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zanzjanAmazon has unexpectedly jumped the shark. Drat, and I've spent a *lot* of money (well, a lot to ME) there over the years, including a fair number of high-priced baby items, and always been very happy with them up until now. )-:
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Date: 2009-04-12 09:41 pm (UTC)Here's hoping they realize the massive error of their ways and correct it, stat. I don't think they'd take my Kindle back at this point...I'm guessing everyone's reaction will be too huge to ignore and they'll have to reverse it.
Good open letter, sums up some of the titles affected.
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Date: 2009-04-14 05:46 pm (UTC)"It's obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as "adult" after too many people have complained about it. ... So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find. To the outside world, this looks like deliberate censorship on the part of Amazon, since Amazon operates the web application in question."
There is in fact some hacker over at pastebin who claims he took advantage of this and scaled it up, apparently as a weird sort of revenge for some delisting on Craigslist that he blamed on gay people:
[I wrote] 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 [gay] 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'...
The whole post is here: http://pastebin.ca/1390576. Reading the guy's hack it looks to me like it would have exactly the result we've seen.