Amazon says gay-books listing snafu was an error, not a hack

IDG News Service - Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. blamed a glitch that knocked gay-and-lesbian-themed books out of its main product search engine on a "ham-fisted cataloging error," while disputing a hacker's claim that he had caused the search problems by exploiting a flaw on Amazon's Web site.

The problem was first reported on Sunday by author Mark Probst, who in a blog post said he had noticed that the search rankings on the Amazon site had been dropped for his own novel, The Filly, and other gay-themed books.

His report set off a firestorm in the blogosphere, where some accused the company of antigay censorship — a fire that was fueled by Probst's inclusion in his post of a message he received from an Amazon customer service representative. As posted by Probst, the message said that the company excluded "adult material" from some searches and best-seller lists "in consideration of our entire customer base."

On Monday, though, Amazon said that the exclusions were actually caused by a glitch and that the problem didn't involve only gay and lesbian titles. It affected 57,310 books worldwide "in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine and Erotica," according to the company.

Amazon was still in the process of fixing the problem, spokeswoman Patricia Smith said via e-mail.

The retailer's disclosure didn't prevent a hacker who uses the name "Weev" from claiming credit for the glitch. As some bloggers complained that Amazon's statement didn't adequately explain what had happened, Weev said in a blog post that he had caused the problem by exploiting a common Web programming error on the Amazon site.

He also claimed to have enlisted "some people who run some extremely high traffic websites" and "hired third worlders" to help him game Amazon's ranking system by automatically filing customer complaints reporting gay and lesbian books as inappropriate material.

Other bloggers, though, quickly debunked Weev's exploit claims. And Amazon's Smith also said that the hacker's claims are false.

A former Amazon employee named Mike Daisey said in an interview that the problem really did appear to have been caused by an employee mistake.

According to Daisey, a friend within the company told him that someone working on Amazon's French Web site mistagged a number of keyword categories, including the "Gay and Lesbian" one, as pornographic, using what's known internally as the Browse Nodes tool. Soon the mistake affected Amazon sites worldwide, Daisey said. "If you use that tool in one site, it affects every site in Amazon," he noted. "So the guy screwed up in France and it propagated everywhere."

Daisey, a monologist who worked at Amazon for three years, said he was amused that Weev's claims had been so widely reported, given that Weev has made a name for himself as a so-called online troll who traffics in pranks. "I think it's hilarious," Daisey said, "that he's gotten as much traction as he has with the [Amazon] story because his whole modus operandi is about pranking people."