Amazon got gamed?

Remember Easter's Amazon Fail?

A person has come forward and claimed that they exploited Amazon's "Report as inappropriate" feature with a bit of a cross-site-scripting to get many thousands of users to unknowingly and unwittingly report a large list of titles as inappropriate, removing their sales ranking and excluding them from search results.

Amazon have yanked the feature during the fixup process which makes the story quite a bit more credible.

All in all 57,310 items were affected. Not just gay-themed books, but "a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine and Erotica."

The Day Online Reputation Died - Attacking Amazon's Ranking System (playnoevil)

Amazon refers to this as a "ham-fisted" cataloging error, which doesn't feel like it holds water. Someone was working on the Amazon databases over the Easter Weekend (a time when Amazon says it didn't have anyone to respond to the problem), and decides to classify most items (but apparently not all) that are tagged gay/lesbian as porn?

That doesn't seem very likely, to be honest.

Amazon fails

Apparently Amazon has started stripping sales rankings from a lot of the books in its catalogue. A hint of homosexuality, it seems, is the trigger. Gay or lesbian characters or themes.

In response to an enquiry from one of the authors, they indicated that this was due to policy. Publisher's Weekly calls it a glitch, but at least one Amazon employee seems to think it is intentional. If it is a glitch it is a very unfortunately specific (and apparently homophobic) glitch.

I'm seriously not at all sure I'd buy the glitch story. If it is, then I think Amazon needs to stop just saying "Yeah, it's a glitch" and start telling people when they expect things to be corrected.

Brass knuckles

Since there's no controversy about violent video games, and violence and video games, of course Electronic Arts figured it would be a great idea to send out brass knuckles with the promo material for Godfather II.

That's like bungee-jumping using a length of iron chain, you know, to prove it's safe - or some other staggering, self-harming non-sequitur.

As a promotional item, it would come from their marketing department, so we must assume that the marketing department hasn't read a newspaper or watched any TV in, oh, the last ten years or so. Leastways, nothing about - you know - games.

Now EA is trying to take the things back. Turns out that possession of them is a crime in a lot of places in the USA. Sending them across state lines, too. Of course, if they're trying to get people to send them back, are they not now inciting the recipients to break the law by sending the items across state lines a second time?

What the heck was anyone thinking?