Samantha Rose Hunt20 April 2009, 2:45 PM
A hacker has come forward claiming he was responsible for duping Amazon into delisting gay/lesbian books.
Earlier in the week a hacker, who identified himself is “Weev,” took credit for a “glitch” on Amazon.com by posting a confession on a LiveJournal discussion board Monday morning. The glitch caused many gay and lesbian themed books to lose their sales ranks during the Easter holiday weekend, disappearing from top-seller lists.
The weekend launched bloggers into uproar as individuals become upset regarding removal of a number of books which are “adult” themed. The removal was discovered by Mark R. Probst, who discovered that his very own gay romance novel The Filly had been affected.
“Weev,” stated that he was able to remove the sales ranks by exploiting a content reporting feature that let users report inappropriate content. By submitting a multiple reports on any specific book title the book would lose its sales rank.
“Weev,” said that he designed a script which searched and returned each gay and lesbian themed book and then worked with popular web sites in attempt to issue complaints, thus removing the books ranking. “They put … invisible iFrame(s) in their Web sites to refer people to the complaint URLs, which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge,” he wrote.
Amazon, however claims that there was in fact no hack, and that the glitch was actually, “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error,” which ultimately caused tens of thousands of titles to lose their sales ranks, the company claims the de-rankings did not only hit gay and lesbian titles.
The company is working to correct the glitch. Patty Smith, director of corporate communications from Amazon issued a written statement: "This is an embarrassing and hamfisted cataloguing error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. It has been misreported that the issue was limited to gay and lesbian themed titles.”
The statement continued, "In fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as health, mind and body, reproductive and sexual medicine, and erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search. Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future."
Mark Probst and other books have had their rankings restored.
Note: please keep discussion to the technical issues around the glitch, not your thoughts on the merits of different sexual preferences. Comments on the latter topic will be deleted.