LOL! Good. That little attention seeker is a nobody again.

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.

It feels more like a publicity stunt, by Amazon...
Free advertising everywhere.

@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

@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! !!

Blame Canada!

@Coles_Law: I'm convinced that this is George Bush's fault.

@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.

The French did it. I didn't see that coming. Works for me, though. Those damned French!!

@humphrmi:
With all their beady little eyes
And flapping heads so full of lies
Blame Canada!
Blame Canada!
We need to form a full assault
It's Canada's fault!

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.

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.

@MercyEleusis: yes, because you still have care to give. there are those, whoever, who couldn't care less.

@humphrmi:

I'm sure you're aware that Amazon.FR stands for FRANCE and that the majority of Canada speaks english.

@HiPwr:
WHUT? Where did you see that?

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.

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?

@michaelthegreat:

Where on the page does the 'mark as inappropriate' button show up?

@michaelthegreat: ... wait, you searched for "anal sex" in the "movies" section and thought the results were inappropriate?

am i missing something here?

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.

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.

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?

[blog.seattlepi.com]

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?

[news.cnet.com]

Amazon will keep throwing stuff at the wall 'til something sticks, I guess.

Wonder what's next... Immigrants? Pirates? Decaf coffee?

@Ccharles-Antoine Blais Métivier: Evidently you're not a South Park fan ;)

@Coles_Law:
And the underwear gnomes

Never assign to malice would could be explained by stupidity.

@katieoh: HA! I totally just spewed chunks of day-after-discount-Easter-candy on my laptop.

So when the the LBGT people admit life doesn't center around them?

@Corporate_guy: when will the rest of the people stop treating them like their lives don't matter?

@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.

@savdavid: Yet, he's still just as ugly.

@Coles_Law: I sure hope that Barney Frank has an alibi.

@humphrmi: RTFA. (rolling eyes)
Blame Québec!

@katieoh: Michealthegreat also called the local police to report a man performing multiple acts of oral sex in the park restrooms.

@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?

@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.

@Corporate_guy:
I dunno, prolly around the same time "corporate guys" admit life doesn't center around them either?

@marsneedsrabbits: Illegal ass pirates that drink nasty decaf coffee.

@katieoh: They do?

@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.

@dieselmachine:

They disabled the "mark as inappropriate" function.

@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.

@marsneedsrabbits:

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.

@Corporate_guy:

Yeah, that's totally what they think, with their demands for that super-special super-marriage they looking for... or not.

@HooFoot: But...everyone iz out to get teh gayz! We must ATTACK!

@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.

@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.