Author Topic: Amazon hates gay people!!!1 #amazonfail (Read 6817 times)

Howard Alan Treesong · « **on:** April 13, 2009, 01:53:44 PM »

fucking twitterheads, go fuck yourself in 140 characters or less

short short version: a lot of LGBT books disappeared yesterday from ranked search results (Top 100, etc.) and only appear now in specific searches for said material. they are apparently now classified as "adult" and thus censored. porn etc. is not classified as "adult."

internet: AMAZON HATES GAY PEOPLE, NEVER BUYING ANYTHING FROM AMAZON AGAIN, TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO BOYCOTT AMAZON, USE HASHTAG #AMAZONFAIL

reality: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011173.html#011173
(alternative reality: http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html)

is there a special word for people who take strong moral stances only when it becomes memetically popular to do so on the Internet? besides "sheeple."

Rman · « **Reply #1 on:** April 13, 2009, 01:59:25 PM »

Sensationalism and blogging, well microblogging with twitter, kind of go hand in hand these days. Idiocracy is seeming more and more plausible.

The Fake Shemp · « **Reply #2 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:00:00 PM »

So, does this mean its cool to hate Amazon now?

MCD · « **Reply #3 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:07:56 PM »

brb ordering from amazon.

Eric P · « **Reply #4 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:09:14 PM »

i hereby refuse to use amazon until i want a book or something.

Don Flamenco · « **Reply #5 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:16:50 PM »

Quote from: Synthesizer Patel on April 13, 2009, 01:53:44 PM

is there a special word for people who take strong moral stances only when it becomes memetically popular to do so on the Internet? besides "sheeple."

drama queens. they get all up in arms about shit over the internet because it's seems righteous to do so, then forget about it 10 minutes later.

tehjaybo · « **Reply #6 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:26:25 PM »

Thread hijack. This thread is now about what you have just bought from Amazon.com

World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide are on their way to my house because I didn't own them yet.

Don Flamenco · « **Reply #7 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:29:15 PM »

I need World War Z.

and what's that book by that Spanish author...2226 or something?

Kestastrophe · « **Reply #8 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:31:33 PM »

I started reading WWZ yesterday, 20 pages in and I want a movie

Tauntaun · « **Reply #9 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:32:36 PM »

Quote from: Kosma on April 13, 2009, 02:31:09 PM

How is beign gay an adult issue?

Wtf is wrong with amazon.

Quiet queer!

Tauntaun · « **Reply #10 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:33:49 PM »

Quote from: Kosma on April 13, 2009, 02:33:16 PM

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tehjaybo · « **Reply #11 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:36:07 PM »

Quote from: Tauntaun on April 13, 2009, 02:33:49 PM

Quote from: Kosma on April 13, 2009, 02:33:16 PM

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I see your

and raise you a

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Or maybe me being around is enough to give you a 'raise'...

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tehjaybo · « **Reply #12 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:37:09 PM »

Quote from: Kestastrophe on April 13, 2009, 02:31:33 PM

I started reading WWZ yesterday, 20 pages in and I want a movie

Awesome book. I've listened to it on audiobook, because it was all I could find at the time. Absolutely brilliant. The stories are amazing, and I love how it progresses through the whole war, telling about the lives of some people.

Bloodwake · « **Reply #13 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:37:51 PM »

Quote from: tehjaybo on April 13, 2009, 02:26:25 PM

Thread hijack. This thread is now about what you have just bought from Amazon.com

World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide are on their way to my house because I didn't own them yet.

Let me borrow them

Don Flamenco · « **Reply #14 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:41:36 PM »

thanks guys, you pushed me into ordering WWZ and tacitly oppressing the gay community

I found this while looking:
http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Zombies-Classic-Ultraviolent/dp/1594743347/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239644484&sr=8-1

wtf

tehjaybo · « **Reply #15 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:42:31 PM »

God Bloodwake, freakin mooch.

"Mail me Smallville S2 plz"

"Let me borrow World War Z plz"

"Come on man, it's just a handjob!"

Where will it end? WHERE?

DJ_Tet · « **Reply #16 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:43:32 PM »

In other news, the Sex story repository, ASSTR.org has a way to search through sex stories based on key word classifications. It has an 'include' field and an 'exclude' field. Up until recently, you could 'include' gay but you couldn't 'exclude' it. I always thought they just didn't want to upset the gay community, but it really sucked if you weren't gaborn or demi trying to read stories.

tehjaybo · « **Reply #17 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:44:07 PM »

Quote from: Kranz Fafka on April 13, 2009, 02:41:36 PM

thanks guys, you pushed me into ordering WWZ and tacitly oppressing the gay community

I found this while looking:
http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Zombies-Classic-Ultraviolent/dp/1594743347/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239644484&sr=8-1

wtf

You know, I saw that. And I really wanted to read it. But I will wait until someone I know has read it and can let me know if it's really worth it.

Tauntaun · « **Reply #18 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:44:10 PM »

Quote from: tehjaybo on April 13, 2009, 02:42:31 PM

God Bloodwake, freakin mooch.

"Mail me Smallville S2 plz"

"Let me borrow World War Z plz"

"Come on man, it's just a handjob!"

Where will it end? WHERE?

T234 · « **Reply #19 on:** April 13, 2009, 02:52:25 PM »

Quote from: DJ_Tet on April 13, 2009, 02:43:32 PM

In other news, the Sex story repository, ASSTR.org has a way to search through sex stories based on key word classifications. It has an 'include' field and an 'exclude' field. Up until recently, you could 'include' gay but you couldn't 'exclude' it. I always thought they just didn't want to upset the gay community, but it really sucked if you weren't gaborn or demi trying to read stories.

The most amazing website I have ever visited.

Eric P · « **Reply #20 on:** April 13, 2009, 03:01:17 PM »

Quote from: Kranz Fafka on April 13, 2009, 02:29:15 PM

I need World War Z.

and what's that book by that Spanish author...2226 or something?

2666, Roberto Bolano. Awesome writer, but I haven't read that yet.

I still have a book of his I need to send to Ghengis

I'm probably going to order the other TED Klein book he did this week. It's going to cost me another quarter.

Don Flamenco · « **Reply #21 on:** April 13, 2009, 03:03:53 PM »

Quote from: Eric P on April 13, 2009, 03:01:17 PM

Quote from: Kranz Fafka on April 13, 2009, 02:29:15 PM
I need World War Z.

and what's that book by that Spanish author...2226 or something?

2666, Roberto Bolano. Awesome writer, but I haven't read that yet.

I still have a book of his I need to send to Ghengis

just ordered 2666 as well, but I got the 3 volume version on ebay. +1 for gay community

demi · « **Reply #22 on:** April 13, 2009, 04:56:12 PM »

I guess I shouldnt reveal my evilbore amazon account

It's ok... I never wanted to eat anyway

Tauntaun · « **Reply #23 on:** April 13, 2009, 05:16:59 PM »

Quote from: Kosma on April 13, 2009, 03:04:11 PM

All that humping is only adult content if its gay, I dont know no rules about a girl on hippo.

It's a cat.

Eric P · « **Reply #24 on:** April 13, 2009, 05:39:21 PM »

Quote

Previous Entry Add to memories! Tell a Friend! Next Entry
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.
#!/bin/bash
let count = 1
while true; do
links -dump 'http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=0/?ie=ASCII&rs=1000&keywords=Gay_and_Lesbian&rh=n%3A!1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHomosexuality&page='`echo $count`|grep \/dp\/ >> /tmp/amazon
((count++))
done

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:

cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//

and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every cigarillo 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:
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/solving-captchas-for-cash/

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:

for i in `cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//`; do lynx -cookie_file=/home/avex/cookie1 http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/`echo $i`/;done

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.

The only person to figure it out was dely from Six Apart: http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html
but he has been ground zero at my work, cleaning up my messes before. Who else trolls via moral outrage? Not many in the scene that I know of.

http://community.livejournal.com/brutal_honesty/3168992.html

though flagged, is totally sfw

Howard Alan Treesong · « **Reply #25 on:** April 13, 2009, 05:49:13 PM »

as predicted it was about the lulz all along

Eric P · « **Reply #26 on:** April 13, 2009, 06:00:20 PM »

lulz ruin everything

Mr. Gundam · « **Reply #27 on:** April 13, 2009, 06:27:00 PM »

So this was confirmed to be the work of hackers?

I bought my wife Pride and Prejudice and Zombies from Amazon last night for her birthday. Hopefully it's interesting, if nothing else.

Eric P · « **Reply #28 on:** April 13, 2009, 06:29:10 PM »

no

that's real and pre-release is so successful that the publisher is preparing more literary mash ups

so, "fuck you" internet.

Mr. Gundam · « **Reply #29 on:** April 13, 2009, 06:31:54 PM »

Quote from: Eric P on April 13, 2009, 06:29:10 PM

no

that's real and pre-release is so successful that the publisher is preparing more literary mash ups

so, "fuck you" internet.

No no no. I was asking if the Amazon hates teh gayz was the work of hackers. I know that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is real.

Eric P · « **Reply #30 on:** April 13, 2009, 06:32:55 PM »

oh, dunno about confirmation or not, but it was an interesting read

Mr. Gundam · « **Reply #31 on:** April 13, 2009, 06:34:24 PM »

The Seattle PI is reporting it was the work of hackers, but who knows at this point.

Eric P · « **Reply #32 on:** April 13, 2009, 06:45:53 PM »

Quote from: distantmantra on April 13, 2009, 06:34:24 PM

The Seattle PI is reporting it was the work of hackers, but who knows at this point.

please, i don't trust blogs. let's have confirmation from a print news paper

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Mr. Gundam · « **Reply #33 on:** April 13, 2009, 06:51:06 PM »

I see what you did there!

I hate the Seattle Times.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp

TVC15 · « **Reply #34 on:** April 13, 2009, 06:53:03 PM »

Quote from: distantmantra on April 13, 2009, 06:51:06 PM

I see what you did there!

I hate the Seattle Times.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp

Quote

BLOGGER BIO
photo
Andrea James: News gatherer

lol they don't even call their schlubs reporters

Eric P · « **Reply #35 on:** April 13, 2009, 06:59:07 PM »

Quote

Andrea is a New Jersey native who started her career as a bonafide computer nerd. She majored in computer information systems at American University in Washington, D.C., and worked as a data analyst and Web designer to put herself through school. She also minored in physics because it was "fun."

TVC15 · « **Reply #36 on:** April 13, 2009, 07:00:10 PM »

RIP Seattle PI. She's probably more qualified to fix whatever the amazon fuckup was than to write on it.

Eric P · « **Reply #37 on:** April 13, 2009, 07:00:14 PM »

Quote

She enjoys hiking and skiing and exploring new places. In 2001, she appeared on Wheel of Fortune and won an all-expenses-paid trip to Antigua, which she still claims is one of her biggest achievements.

i hate this woman.

Positive Touch · « **Reply #38 on:** April 13, 2009, 07:54:01 PM »

jealous?

demi · « **Reply #39 on:** April 13, 2009, 08:07:56 PM »

Quote from: Eric P on April 13, 2009, 06:00:20 PM

lulz ruin everything

Lulz make life worth living

Great Rumbler · « **Reply #40 on:** April 13, 2009, 09:11:25 PM »

The Internet has a cancer. That cancer is lulz.

DJ_Tet · « **Reply #41 on:** April 13, 2009, 09:15:34 PM »

Quote from: T234 on April 13, 2009, 02:52:25 PM

Quote from: DJ_Tet on April 13, 2009, 02:43:32 PM
In other news, the Sex story repository, ASSTR.org has a way to search through sex stories based on key word classifications. It has an 'include' field and an 'exclude' field. Up until recently, you could 'include' gay but you couldn't 'exclude' it. I always thought they just didn't want to upset the gay community, but it really sucked if you weren't gaborn or demi trying to read stories.

The most amazing website I have ever visited.

See, we aren't so different after all

Howard Alan Treesong · « **Reply #42 on:** April 13, 2009, 09:41:19 PM »

http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp

seattlePI is now saying it was an amazon.fr employee who didn't know the difference between "adult" and "erotica" and applied the wrong label to 50,000 items

localization, lol

The Fake Shemp · « **Reply #43 on:** April 13, 2009, 09:52:09 PM »

#amazonfail

etiolate · « **Reply #44 on:** April 13, 2009, 09:55:56 PM »

Quote

is there a special word for people who take strong moral stances only when it becomes memetically popular to do so on the Internet? besides "sheeple."

college kids

The Fake Shemp · « **Reply #45 on:** April 13, 2009, 10:07:34 PM »

Aren't you in college?

CHOW CHOW · « **Reply #46 on:** April 13, 2009, 10:20:10 PM »

Quote from: tehjaybo on April 13, 2009, 02:26:25 PM

Thread hijack. This thread is now about what you have just bought from Amazon.com

World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide are on their way to my house because I didn't own them yet.

Pre-ordered 1st season of True Blood for a girlfriend's bday. Told me she like vampires and had a goth phase in high school

The Fake Shemp · « **Reply #47 on:** April 13, 2009, 10:20:55 PM »

Signs you might be a fat goth chick:

1. You saw Twilight
2. You watch True Blood
3. You listen to Panic at the Disco

CHOW CHOW · « **Reply #48 on:** April 13, 2009, 10:22:53 PM »

: she loved twilight too

etiolate · « **Reply #49 on:** April 13, 2009, 11:08:08 PM »

Quote from: Willco on April 13, 2009, 10:07:34 PM

Aren't you in college?

Yesh.

CrystalGemini · « **Reply #50 on:** April 14, 2009, 01:07:11 AM »

Quote from: etiolate on April 13, 2009, 11:08:08 PM

Quote from: Willco on April 13, 2009, 10:07:34 PM
Aren't you in college?

Yesh.

Explains the Starbucks thread.

recursivelyenumerable · « **Reply #51 on:** April 14, 2009, 01:27:42 AM »

but I like fat goth chicks

tehjaybo · « **Reply #52 on:** April 14, 2009, 11:35:51 AM »

Quote from: recursivelyenumerable on April 14, 2009, 01:27:42 AM

but I like fat goth chicks

I like skinny goth chicks.

I like my girls like I like my pancakes.

Eric P · « **Reply #53 on:** April 14, 2009, 11:40:03 AM »

Quote from: tehjaybo on April 14, 2009, 11:35:51 AM

Quote from: recursivelyenumerable on April 14, 2009, 01:27:42 AM
but I like fat goth chicks
I like skinny goth chicks.

I like my girls like I like my pancakes.

in stacks of three, covered in syrup? with bacon on the side?

tehjaybo · « **Reply #54 on:** April 14, 2009, 11:44:32 AM »

I don't eat pancakes stacked. Weirds me out. I was gonna say flat and covered in my sauces, but I guess syrup isn't so bad.

And I'll have a side of sausage.

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demi · « **Reply #55 on:** April 14, 2009, 04:30:29 PM »

Quote from: Eric P on April 14, 2009, 11:40:03 AM

Quote from: tehjaybo on April 14, 2009, 11:35:51 AM
Quote from: recursivelyenumerable on April 14, 2009, 01:27:42 AM
but I like fat goth chicks
I like skinny goth chicks.

I like my girls like I like my pancakes.

in stacks of three, covered in syrup? with bacon on the side?

Hey baby

Tauntaun · « **Reply #56 on:** April 14, 2009, 04:31:32 PM »

Quote from: demi on April 14, 2009, 04:30:29 PM

Quote from: Eric P on April 14, 2009, 11:40:03 AM
Quote from: tehjaybo on April 14, 2009, 11:35:51 AM
Quote from: recursivelyenumerable on April 14, 2009, 01:27:42 AM
but I like fat goth chicks
I like skinny goth chicks.

I like my girls like I like my pancakes.

in stacks of three, covered in syrup? with bacon on the side?

Hey baby

tehjaybo · « **Reply #57 on:** April 14, 2009, 04:38:23 PM »

I was starting to like where this thread was going.

Then demi showed up. Now I'm just scared for my anal virginity.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Wherever it may be...

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News:

Author Topic: Amazon hates gay people!!!1 #amazonfail (Read 6817 times)