Comments | bryant: Amazon Troll Busting

bryant

Amazon Troll Busting

Apr 13, 2009 12:20

The original post which prompted this one is now inaccessible accessible again. C'est la vie.

Hopefully you weren't thinking of this as a news post, but just in case ( Read more... )

Comments 161

anonymous April 13 2009, 16:32:51 UTC

I rather thought so... thanks for checking, though: It's always better to know rather than assume.

Form a common sense standpoint, his story would not explain the two Amazon reps' response template about adult content.

Thank you.

peitso April 13 2009, 16:44:13 UTC

The 'adult' content policy messages could have been a PR move because they really had no idea what was going on. No company ever tells the public that it's dealing with a massive crisis that hasn't surfaced yet--there's no need if it's not public. If that was the case, it was still a bad move.

(The comment has been removed)

bernmarx April 13 2009, 17:51:31 UTC

Actually, ironically, just last week I got an email reply from Amazon's digital music department that not only answered my question but gave me a phone number to call to walk me through my number (which I called, and which walked me through my problem).

Thread 22

anonymous April 13 2009, 16:38:06 UTC

Thanks for clearing this up. Even if this guy's actions had some kind of effect there's no way one person would be responsible of it all.

anonymous April 13 2009, 16:40:54 UTC

works for me.

merk@locke:~ [31/83]$ links --version
ELinks 0.10.6 (built on Sep 25 2007 18:50:54)

Features:
Standard, Fastmem, IPv6, gzip, bzip2, Cascading Style Sheets, Protocol (File, FTP, HTTP, NNTP, SMB, URI rewrite, User protocols),
SSL (GnuTLS), MIME (Option system, Mailcap, Mimetypes files), LED indicators,
Bookmarks, Cookies, Form History, Global History, Scripting (Lua, Perl)

bryant April 13 2009, 16:58:33 UTC

Well, sure. links is a real program that really does go out and fetch pages from the Web.

But if you run links as:

links -dump

You get a formatted version of the page; you don't get the raw HTML, which is what you need if you want to extract the links.

I mean, it's a side point, because it's obviously possible to write a script that'll extract every product ID on Amazon, but the code's undeniably buggy as posted.

weev April 14 2009, 14:20:32 UTC

It is? Here's a youtube video of it working, as pasted:

http://www.youtube.com/v/hYk-F5FXIb0

Elinks 0.10.6 is what is installed by default on ubuntu 6.02.2 LTS when I type "apt-get install links". It does dump links at the end of the file, which are trivially grepped for.

Please type links --version and find out what version of links you are using. Then install elinks 0.10.6 and retry the code.

I'd appreciate a retraction, thanks.

weev April 14 2009, 14:29:41 UTC

from that file generated, the regexp works great:

$ head -n 1 amazon
104. http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Kim-Pritekel/dp/1933720085/ref=sr_1_1/182-9014588-9333611?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239630457&sr=1-1
$ head -n 1 amazon|sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//
1933720085

Thread 8

troubleinchina April 13 2009, 16:46:31 UTC

Also, it doesn't account for all of the books that were taken down. Amongst other things, straight erotica also went down, and that wouldn't go down with a "I'm targeting GLTB books" code.

elialshadowpine April 13 2009, 16:50:27 UTC

He mentioned getting other people in on it for a focused attack. If they changed the parameters, that might explain it.

That the code doesn't work at all, though......

anonymous April 13 2009, 16:50:55 UTC

Re 4):

He does insert the product IDs after http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/ like so:

http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/0830823794

But still results in 404.

bryant April 13 2009, 16:53:55 UTC

Yeah, I tried that and got the 404.

If someone can come up with evidence that it worked prior to today I'll recant, because turning off a Web page is exactly how I'd turn off that capability without having to do a code push. But I wanna see some evidence first.