to determining whether or not blue-eyed individuals should be held to a lower social and legal status than non-blue-eyed individuals.

      Therefore, the debate over the nature and origins of homosexuality in humans is, in my view, a deliberate and calculated attempt by homophobes and bigots to manipulate the dialogue about the role of GLBTs in society away from the ways in which we share commonalities and the discrimination we face, and toward the biased, dogmatic thinking that underlies their prejudices about people who are not like themselves. And they have been incredibly successful at this sophistry and perversion of logic, as is witnessed by the asking of the "choice" question nearly every single time a discussion about gay people happens online. The ensuing useless debate is proof and product.

    11. Re:To avoid this.. by mkcmkc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Whether [...] society has an interest (based on there being more good than harm, overall, to society) in the promotion of homosexual pairings.

      Since no one is suggesting that we "promote" homosexual pairings, this question is entirely moot. (No, objecting to discrimination and violence against gays does not count as "promoting" homosexuality. Good grief.)

      --
      "Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
    12. Re:To avoid this.. by fractoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Take the phenomenon of black males in America (as opposed to most African nations) who carry a sexual fetish for paler, light haired women.

      Among dark-skinned races, lighter skin is seen as beautiful. I don't know why but I guess it's the counterpart to light-skinned races' fixation on sun tans. I know I found it amusing going from Thailand (where the TV is full of advertising for whitening creams to lighten skin colour) to England (where the TV is full of advertising for Johnsons' Holiday Skin, a popular fake tan). And it's not just dark-skinned women trying to look like white women - I've heard actresses criticised for not looking "asian enough".

      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. I bet you can't. If you can't 'choose to be gay', then how can you realistically expect others have chosen so, or that they can 'choose to be straight'? Unless you take the absurd position that everyone is intrinsically straight and that every person who claims to be gay is lying, your position is inconsistent.

      Given the preceding, why is it unfair that parents (whose interest is in seeing their kids marry and produce the next generation) would be worried about their kids being told that homosexuality was "perfectly normal", "acceptable", or something else?

      This is a scary viewpoint. Homosexuality is not "acceptable"? 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".

      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?

      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!". Tolerance comes more easily with familiarity.

      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
    13. Re:To avoid this.. by dangitman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah. Thousands of years of romantic poetry is clearly wrong. Nobody is aroused by anything they don't want to be, and every straight guy who's looking at a hot woman must focus and think "getitupgetitupgetitupgetitup oh yeah, she's making me pop a bo... getitupgetitupgetitupgetitup"

      So, what about people who are bisexual? I've been attracted to both men and women, and can make a choice at any time to choose either or both. I know plenty of people in a similar position.

      I think this debate might be more about sexual repression, and both sides take the argument to extremes. Just as people arguing that it's "just a choice" are likely arguing from a sense of repression and revulsion, those gays who vociferously argue that there's no choice" and it's only genetic are also repressing their lingering doubts about their sexuality. Sexuality is amorphous, it's more of a continuum than a binary decision. There are plenty of "straight" guys who enjoy getting a headjob from another guy, and plenty of "gay" men who fetishize glamourous women.

      --
      ... and then they built the supercollider.
    14. Re:To avoid this.. by wickerprints · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You certainly have a strange concept of "favored status." Name me one right--just ONE--that gay people have, or are seeking, that straight people do not enjoy. Name me one law on the books that says gay people are entitled to some benefit that straight people are legally prohibited from having.

      You think that gay marriage is somehow more favorable to gays than straight marriage? That just demonstrates your bias and ignorance.

    15. Re:To avoid this.. by Moryath · · 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.

    16. Re:To avoid this.. by mkcmkc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I object to violence against anyone, as a general rule. I don't see where it makes a difference as to the skin color, gender, or any other component of the person on the receiving end of the violence.

      Good, I'm glad to hear it. If you think about it a while, you'll probably realize that some of the worst situations gays have to endure right now don't involve physical violence per se, but just something more like abominable stupidity and pettiness. Consider the 25-year couple, one dying of cancer, who cannot even assume that they'll be able to be in the same room when death comes. That's where we're at today in the US, and if we want things to improve, we need to make it clear that when religion and bigotry oppose basic human decency, the latter should win out.

      --
      "Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
    17. Re:To avoid this.. by TrekkieGod · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Interesting thought.

      Culture influences what you think of as "attractive" as much as anything else...Given the preceding, why is it unfair that parents (whose interest is in seeing their kids marry and produce the next generation) would be worried about their kids being told that homosexuality was "perfectly normal", "acceptable", or something else?

      There's a major flaw in your theory:

      I'm a male, and I have been since childhood constantly bombarded with cultural ideals of beautiful women. As a result, for the most part, I tend to agree with other males that are part of the same culture as to what constitutes a beautiful woman. Similarly, females have been since childhood constantly bombarded with cultural ideals for beautiful men. Thus, they tend to somewhat agree on what constitutes an attractive male.

      Here's the catch. As a male, I have seen the same "cultural propaganda" as the females around me. However, when I see the culturally accepted attractive male, I don't become aroused. There's a simple reason for that: I'm not gay. It's a similar situation for women. They can recognize a culturally accepted beautiful woman when they see her, but the heterosexual ones don't become aroused. Instead, they try to emulate her. For the homosexual population a similar situation exists, except that they are only aroused by the same gender instead of the opposite one: even though they were exposed to the exact same culture you and I were exposed to.

      Sure, culture influences attractiveness, but there are obviously limits.

      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?

      I can think of two very obvious reasons, both much more likely than your conspiracy theory (especially since I can't think of any reason why a homosexual person would have a need or desire to ensure the existence of homosexuals in the next generation...it certainly doesn't help their dating pool, so why the hell would they care?):

      The first is that it sucks being discriminated against, and it's much easier to prevent bigoted behavior if you properly educate your child. It's basically the same reason why people of older generations are more likely to be racists. They were born in a world where that was the way things were, and it's difficult to change your ways.

      The second is that it will prevent confusion if kids know how to behave around the child with "two fathers" or "two mothers." It's unfair for such a child to be ostracized for something they have no control over.

      --

      Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.

    18. Re:To avoid this.. by The_mad_linguist · · Score: 5, Funny

      >I chose to be white. Yep, you heard correctly.
      >Me being white is a choice. Stand up oppressed minorities! You too can choose white.

      Micheal Jackson, is that you?

    19. Re:To avoid this.. by Man+On+Pink+Corner · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's not what is being discussed. The question is, in context of the legal arguments taking place in places such as California currently, whether it is to society's best interest to extend tax and other benefits to gay pairings.

      Civil rights do not accrue to "society." They accrue to individuals, and they are not subject to popular consensus.

      Separate is not equal. This argument happened before, and just as in that case, there are people who are clearly on the right side of it, and people who are clearly on the wrong side.

    20. Re:To avoid this.. by Anonymous Coward · · 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?)

    21. Re:To avoid this.. by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      You really believe that? Sounds like the kind of thing they teach "confused" kids at those camps where they try to "cure" them of them being gay. If we just make them all jerk off to pictures of the opposite sex, they will turn straight!

      I think most people who try what you suggest will just end up not getting off until they either tune out what they are looking at our find something more arousing to look at.

      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?

      Don't kid yourself. You can insult someone by calling them names and you can insult someone by acting like they are those names. Just because you aren't doing the former doesn't mean you aren't doing the latter. In my experience, it is almost universal that people who act like someone is stupid get all riled up when they are called stupid in return. It is a false piety.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    22. Re:To avoid this.. by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Bingo.

      Sexuality ranges from 100% opposite sex attraction to 100% same sex attraction to 100% dominant to 100% submissive to 100% yada yada yada (race, boobs, ass, red head, blonde, fat, thin). There are many, many axis which sexuality turns on and each of them varies from 0% to 100%. If you are only lightly attracted to the same sex or only attracted to the same sex under particular circumstances, then it can be a choice under certain circumstances. One of the most comfortably gay guys I ever knew (from a painting class I took with him) was married for 8 years and had a couple kids. Clearly, he wasn't gay but was bisexual- but it was a lot simpler for him to just be one or the other socially.

      Society doesn't tend to support bisexuality very well unless you are a hot female.

      and for what it is worth, the policy seems a bit extreme for Amazon to have gone to without warning. It really puts their position as a neutral retailer in jeopardy. Christians, hindus, gays, straights, etc. could all buy books from Amazon as long as they are not politicized-- it's just a question availability and inexpensive price.

      My problem with Amazon, Walmart, and many other similar stores is that ultimately they are bad for me as a consumer.
      I get better prices on 80% of the merchandise-- and the other 20% of merchandise I lose the ability to purchase at all.
      The small pet store with the barley dog food goes out of business- but pedigree is $1.00 instead of $1.10 at Walmart.

      Ultimately, we as consumers are slitting our own throats by buying from the Amazons and Walmarts. The little stores need that extra dime in order to keep providing the specialty products the big stores will not offer. In some cases, you go from 10 to 15 (or more) different varieties of a product to *three*. All the diverse products were profitable- but the three were the most profitable.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    23. Re:To avoid this.. by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A viewpoint held by a large number of people in society, is that homosexuality is not a good lifestyle choice.

      A whole lot of people think that the Earth is 6,000 years old, or that Obama's not like all the other politicians. The question is, are the people correct or not?

      Looking at things from an evolutionary perspective, repressing homosexuality is the worst possible thing to do if it's biologically-based. Assume it's maladaptive - that there's something wrong with it in some objective sense that has real-world consequences that outweigh any possible advantages. (Sickle-cell anemia has bad consequences if you have two genes for it, but if you only have one copy, it helps protect you from malaria. Go look up what populations have a prevalence of sickle-cell, and whether malaria was common where they originated. Go ahead, I'll wait.)

      If homosexuality really is bad, then it will evolve away after a while. Any effort to force homosexuals to breed will just preserve the 'bad' genes longer. (Even if it's only neutral, it'll most likely go away just through genetic drift). So laws against homosexuality are a bad idea in direct proportion to how bad you assume homosexuality is.

      But if we assume the converse, that homosexuality is objectively neutral - or perhaps even has net advantages for the population that contains it - then laws against homosexuality are also obviously a bad idea.

      If it's not biologically-based - and I can't see how anyone could really argue this, if sex and sexual orientation don't have a biological basis, then what the hell does? - then it's something that consenting adults choose to do. As long as nobody's being hurt involuntarily, what possible (non-religious) justification could a law against homosexuality possibly have in that case?

      So, no matter what position you take on the subject, laws against homosexuality are stupid.

      --
      PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
    24. Re:To avoid this.. by rhakka · · Score: 4, Informative

      http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/118/1/349 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.

  3. I don't think "hack" is the right word by taustin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the claims for responsibility are even close to accurate, and they seem plausible, it wasn't a "hack" so much as gaming the system for consumers to complain of "adult content." Nothing was used in a way that it was not intended to be used, from a technical standpoint.

    As for "implementing as wildly-unpopular new policy without telling anyone," there are reports of this going back to February, and very credible reports that thousands of romance novels were affected, probably more than the "gay" conent novels. Seems an odd thing for Amazon to do, don't you think?

    But we'll never know, and articles like this are the reason why. If it was someone gaming the consumer tagging system, there is no way to explain it to the average person that will not make it sound like their web site was "hacked," which is to say, compromised. Given the rash of recent actual cracks involving hundreds of millions of credit card numbers, Amazon has damned good reason to not shoot from the hip in any public statements.

    An apology for being so inept that a claim that a single person caused this with "ten lines of code" would be nice, though.

    1. Re:I don't think "hack" is the right word by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This seems like a hack to me, assuming it's true of course.

      http://pastebin.ca/1390576

      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.
      #!/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\/ >> /tmp/amazon
      ((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/

      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/`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

      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!

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  4. Breaking news... by Miracle+Jones · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

  5. The one time I try to RTFA... by brainfsck · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Wildly unpopular? by Hordeking · · Score: 4, Funny

    Fact: 99% of quoted statistics are 150% bullshit.

    --
    Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
  7. Napoleon (not Dynamite) said it best... by Nutria · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ham-fisted cataloging error

    "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence."

    --
    "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  8. Re:Has to have been intentional by moosesocks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seems a bit paranoid.

    In the end, Amazon listened to their customers, and reversed an unpopular policy very quickly. If anything, this is good news.

    It's blatantly not in Amazon's best interest to censor anything. The more variety and volume they sell, the larger the profit.

    --
    -- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
  9. Griefers. by w0mprat · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I like this analysis from Charles Stross:

    "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

    --
    After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
  10. Re:who is misrepresenting the truth by cduffy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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. 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.

  11. Amazon have done this before by Ren.Tamek · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  12. Did some gay drop you on your head? by mkcmkc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Actually, the problem is that "being gay" is really a choice

    I have no idea why anyone thinks this matters. The reason that gays are A-OK with me is because they're not hurting anyone by their behavior and frankly, in my experience, even seem to be slightly nicer than the rest of us (on average).

    something that society wants to promote and give benefits to (e.g. preferential treatment, tax benefits, etc)

    Bzzt. Gays do not get preferential treatment or tax benefits for being gay, nor is anyone suggesting this ought to be done.

    any more than someone who makes bad lifestyle choices and becomes obese

    Now we've completely jumped the rails. Obesity has a significant inherited component. Go trawl NCBI.

    there are a large number of parents that don't want their kids recruited to.

    Perhaps you're thinking of Jehovah's Witnesses? (Maybe they have a "gay" branch, I dunno.)

    not something the majority of society wants to see promoted.

    Shouldn't the question here be whether or not a set of behaviors is harmful to society, rather than what "the majority of society wants to see promoted"?

    if homosexuality were not a choice, why are the two most common insults directed at anyone who is against public promotion of homosexuality "well you must be in the closet" and "you must be afraid you'll try it and like it"?

    Well, (a) one can be gay and in the closet. Doesn't really matter whether or not being gay is genetic. Duh. As for (b), we saw a study just this month that found that homophobic males are most likely to be turned on by gay porn. So, maybe fear of just that really is a significant component here.

    Anyway, please take a deep breath. Gay acceptance isn't going to mean the fall of the republic or endanger the safety of your children. For those we have Neocons and motor vehicles, respectively.

    P.S. Yeah, I know you're trolling. It was good for me anyway. ;-)

    --
    "Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
  13. Good scientific experiment. by TiggertheMad · · Score: 5, Funny

    Compare Indian pornography to Japanese, to Chinese, to European, to American, to South American, to African,

    Ok, will do. Links please.

    --

    HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
    1. Re:Good scientific experiment. by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm sure you're smart enough to use google.

      Your lack of a sense of humour is funny. Not hahah funny, but revealingly funny.

      Your response shows that you both:
      (a) Didn't get the joke and
      (b) Were so put out by it that you could not let it pass without the equivalent of a tin-pot authoritarian's "shut the fuck up."

      In my opinion, it shows that you aren't really being objective in your analysis. That all of your "dispassionate" prose is really just a rationalization of your bias cloaked in the form of false empathy and insincere objectivity. If you weren't so tightly wound on the subject you wouldn't have felt the need to post such a transparent and futile defence against a perceived attack, especially one that wasn't even a criticism at all.

      In other words, people don't even need to read you original post and go to the effort of applying any tests of the logic therein - your one line misdirected response to that joke reveals exactly where you are coming from in a much more succinct and direct fashion.

      On the bright side, at least you can claim to have been a real "straight man."

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  14. Re:Iowa couldn't, actually by Pharmboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!
  15. Re:Has to have been intentional by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's simply unhealthy to implicitly distrust (and loathe) every corporate and governmental entity on the planet.

    NO. WRONG. WRONG WRONG WRONG. SPIT OUT THE KOOL-AID.

    It's kind of silly to loathe by default, but defaulting to trust is just ignorant.

    The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and if you don't think that preventing major retailers from discriminating by default is part of that vigilance, you don't understand the problem.

    I do not loathe Amazon, and intend to continue purchasing things from them, but this is a serious issue and I would both loathe them and avoid purchasing from them if they had not undone this.

    However, going into hysterics over an isolated incident that was quickly corrected seems to be incredibly unhealthy;

    The incident was quickly corrected because many went into "hysterics" -- or, as I like to put it, expressed a valid concern.

    society needs at least a modicum of trust in order to function.

    Yes, that is true. But that trust does not extend to trusting that a company has my best interests in mind. Instead, I trust that they will serve their own interests. The problem lies in when they don't understand when their interests and the customer's are aligned, which obviously was a problem here. In fact, I really don't trust Amazon or any other web retailer very much at all. Experience has taught me not to. Instead, I have some trust for my credit card company. I had some trust for my bank, but they rejected a chargeback where I had been defrauded. I changed banks. I could have just trusted that they knew better than I do.

    In short, you are a fool if you default to trusting corporations or indeed businesses of any size. In fact when you buy from a web retailer you are trusting your credit card company to handle chargebacks for you if the transaction goes awry, because you know that getting any kind of satisfaction through the court system on an out-of-area retailer is nigh-impossible. When you buy from a local retailer you don't know, you have faith in the court system; still not in that retailer. That, or you have completely failed to understand one of the basic tenets of security: mistrust by default.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"