... amazon.com fiasco ...

[razorjak]

So who actually buys the "It was a rogue programming error." excuse?

For those of you who didn't hear what they tried to pull ... Recently, Amazon.com started to throw anything regarding homosexuality into the porn category and pull their sales ranking.

When they got called out on it, they claimed it was a "glitch".

Yeah, not buying it. Nor anything from them for quite awhile.

Comments

[apestyle.livejournal.com]

Amazon is a Seattle company, hence I have a good friend that works there. The dish is this: over in France a hamfisted programmer took anything that had the "adult" tag and de-listed it. "Adult" in France = porn.
Since their systems are globally linked, the idiot's actions over there affected the systems in the U.S. This shit happened over the weekend, and was corrected on the following Monday. Pretty rapid turnaround if you ask me.
Amazon is pretty well known for supporting its GBLT community, I strongly doubt this was malice, and strongly believe it was one dumbshit's mistake.

[razorjak.livejournal.com]

Dammit! There you go again dashing my cynical views!

Still can't see how "Howard's End" could be considered porn, though.

Some of the stuff that was deranked should never have even had an adult tag in the first place.

[the_axel]

As I understand it the tags are entered both by Amazon and by publishers, and it's entirely possible that the publishers wanted 'Adult' on the titles to differentiate them from 'Childrens' and 'Teens'.

Certainly, in the UK, that was how public libraries classifed things, and book publishers are a traditional lot.

And I very much doubt that the Ledding Library in Milwaukie, OR has 100 000 items of porn.

[apestyle.livejournal.com]

Well apparently it wasn't *only* adult tagged stuff, lots of titles got the virtual axe.

[the_axel]

I agree with apestyle.

That's one of the two scenario's that makes sense to me.

Code monkey does something dumb and changes the production environment without adequate testing and something blows up. My understanding is that Amazon's website doesn't have one central group that owns it but is made up of many modules each with it's own group.

The other is that some anti-gay hacker or troll found a weakness in their system and exploited it. The fact that this exploded over a long weekend, and a Christian holiday at that, lends credence to that theory.

One of the things that supports it not being planned is that not all versions of a given product were impacted. When this story broke I looked at a couple of the impacted titles and found that some had lost their Sales rank, and others didn't. If Amazon had planned this I think they would have been a lot more comprehensive.

The initial responses that went out were likely from a customer service centre in India who have a limited number of form e-mails to respond with rather than being a thought out & planned answer.

http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/shane/2009/04/14/what-amazons-catalogue-glitch-says-about-cloud-based-metadata/

http://www.thestar.com/unassigned/article/617982

P.S. Are you still playing Warhammer Online?

[razorjak.livejournal.com]

Not at the moment, the account that I was paying my online fun fees with was the one that got levied by the state.

[the_axel]

That sucks.

When you make it back, we shifted our Destro characters to Vortex and have taken up playing Order on Phoenix Throne.

Our Order guild is 'Sine Misericordia'.

Ostermark was suffering from underpopulation and E & Michelle in particular wanted a change from Destruction and PT is the only RP server with a population worth talking about.

[rat-bastard.livejournal.com]

weev claims that he is the programmer/troll responsible, and that it was his way of pointing out a severe weakness in Amazon's rating system. This claim could easily be bullshit, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't.

[the_axel]

I've read a few posts from other people that his story is full of holes (like his code wouldn't work and they can't find the exploit of which he speaks).

[absurdhero.livejournal.com]

I buy it. My information is similar to apestyle's.

This is another bullshit artificial fiasco perpetuated by reactionary hive-mind intertards.