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New York, 12:00 PM
Sun Nov 22
11 posts in the last 24 hours
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04/14/09
I believe them, that this is a categorization error, especially your man from France -- I once outsourced a medical classification system, and when I got it back the New Delhi-based team had classified homosexuality as "a mental illness of the genital area". This is one node, mind you, buried in about seventy pages of medical jargon, intended for Western content. I caught it before we launched it, but I can only imagine what would've happened if that team had been working on tagging rather than creating the classification structure. And when I'd gone looking for the tags, at first glance it would've just read "Homosexuality".
Considering all this blew up on Easter weekend, when everyone would've been away from any logs, I'm not surprised PR didn't have an immediate answer for the masses. Discovering the glitch is one thing; crawling through the enormous Amazon taxonomy to find what's throwing it? That's a nightmare.
04/14/09
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04/13/09
thought. jezehellers are bots?
04/14/09
Logic takes a holiday.
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04/14/09
Occam's Razor loses again.
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04/13/09
@secretagentman: You are a filthy filthy dirty man.
04/13/09
@secretagentman: Nice!
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04/13/09
The real question is, where's that Bezos on a Bearskin rug shot when we need it, Sweaterbear?
04/13/09
False dichotomy. There are myriad other explanations, including the possibility that each book was tagged and/or reported by individuals in an organized or unorganized effort by people with particular religious sensibilities, so that content which offended was no longer displayed. I'm not suggested that's definitely what happened, but this hacker's story has already been debunked and doesn't reflect the actual evidence, which seems to be that authors have been complaining about this sort of things for months and the issue's just reached critical mass.
04/13/09
I agree with you that the problem probably didn't reach the critical mass needed to get it bounced from CS to IT; it's just weird that people are canceling their accounts and being so reactionary when there is so little backing up the Amazon-hates-gays theory.
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04/13/09
tina = christina = christy = crystal = crystal meth
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04/13/09
Then I reset the vingtrap and spun around to matriculate the algorithm matrix inquest.
Thirdly, flim-flammed the spam operator to release my influx capacitator.
Lastly I took all you fools and giga-rolled your offsets into a mega-jib, et viola! I'm still masturbating to Sears catalogs in my dad's basement.
What a douchebag. So you brought Amazon to its knees. My guess...no luck getting a girl in that position.
04/13/09
Classic takedown of Sadgeekdom.
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04/13/09
I think the heroine anecdote was a red herring, something he up to make his point and to fabricate a reason for going after gay subject matter specifically. He tried to sound clever in the process using linguistic jargon, which he probably acquired from Wikipedia and, evidently, did not understand perfectly. Point is: there is little reason to believe that he ever posted ads on Craigslist seeking heroine, and it is unlikely that his assault on "gay books" was retaliatory.
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Cum semel occideris et de te splendida Minos
fecerit arbitria,
non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te
restituet pietas.
04/13/09
As for my dead friend, pietate non tam praeclaris, sed satis facundus.
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04/13/09
If it really was someone abusing the system, why not just say so? Or just say it's being looked into and leave it at that. Why say give this whole 'adult' reason, unless we're now saying that's a lie and part of some greater hacking conspiracy?
It seems to me if it really WAS a hack Amazon has done more damage to themselves trying to cover up hack.
04/13/09
This whole thing's been silly from the start. There was never any clear motivation for Amazon to be doing this, and now they're supposed to have instantly untangled the problem on Easter Sunday to the point that they can definitely proclaim it a "hack"? They're probably still looking into it and trying NOT to make themselves vulnerable to copycat hackers.
04/13/09
The "reputation systems based on user input" are indeed problematic, because they can be so easily hijacked. It is good that someone (Weev) went through the trouble of demonstrating this problem.
Amazon should authenticate reviews and ratings by allowing the user to review the book only if the user has actually ordered that book from Amazon.
Alternatively, Amazon could authenticate reviews by asking users to enter a randomly selected string of words from a randomly selected page in the book in question. That would be messy, however, due to the existence of multiple editions, and it would be vulnerable to manipulation (to an extent), due to the availability of page previews on Amazon itself and sites such as Google Books.
I should say Weez also did well to demonstrate the power of the pink dollar and the organizational agility of those who care. Thanks, Weev: you’re a gay activist in spite of yourself.
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04/13/09
By saying, "oh, we flag adult content," and "oh, it was a glitch that only managed to knock out positive gay materials," they basically set themselves up for a massive PR fail.