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Old 04-13-2009, 11:15 PM   #91
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I think 'ham-fisted' is a good way of admitting guilt, even if they haven't said they're sorry outright. They were trying to filter adult books and some yahoo thought that should include a lot of tags that it shouldn't.
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Old 04-14-2009, 02:22 AM   #92
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So it was a hacker, amazon is in the clear, they always had my confidence.

shame on you people for thinking Ole amazon could be Evil.
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Old 04-14-2009, 02:25 AM   #93
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So it was a hacker, amazon is in the clear, they always had my confidence.

shame on you people for thinking Ole amazon could be Evil.
No, it was not a hacker.
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Old 04-14-2009, 02:41 AM   #94
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Even the biggest companies make cock-ups - it's human error. Does no one remember that a few weeks ago, for a while, every search result on Google was tagged with a "this has been reported as an unsafe site" flag?
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Old 04-14-2009, 03:00 AM   #95
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Even the biggest companies make cock-ups - it's human error. Does no one remember that a few weeks ago, for a while, every search result on Google was tagged with a "this has been reported as an unsafe site" flag?
yeah that was fun, OMGZ the interwebz are unsafe, every site!

Hotmail was down for over 2 hours the other night

Amazon glitches up the entire system. the flag as inaproriate hacker theory is still valid in my eyes. I still dont think they got the WHOLE thing sorted out yet.

knowing how corporations work, I knew that it wasnt On purpose by the company, but some small group.

Last edited by Andybaby; 04-14-2009 at 03:02 AM.
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Old 04-14-2009, 09:28 AM   #96
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Maybe the bloggers that reported that the issue was all about gay and lesbian titles should apologize to Amazon. They're the ones that generated the heat and mistargeted it.
It may not have been "all about" gay and lesbian titles, but gay books and authors were clearly and obviously targeted by this "glitch."
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Old 04-14-2009, 09:38 AM   #97
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It may not have been "all about" gay and lesbian titles, but gay books and authors were clearly and obviously targeted by this "glitch."
I'm not actually sure that's the case, since my own book Stealing Light got hit. The sales ranking disappeared from my Amazon UK page for several hours, and I figured it was just a glitch. Nobody's 'targeting' my book for gay or lesbian content, because there isn't any. It's spaceship-and-explosions space opera, and yet it was obviously affected. That's a database error and foot-in-mouth Amazon rep saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time, not a blackhearted attempt to do evil.
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Old 04-14-2009, 09:52 AM   #98
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Originally Posted by garygibsonsf View Post
I'm not actually sure that's the case, since my own book Stealing Light got hit. The sales ranking disappeared from my Amazon UK page for several hours, and I figured it was just a glitch. Nobody's 'targeting' my book for gay or lesbian content, because there isn't any. It's spaceship-and-explosions space opera, and yet it was obviously affected. That's a database error and foot-in-mouth Amazon rep saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time, not a blackhearted attempt to do evil.
Gay and lesbian titles with adult content were delisted while very similar straight titles were not. Gay and lesbian titles with no adult content were delisted. Gay and lesbian authors found their books with no gay content whatsoever likewise delisted.

I never said "only" Gay and Lesbian titles and authors were affected, but it certainly appears that they were hit by this glitch while similar straight books and authors were largely left alone.
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Old 04-14-2009, 10:08 AM   #99
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Another point that makes me wonder if there really isn't some censoring going on at Amazon, compare the US cover of this book of Lesbian erotica:

http://www.amazon.com/Cherry-Red-Div...9697556&sr=1-7

With the UK version:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cherry-Red-D...697617&sr=1-19

It hardly seems racy enough to black out; no worse than the cover of a slightly bawdy romance novel.
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Old 04-14-2009, 10:11 AM   #100
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I don't think anyone is disputing Amazon's legal right to sell or not sell whatever they please. The point is that we also have a right to choose to not buy from a company that exibits such nasty behavior.

If anyone sought to legally constrain Amazon into including LGBT books in their rankings, I'd oppose them. But anyone exercising *their* rights by not buying from Amazon will at this point recieve a hardy cheer from me.
I think we are saying exactly the same thing. Furthermore, I think that our reliance on data at the fingertips has channeled us into a "snap judgment" society, and that misunderstandings like this can become a fiasco whether there is genuine duplicity or a simple misunderstanding or genuine accident.
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Old 04-14-2009, 10:11 AM   #101
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Of course, because of all the backlash Amazon could be doing a serious backpedal and telling us it was a glitch when it was in fact what they intended to do all along.
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Old 04-14-2009, 10:21 AM   #102
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Originally Posted by garygibsonsf View Post
It's spaceship-and-explosions space opera, and yet it was obviously affected.
Dude, why aren't your books in the Kindle store? Sounds like books I might like.

BOb
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Old 04-14-2009, 10:41 AM   #103
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"Many books have now been fixed..." so they're still intending to use this filtering code.

As an option "Eliminate items with these tags from my shopping experience," fine. I'm not interested in erotica myself. But that should be a choice left to the user.

(And, by the way, kids can have Amazon accounts, with or without a credit card. Mine have both had accounts for years. The question really is, at what age do you let kids use computers unsupervised, and how often do you talk with your kids about what's online? For that matter, at what age do you let them go to book stores or the library without supervision?)
Erotica is one thing, but "the history of sexuality, volume I" by Foucault and the entire rest of scholarly literature that *mentions* or references homosexuality of anything related to it is quite another. Even if that was a radio button setting, it would seem the filtering is rather ham-fisted too.
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Old 04-14-2009, 12:00 PM   #104
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It may not have been "all about" gay and lesbian titles, but gay books and authors were clearly and obviously targeted by this "glitch."
57,310 books were affected, and we've seen lists of what...maybe 100 books with gay/lesbian content that were affected? We've also seen specific references to books that are NOT gay content that were affected. And you're still assuming that gay and lesbian books and authors were affected without seeing the full list of titles.

Sometimes a glitch is just a glitch.
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Old 04-14-2009, 01:03 PM   #105
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Gay and lesbian titles with adult content were delisted while very similar straight titles were not. Gay and lesbian titles with no adult content were delisted. Gay and lesbian authors found their books with no gay content whatsoever likewise delisted.

I never said "only" Gay and Lesbian titles and authors were affected, but it certainly appears that they were hit by this glitch while similar straight books and authors were largely left alone.
I got the impression that they were using tags to filter. If you figure that GLBT authors and content likely attract inappropriate tags from prejudiced users then that could explain it without any intended targeting on Amazon's part.

I remember back in ye olde days of the internet getting a spam email from some woman trying to organize a protest against Yahoo because when the searched for the N word, groups like NAACP were top hits. She thought that yahoo had returned that because they had catalogged NAACP and others this way. She was new to the Internet and didn't quite get how search engines worked. NAACP came up because that word was on their site. It's not surprising since they talk about hate. In this case, the GLBT-related works are a target for the hate but it's still all about words placed there by others. That's why I think Amazon needs to stay the heck out of filtering altogether. They either have to categorize everything themselves or they have to find a way to separate "good" tags from ones that are left with some other agenda. Either way, they're going to piss people off. I say let people set up their own tag filters if they like but they should back away from this pit of quicksand as fast as they can.
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