April 13, 2009

A “Glitch,” A Hack, Or Just Bad Judgment? Bottom Line: It’s Still Amazon’s Fault

Amazon says it was a “glitch”; authors have evidence showing otherwise. Either way, Amazon is at fault, and I’ll tell you why.

Publishers Weekly’s take:

A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove “adult” titles from its sales rankings. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a “glitch” had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new policy regarding “adult” titles. As of Monday morning, a number of titles affected by the glitch were still without sales rankings. No one at Amazon was available this morning to discuss when the problem might be fixed or what caused the glitch. …

Whatever the cause, titles like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain are among the those that have lost their sales ranking. Bloggers aren’t buying the glitch explanation and some are calling an Amazon boycott, but the fact that such a wide range of titles have lost their rankings suggest that whatever Amazon may have been trying to do went haywire.

Author Mark R. Probst’s take:

On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: “Transgressions” by Erastes and “False Colors” by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book “The Filly.” There was buzz, What’s going on? Does Amazon have some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books? Is it just a major glitch in the system? Many of us decided to write to Amazon questioning why our rankings had disappeared. Most received evasive replies from customer service reps not versed in what was happening. As I am a publisher and have an Amazon Advantage account through which I supply Amazon with my books, I had a special way to contact them. 24 hours later I had a response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. …

Yes, it is true. Amazon admits they are indeed stripping the sales ranking indicators for what they deem to be “adult” material. Of course they are being hypocritical because there is a multitude of “adult” literature out there that is still being ranked – Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins, come on! They are using categories THEY set up (gay and lesbian) to now target these books as somehow offensive.

Now in fairness I should point out that Amazon has also stopped ranking many books in the “erotica” categories as well which includes straight erotica. But that’s a whole other battle that I’ll leave to the erotica writers to take on.

Now I could probably convince the automatons at Amazon that The Filly is YA and therefore not “adult” in the least, and I could probably even convince them to reinstate my ranking. But if they are excluding books just on the basis of being “gay” then by all means exclude mine too because I don’t want them just to reinstate the “nice” gay books, they need to reinstate all the gay books and if they are really going to try and exclude so-called “adult” material, then how come this has an Amazon ranking? …

[Update:] Publisher’s Weekly now has a story … that an Amazon spokesperson claims this is all a glitch and they have no such new policy. My caselog is still active in my Advantage account with the response from customer service rep Ashlyn D. Also I’d like to point you to this blog of an author who received this same response from Amazon back in February. …

As of 8 AM this morning (April 13th) The Filly has had it’s ranking reinstated by Amazon. I also noticed Alex Beecroft’s False Colors was reinstated as well. Many others are not, so they haven’t fixed the “so-called” glitch as of yet.

A protest petition (which both my wife and I signed, and which is gathering literally hundreds of new signatures by the hour; the total is up to 17,744 as I write this) lists more LGBT titles that were “glitched” out of the ranking system:

–Radclyffe Hill’s [sic] classic novel about lesbians in Victorian times, The Well of Loneliness, and which contains not one sentence of sexual description;

–Mark R Probst’s YA novel The Filly about a young man in the wild West discovering that he’s gay (gay romance, no sex);

–Charlie Cochrane’s Lessons in Love (gay romance with no sex);

–The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience, edited by Louis-George Tin (non-fiction, history and social issues);

–and Homophobia: A History by Bryan Fone (non-fiction, focus on history and the forms prejudice against homosexuality has taken over the years).

The last two, especially, blow me away. And… The Well of Loneliness? With all due respect to Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness makes for a better sleep aid than it does an aphrodisiac.

Finally, here’s another, much longer list of books purged from the ranks; what burns my hide is the presence of even more most-decidedly un-erotic, scholarly works:

• Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History

• Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America

• Transgender Warriors (Leslie Feinberg)

• Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (Leslie Feinberg)

• Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History

• Strangers: Homosexuality in the Nineteenth Century

• Celluloid Closet (Vito Russo)

• The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (Randy Shilts)

• Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military (Randy Shilts) (Yet Shilts’ And The Band Played On hasn’t been touched yet. Huh?)

• Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet (William N. Eskridge Jr.)

• Biological Exuberance (Bruce Bagemhil)

…and pretty much every other important, required-reading, historical, biographical, and queer-theory book your can think of.

So, what happened? Was Amazon deliberately targeting LGBT-themed books, or was it really a “glitch”?

I think it was both, and here’s why — that is, if — I repeat: if — this “fag”-hating troll is telling the truth, and not just making stuff up to impress his fellow low-life troll friends who have nothing better to do with their time than make life more difficult than it has to be… just for lulz:

Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here’s a nice piece I like to call “how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code”.

I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like “looking to get tarred and pleasured” and “Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence’s lexical subject” kept getting flagged. The hypocracy of the gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for “pnp” or “tina” reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. How is homosexuality and meth okay but heterosexuality and heroin bad? So I decided to get them back and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.

I’m logged into Amazon at a far later date and see it has a “report as inappropriate” feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.

So I script some quick bash. …

There’s 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 … and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag 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’. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. If you ever need a service like that, you can find them in a post like this advertising in the comments…

Then they would log into the accounts, save the cookies in a cookie file and send it to me.

Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books…

The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay and outrage across the blogosphere ain’t so bad. …

H/T to a commenter at Pam’s.

If none of that made sense (and it shouldn’t, unless you’re a geek of the highest order), he’s claiming to have exploited Amazon’s customer rating system through a script; i.e., automatically, programmatically.

So, let’s assume this “fag”-hating hacker-troll did just what he says he did. Then it’s not Amazon’s fault, right?

Wrong.

There’s still the issue of Amazon’s replies to more than a couple of authors (in addition to Probst, and predating Mr. Gay-Basher’s attack):

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

If Amazon was relying solely on customer feedback, Amazon is still at fault for not catching the sudden wave of negative feedback solely targeting LGBT-themed books — an anomaly that should have stuck out like a sore thumb to anyone at Amazon who was paying attention. That, of course, begs the question: Why was no one paying attention? Amazon.com is a 24/7 business; Web sites do not get weekends off.

If this programmatic exploit of its feedback system is the “glitch” Amazon is referring to, then why did Amazon reply to inquiring authors with the canned “adult material” response — and before this exploit was supposedly implemented?

Bottom line: Any system can be exploited, but Amazon is still at fault — not so much for failing to lock down its feedback system against exploits (seriously: you can’t know there is a vulnerability until somebody exploits it), but for 1) failing to detect an overwhelmingly obvious anomaly, 2) failing to come clean about what really happened, and 3) continuing to shift the blame from itself to the “adult” content of de-ranked books that were never “adult material” (i.e., sexually explicit) to begin with.

So, now what? Well, for us, the answer is simple, if painful: After many years of being satisfied customers of Amazon, and almost as many years selling books and videos through Amazon, we’re moving on, and looking for a new online outlet both for our personal shopping, and through which to sell books and DVDs.

Even if Mr. Gay-Basher Troll is telling the truth.

We cannot, and will not, continue to support a company that would allow our community — or any other (yes, even right-wing Christian authors) — to be targeted so easily, and fail to come clean about what’s really going on.

We may go back to Amazon one day. But we’d need to see Jeff Bezos hold a press conference, explain everything fully and truthfully, and then get down on one knee and beg forgiveness. Oh, and he’d have to sack that “Ashley D” person who keeps sending out the “adult material” replies, too.

In the meantime… If Mr. Gay-Hating Hacker Troll is telling the truth, shouldn’t he have been arrested by now?

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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