Amazonfail and Bantown

[tablesaw]

I was asleep for most of #Amazonfail. By the time I started seeing it, I was seeing reports that Amazon said it was a glitch. And having just had a long Easter rest, that actually seemed to make sense to me.

In fact, in the back of my mind, what made sense was this:

It's obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as "adult" after too many people have complained about it. It's also obvious that there aren't too many people using this feature, as indicated by the easy availability (and search ranking) of pornography and sex toys and other seemingly "objectionable" materials, otherwise almost all of those items would have been flagged by this point. So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find. To the outside world, this looks like deliberate censorship on the part of Amazon, since Amazon operates the web application in question. To me, this looks like one of two things:

1. Some "Family"-type organization astroturfing Amazon in an attempt to rid the world of EVIL PRO-HOMOSEXUAL FILTH!!
   
2. Bantown

—tehdely, "On Amazon Failure, Meta-Trolls, and Bantown"

tehdely goes on to explain "Bantown" and how it was used during LJ strikethrough.

Of these, the Firefox shitstorm, Nipplegate, and Strikethrough stand out. Friends, #amazonfail is simply more of the same. I don't mean to imply that any of the same people are involved, but rather that the same tactic is involved, and it is working devilishly. Cleverly as well, this troll was perpetrated on a weekend AND a holiday, when Amazon's customer service would be operating on a skeleton crew and most of those who would be able to fix the problem would be at home and possibly unavailable or on vacation. Also, like Nipplegate and Strikethrough, this troll pits a marginalized and activist community against a big company, with the Internet and all its various discussion media (in this case, blogs and Twitter) as the facilitator.

Now, a hacker has claimed to have done exactly this thing. At the moment, the hack listed in the post does not appear to be reproducible. But as bryant says:

The really interesting thing about the troll is that he's right even if he didn't do it. The vulnerability he describes exists anywhere you make automated decisions based on third-party input.

Hat tip to a poster who linked a locked post.

Comments

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

chance hacker did what he claims to have done: zero. advisability of making such a public claim unless patently innocent: correspondingly low.

[tablesaw]

Very true, and I've updated with a post that is trying to test the general method. But the problem still feels more like the result of exploitable architecture (exploited in a specific short period of time) than corporate policy.

In retrospect, I think I felt more obliged to post the hacker post because it was the one that linked to tehdely's.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Could well be. I wonder if we'll ever find out?

[tablesaw]

I suspect we'll find out how. It's in Amazon's best interest to give a full explanation to some internet soapboxes. I don't expect we'll learn a who, though.

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

That post seems intentionally and obviously tongue-in-cheek to me, but all of the commenters seem to be taking it seriously, and I'm not familiar with the author's past writings.

[tablesaw]

You can read about him in this article.

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

#bantown is srs biznes!

Weev is an expert liar, I don't believe much of what he says (except the parts about his self-inflated sense of importance), but as tablesaw points out, he's fooled at least some NYT journalists. Here's a copy of the article without login: http://richarddawkins.net/article,2928,The-Trolls-Among-Us,NY-Times

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

"Fooled" in what sense? I'm only now reading the article, and I don't know anything about him (or especially care to pay him the courtesy of doing the research); what should I know about the article?