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?"

Comments

Maybe...

[milas]

...it was a glitchy hack?

Re:Maybe...

[fractoid]

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.

Re:Maybe...

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

Re:Maybe...

[Dutchmaan]

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.

Re:Maybe...

[calmofthestorm]

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.

To avoid this..

[tjstork]

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.

Re:To avoid this..

[larry bagina]

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

Re:To avoid this..

[sudotron]

*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.

Re:To avoid this..

[MindlessAutomata]

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...?

Re:To avoid this..

[Moryath]

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?

Re:To avoid this..

[wickerprints]

"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.

Re:To avoid this..

[fractoid]

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.

Re:To avoid this..

[Moryath]

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..

[TrekkieGod]

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.

Re:To avoid this..

[The_mad_linguist]

>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?

Re:To avoid this..

[Anonymous Coward]

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?)

Breaking news...

[Miracle Jones]

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."

The one time I try to RTFA...

[brainfsck]

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.

Napoleon (not Dynamite) said it best...

[Nutria]

ham-fisted cataloging error

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

Amazon have done this before

[Ren.Tamek]

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?

Re:I don't think "hack" is the right word

[Hal_Porter]

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!

Good scientific experiment.

[TiggertheMad]

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

Ok, will do. Links please.

Re:Iowa couldn't, actually

[Pharmboy]

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.

Re:Has to have been intentional

[drinkypoo]

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.