In the comments to my earlier post about the Amazon Gay Glitch, monologuist Mike Daisey (who knows a thing or two about Amazon), comments:

After hearing from people on the inside at Amazon, I am convinced it was in fact, a “glitch.”

Well, more like user error—some idiot editing code for one of the many international versions of Amazon mixed up the difference between “adult” and “erotic” and “sexuality”. All the sites are tied together, so editing one affected all for blacklisting, and ta-da, you get this situation.

The CS rep who responded that this was Amazon policy was just confused about what they were talking about, and gave standard boilerplate about porn.

The dumbest part is saying it was a “glitch”. A “glitch”? Just say that it was one of your workers making an editing error. Really dumb PR move, that one.

Let me know if you actually want more details on how it went down, but it’s pretty boring and technical.

I asked Mike for more details, and according to his inside sources, the story is that a programmer at Amazon France was editing the site to filter porn out of some search results, and he “mixed up ‘adult,’ which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like ‘erotic’ and ‘sexuality.’ The system he was working on is universal, so the change he made propagated across Amazon’s sites worldwide.

Amazon’s systems are notoriously idiosyncratic so it’s not hard to imagine a change like this getting into their worldwide system, though it’s certainly interesting that it would be so difficult to correct the problem.

When Mark Probst received his reply from customer service, the rep misunderstood the problem and sent him a boilerplate response on how they deal with “adult” content.

The technical reasons for this glitch (no quotes!) are still hazy at best, and it seems increasingly unlikely that Amazon will issue any sort of real explanation, unfortunately.

Oh, and the LiveJournal post from that guy claiming to have done the whole thing himself just for laughs? It’s bullshit.

Anthony Hecht is The Stranger's Chief Technology Officer. He owns no monkeys.

61 replies on “Re: Amazon and The Gay (French) Glitch, Mike Daisey Responds”

  1. OH SO NOW SAVAGE IS PISSED OFF WELL WELCOME TO THE CLUB I GUESS WHEN YOU CANT GET YOUR PORN DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR HOSE AT VASHON OR YOUR STOOL AT RPLACE THEN ITS REALLY OPPRESSION HUH NOT LIKE WHAT SELF-ACTUALIZED QUEERS AND DYKES OF SIZE FACE EVERY DAY WERE ALL UNDER THE OBAMA BUS NOW SAVAGE HOW DOES IT FEEL NOT GOOD HUH

  2. You know, Jigae, other people are allowed to have opinions different than yours, and expressing different opinions does not make them a dick. For years I’ve had people all of a sudden ask what has happened to me just because for the first time my opinion differs from theirs. I haven’t changed, I assure you.

  3. The sales rank issue is not the only anti-gay part of Amazon. Did you know that their “search suggestions” feature is completely disabled for searches using “gay” or “lesbian” as their first word?

    Normally Amazon shows you suggestions as you type characters in the search box. For example if you type “Christian m” you will see a list of suggestions including “Christian marriage”. You don’t have to type the full search, just select from the suggestions.

    If you try this same search by typing “gay m” you get nothing. Unlike the term “Christian”, the word “gay” just shuts off the search suggestions feature completely. Same for “lesbian.”

    This sucks.

    I wonder what kind of “glitch” this can be attributed to.

  4. @52: No really, you’ve been more of a dick lately to everyone. This is the first time we’ve disagreed in recent memory. It’s seemed so out of character that I’ve wondered if you’d been sock-puppeted, but you’re overall debate style is about the same so I have to assume you’re just going through a rough patch.

    Another reason we need registration — there’d presumably be some way of sending personal messages.

  6. @ paul & garote:

    You may know shit-loads about CS security but you obviously know sweet fa about Amazon’s systems. Think of the IT equivalent of toilet rolls held together with duct tape & string and you’re on the right lines.

    I worked at Amazon for way longer than Mike Daisey and I can tell you that it’s not only entirely plausible that one employee could screw up the listings for 58K items on the site, it’s the only plausible explanation – far more likely than a hacker – and has happened on other occasions with other things (there were a number of very public pricing errors years ago until we managed to shore up those systems & put safeguards in place so you couldn’t en masse mis-price items).

    As for keeping the kiddies safe – that’s one of the reasons Amazon has those types of flags in the database, and it’s a perfectly reasonable reason. Even the illustrious Dan Savage would want to keep his little boy away from porn before puberty, wouldn’t he?

  9. Wow hold up… I’m buying the hacker angle: http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.htm…

    That does explain the early de-listing of Craig Seymour’s book, and its subsequent re-listing, and the “policy letter” – probably an automated form letter for when your content gets delisted. 100% consistent with early testing of the attack before mainstream deployment.

    Of course someone is going to take credit for it. Since Amazon has a public cover story we have almost no way of knowing if he is the real attacker, or if it was an attack or not (unless Amazon changes their story).

  10. @shiraz, #56

    Maybe Amazon is like toilet paper rolls and string, and maybe one employee did just fuck it up. I don’t pretend to know anything about Amazon’s internals.

    Still, the weak architecture might also strengthen my case, no? Sorry if I don’t believe you when you say the flimsy-ness of its construction makes employee error “far more likely than a hacker,” since said construction makes it far easier for a hacker to exploit.

    Even the smallest hole in construction can lead to a hacker breaking it (Twitter fell for a dictionary attack a few months ago, after all), so bad construction is not a strong defense when claiming a hacker couldn’t have done it.

    But again, this is all what I think, not what I know.

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