... 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.

[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?

[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.

[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.