Amazon Troll Busting

[bryant]

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

Comments

[jonthegm]

The code he POSTED didn't work... but you can immediately see that given a slightly more powerful perl or python script that you could do it without links.

[bryant]

I do! Heck, I wrote that code in about five minutes while I was fooling around with this. I'm willing to believe that he screwed with it for some reason.

Buttt the automated complaint page doesn't exist, which is a bigger problem.

[jonthegm]

What about the tagging system? Couldn't that be the culprit as well? (This hinges on Amazon having a heuristic that says "adult" tag combined with some other tags == highly likely to need blacklisting... therefore blacklist and send for review)

It seems a bit easier to blame a Bantown style exploit the more you look at it. Even if this guy is just a fake.

[bryant]

Oh, I will not at all be surprised if it turns out to be a third party responsible. Users can absolutely tag items, and if there's something turning those tags into decisions about which books should have sales rank? That'd explain it.

The tag in question would have to be something fairly innocuous, like "lesbian," given that Heather Has Two Mommies was de-ranked. It didn't have any adult tags, etc. -- lesbian was the one tag I could see which could be interpreted by someone dumb as adult content. So I dunno. Maybe.

But at this point there's nothing conclusive -- the post in question has nothing that would prove that the author was responsible. This puts it back in the pure speculation category. I'm holding off on pretending I know what happened until there's something real to bet on. Maybe Amazon screwed up; maybe Amazon was malicious; maybe someone else was malicious. Lord knows.

[anonymous]

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.

[stardragonca]

Of course, young Archimedes just made himself liable to a whole lot of grief.
Especially if Amazon decides they need a good financial scapegoat, and lookee who just volunteered!

[stardragonca]

He's a troll. He doesn't care who gives him grief; he just thinks it's funny that people are getting so worked up. If Amazon wants to get any money out of him, well... I wish them luck in finding his real name.

I mean, I'm not condoning his actions, I just don't think there's a lot you can do to a guy who doesn't take anything seriously. Besides ignoring him, that is.

[ravan]

Amazon's security people are pretty good. They also have been known to hire white hats. They took a financial hit. They'll be wanting his ass.

[stardragonca]

A phone call to Justice would produce the name.
I could link you to his published picture.
He doesn't care because he assumes nothing bad is going to ever happen to him, because he's so cool.
Mistake.

[emeraldsedai]

Appreciate the knowledgeable counter-perspective. I did, in fact, read the post on brutal_honesty, along with everything else that's been linked a zillion times on Twitter. (Honestly, the internet was FUN last night!), and though I can't vet the guy's code, my tentative conclusion matches yours: nothing I've read so far makes total sense of the facts.

[bryant]

I really /want/ to know what happened, because running big Internet stuff happens to be my job. I am sad that I probably won't ever really know.

It's damned well a good lesson in the vulnerabilities of centralization, no matter what. Same applies to Google. Same applies to UPS and FedEx. Single points of failure, right?

[emeraldsedai]

Same applies to the A3 Network. Hellooo Twitter. ;)

[emeraldsedai]

Portland blog The Fluent Self has a take on amazonfail today that I think is germane to your point.

[sunfell]

Could the troll have used Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" to propogate his scheme? We'll have to keep an eye on that to see if there will be any policy changes there. Talk about being blown up with one's own petard...

I like Amazon- warts-and-all, it's my fall back when local places can't or won't stock books I need. I'd hate to see it messed up by something like this. They're out to make money- it doesn't make sense that an internal policy could become so toxic.

[bryant]

Sure. You'd be nuts to use the Turk, because then there's a money trail which Amazon can look at without a court order, though. :)

[sunfell]

I really like what you say about 'reputation capital', and *fail (and *win) is a prime example of that. The "*fail" useage is well on its way to becoming a meta-meme, if it isn't already (consider the "Fail" blog).

Tracking the fallout from this will be interesting, as well as Twitter's role in it.