All but one of Bezos' reviews are five stars. The geeky retailer raves about Snickerdoodles, "amazing cheese snacks," $1,100 binoculars and a book that indulges his "dream of visiting the outer planets." Then comes the 13th Warrior, the 1999 action film starring Antonio Banderas. It is a four-star picture, according to 334 other customers, but Bezos writes that "one star is indeed one too many."

This is a terrible, terrible movie... this endless stream of uninteresting battle scenes with pointless dialogue and no discernable plot is perhaps one of the worst movies ever made. Sorry if this seems harsh, but I just don't want anyone to buy it unknowingly.

The only thing anyone can agree on was Amazon.com PR's complete mishandling of the situation, once people noticed that gay and lesbian books were getting marked as "adult" titles, which Amazon.com omits from its sales rankings and search results. Top flack Patty Smith didn't do much better with her latest excuseplanation:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & 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.

Thanks for checking in. Best regards -
Patty

In other words, it happened and they're fixing it. That's worse than nothing. So here are the rumors that have crossed our inbox:

Blame France! An Amazon.com alumnus tells us this story about "how it went down":

guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up "adult", which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like "erotic" and "sexuality". That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon. The [customer service] rep thought the porn question as a standard porn question about how searches work.

It's the Conficker worm! A source who claimed to work at Amazon.com told me that internal logs revealed a massive wave of automatically created accounts shortly before the incident, apparently using machines infected with the Conficker worm.

We don't have concrete evidence that it was Conficker, but a few days before the incident, there was a mass registration of accounts on Amazon. We're talking MASSIVE. I don't have an exact number, but from the regions the accounts were registered from, it looked like it followed a trend. There were quite a few from India, eastern United States as well. According to my coworkers who have done more research into it, the regions that the registrations were from followed a strong trend with the regions that Conficker has most affected.

The hacker did it. That brings us back to the claim by Weev, a well-documented website prankster, that he's responsible — a claim which Smith, the Amazon spokeswoman categorically denies. ("No," she said, in response to a series of direct questions asking if Weev was involved. Smith is quite possibly the least verbose director of corporate communications in the world.)

In his detailed explanation of how he allegedly pulled off the stunt, Weev says he hired third-world workers to break Amazon's "captcha" security, which displays a random set of numbers and letters in an effort to block hackers who attempt to mass-register accounts using scripts. Might he have hired a third party which then used a Conficker botnet to create accounts which then flagged gay and lesbian books on Amazon as inappropriate? Or is this all part of an elaborate attention-getting stunt to take credit for an Amazon employee's mistake? Either way, it's a masterstroke to tie together the month's two big Internet memes.

The hacker, known as Weev, with whom we've had dealings before the "amazonfail" episode, is saying that the whole escapade was the result of his exploitation of a vulnerability in Amazon's product-rating tools.

What to make of people who don't want to believe this was a prank? They're left with the notion of Amazon.com pursuing homophobic censorship, which must be pleasing to people who see evil behind every "Inc." Pick your conspiracy theory: Someone's playing someone.

A recap: On Friday, two gay-themed romance novels disappeared from Amazon's sales rankings — they were still listed on the site, but could not appear on best-seller lists. On Saturday, hundreds more vanished. Writer Mark Probst asked Amazon.com customer service what happened, and got this answer from an "Ashlyn D." in customer service:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Twitter users started decrying the move en masse, tagging their posts "#amazonfail" and accusing the online retailer of homophobia. Amazon.com PR didn't help matters by calling the problem a "glitch." Even though the sales ranks of most gay and lesbian titles had been restored, Twitterers taunted Amazon.com by posting messages with the tag "#glitchmyass."

Glitch my ass, indeed. One LiveJournal user speculated that the mass flagging of gay books on Amazon.com might be the work of organized antigay groups — or troublemaking hackers:

Now, let's just put ourselves in Amazon's shoes. Keep in mind that Amazon is a smug, fairly liberal company headquartered in fucking Seattle of all places and, last I checked, Jeff Bezos is not exactly a Christian fundamentalist.

Why on earth would they suddenly censor only a specific group of content that deals with a marginalized and politically active community? Why would this policy change not take the form of a specific policy, but rather of very discriminately flagging only certain titles as "adult" content? Why would this happen over a weekend?

Our hacker has an explanation: Amazon.com has long had a mechanism that allowed customers to flag a product as "inappropriate." Only a small number of these votes were needed to get a book off of Amazon's sales rankings.

What Weev says he figured out was a way to trick Internet users into automatically flagging products without their knowledge, with the help of friends who run high-profile websites. He also says he hired "third-worlders" to register fake Amazon accounts and flag books. (His full explanation of the stunt is below.) He hasn't yet offered proof that he carried off the prank as described, but one part checks out: Amazon.com has apparently removed the feature that lets users flag books as "inappropriate." And the scheme he details seems far more likely than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos deciding to become a censor.

The hacker's confession, which he also posted on LiveJournal:

Hay dude. Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code".

I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like "looking to get tarred and pleasured" and "Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence's lexical subject" kept getting flagged. The audacity of the San Francisco gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for "pnp" or "tina" reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. So I decided to get them back, and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.

I'm logged into Amazon at the time and see it has a "report as inappropriate" feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.

So I script some quick bash.
#!/bin/bash
let count = 1
while true; do
links -dump 'http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=0/?ie=ASCII&rs=1000&keywords=Gay_and_Lesbian&rh=n%3A!1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHomosexuality&page='`echo $count`|grep \/dp\/ >> /tmp/amazon
((count++))
done

There's some quick code to grab all the Gay and Lesbian metadata-tagged books on amazon. Then I pull out all the IDs of the given books from those URLs:

cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//

and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.

Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called "Cross-site request forgery'. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. If you ever need a service like that, you can find them in a post like this advertising in the comments:
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/solving-captchas-for-cash/

Then they would log into the accounts, save the cookies in a cookie file and send it to me.

Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books:

for i in `cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//`; do lynx -cookie_file=/home/avex/cookie1 http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/`echo $i`/;done

The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay
and outrage across the blogosphere
ain't so bad.

Weev has attracted at least one doubter who had trouble following his instructions, saying the code doesn't work. We asked him to answer the critique. He says he believes they were using a different version of a software program called "elinks," and that Amazon has disabled the site feature in question.

In the meantime, you can follow this clusterfuck, 140 characters at a time.

Host Jon Stewart seemed discomfited by his guest's wild, table-slapping howls. But any tech reporter who's interviewed Bezos knows that the Amazon.com's CEO hooting laughter is his most distinctive personal quality, the hook of every headline.

As the '90s bubble burst, observers wondered if Bezos's online bookstore would survive, as it lost money with every shipment. In 2000, then-Red Herring editor Jason Pontin called him a "chuckling maniac" running a "terrible company." Oops! Amazon.com survived and thrived while hundreds of other online retailers perished. Every profile writer since then has felt obligated to trot out a tired line about Bezos "getting the last laugh."

Yet that misunderstands Bezos. The laugh is part of his schtick. He's having fun! He's got a surprise! Where Apple CEO Steve Jobs wooed audiences with imperious cool, Bezos plays it loose and goofy. (Like the time he bragged about having sex at a commencement speech.) Just when you think you've got him figured out, he changes his story. It goes something like this:

You thought Amazon.com was a bookstore. No, wait, it's a retailer, the Wal-Mart of the Web. It's a bricks-and-mortar play, with superefficient real-world warehouses. No, it's a software maker whose Web services underpin the likes of Twitter and SmugMug. Oh, never mind — now it's all about the Kindle, which is clearly the iPod of the book world!

By shifting Amazon.com's focus, Bezos gets Wall Street to think about Amazon.com's starry potential rather than the grinding reality of its workaday business, which is a low-margin, highly competitive retail business. Bezos would never get on the Daily Show to talk about Amazon's latest discount electronics offers. That's the real joke here. And that's why Bezos is really laughing.

(Video by Ryan Tate)

Girald, a corporate lawyer at Skadden Arps turned Fashion Institute of Technology student, had found a tech team, secured seed funding for Moxsie, lined up five designers for an online trunk show, and built the website. But there wasn't money left to pay a model. So she donned the Lucy B lingerie herself. On the site, her head's cropped out, but she provided this photo for Valleywag:

I'm not sure what to make of this online-designer trend. Gilt Groupe, which launched last year, hasn't set the world on fire. And Girald's site? "Love the jewelry, hate the '80s-inspired wrinkled metallic clothing, meh on the rest," was one female friend's insta-review of Moxsie.

I'm mostly interested in the notion that Girald had to step in front of the camera. Sure, Cyan Banister, the founder of Zivity, a softcore, user-created porn site, stripped, but she needed to demonstrate she really used the product. Fashion is a different business; amateur models don't suggest a site that's going to display designers' wares at their best.

If Moxsie is really so low on cash it can't afford models, it doesn't speak well for its prospects of surviving the recession. If it's just a publicity stunt, well, I suppose it worked, at the cost of a little dignity.

What do you think? Is Girald cynical, brave — or a little of both?

Bonus trivia: The other model on the site is Nicole Bulick, a Moxsie contractor who's dating Paul Pelosi, Jr. He's the son of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Mom will be so proud! Here's Bulick:

The Times of London reports that workers in Amazon.com's UK fulfillment centers risk firing if they take sick days, even with a doctor's permission, and must work mandatory seven-day weeks. The pay, through a temporary-laborer firm, is $10.40 an hour — but employees must pay $13 a day for a bus to Amazon's inconveniently located warehouse.

The pace, as well, is backbreaking: 140 boxes packed an hour. All so we can get Xboxes underneath our tree! (A Times reporter took a job undercover to learn all this firsthand.)

The best part? Amazon.com executives don't deny any of it. Allan Lyall, VP of European operations for Amazon, told the Times (emphasis added):

Every single member of the Amazon.co.uk workforce, be that a temporary picker in Marston Gate, a permanent packer in Gourock, a customer service representative in Cork or a product manager in our Slough head office, is currently working flat out to ensure that our millions of customers receive the products that they have ordered on time this Christmas.... Demand for permanent roles from our temporary employees is at such a high level that we no longer need to recruit externally for permanent positions. Indeed, we have already seen well over 100 temporary employees become permanent this year alone. During 2008, we have taken on over 4,000 temporary fulfilment centre associates in the UK and are benefitting from the lowest level of employees leaving the company that we have experienced over all our 11 Christmases.

Got that? In case it wasn't clear, what Lyall is basically saying is that the economy is so bad that Amazon.com employees — many of them Eastern European immigrants who have recently lost jobs in, say, the now-dead housebuilding industry — gladly take the abuse..

(Photo via Attus Apparel)

1. Nintendo Wii – 2,056,866 related items sold
2. Xbox 360 – 1,297,903 related items sold
3. Apple’s iPod Touch – 281,361 related items sold
4. Hannah Montana – 223,139 related items sold
5. Apple’s iPhone 3G – 212,837 related items sold
6. Brett Favre – 199,832 related items sold
7. Barack Obama – 111,546 related items sold
8. High School Musical Cast – 109,813 related items sold
9. Guitar Hero III – 98,159 related items sold
10. Madonna – 96,511 related items sold

The list is not scientific; eBay's so-called pop-culture expert, Karen Bard, picked these items from the raw data, discarding prosaic categories in the interest of making eBay's discard racks look a bit more exciting. ("Bard’s picks were culled from items sold pertaining to pop culture phenomena in categories ranging from political scandals to blockbuster blowouts to tech toys.")

But think about why things land on eBay: They're mostly used goods or closeouts, the outcome of a purchase now regretted. That's why the iPod Touch, an intentionally crippled iPhone that does everything but make phone calls, outsells the iPhone 3G on eBay. Once people figured out what it was good for, they no longer wanted it. The same could be said for Madonna.

(Random celebrity image provided by eBay. Seriously, they included this in the press release.)

Gap.com went down today, as did the websites of Victoria's Secret, Home Depot, and CompUSA. Williams-Sonoma, the kitchenware retailer, saw slowdowns on its ordering page. A tipster tells us he had problems with Borders and DiscoveryStore.com. A cottage industry of analysts — Gomez, Keynote, Pingdom, StorefrontBackTalk and others — have sprung up to track the outages.

E-commerce is no longer a novelty. Why don't the stores just work? The first thought is that cheapskate retailers have skimped on spending, but that's usually not the case, or the cause. Bandwidth and servers are cheaper than ever.

The problem usually comes down to the database that stores product information and orders, a key system which gets hammered when discounts prompt a surge of traffic. As online shopping grows and grows, planning for spurts of visitors becomes more art than science — and while the database is most frequently the problem, the fix is different every time.

It's hard to weep for Cyber Monday's frustrated shoppers. Not being able to spend money at your desk, with your employer paying you, strikes me as a particularly upper-middle-class problem to have. The good news for the offline shoppers who risk being trampled: Laptops are cheaper than ever, with stores like Walmart selling them for $499 or less. Cyber Monday will never go off without a glitch — but if a "server not available" message is the worst problem shoppers face, they should count their blessings.

(Photo by BohPhoto)

11/16/2008

TIVO ADDS DOMINO’S PIZZA TO ITS MENU

Domino’s is Pioneering a Whole New Way of Ordering…Via TV

ALVISO, CA & ANN ARBOR, MI — November 17, 2008 — TV has never tasted this good. That’s because TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), and Domino's Pizza, Inc. (NYSE: DPZ), the recognized world leader in pizza delivery, have teamed up to give broadband connected TiVo subscribers the ability to order pizza for delivery or pick-up, and track delivery timing, right from their TV sets using the TiVo® service. It’s a service that cooks up the perfect pizza purchasing recipe.

“Our commitment to customer satisfaction is what has helped us become the leader in the global pizza delivery market,” said Rob Weisberg, vice president of precision and print marketing at Domino’s Pizza, Inc. “We are confident that teaming with TiVo on this novel, easy, and convenient way to order pizza right from the TV will be very well received by our customers. This is the first step in the future of customer interactions with the brands they seek to engage with and buy from. This is the first time in history that the ‘on-demand’ generation will be able to fully experience couch commerce by ordering pizza directly through their television set. You’ll see a television ad for Domino’s and you’ll click ‘I want it’ through your remote. In about 30 minutes, your pizza will show up at your door.”

Karen Bressner, Senior Vice President of Advertising Sales, TiVo Inc said, “Joining forces with Domino’s Pizza creates an effective marketing and commerce tool for Domino’s while enhancing and further distinguishing TiVo as the ultimate way to watch TV with a closed-loop advertising experience. This exciting new partnership offers yet another advertising solution as commercial avoidance continues to increase. With just a few clicks of the remote, TiVo users can pause their program, order a pizza, and then sit back, relax, and return to their favorite show without missing a single second. Now, TiVo delivers the absolute best television viewing experience…and a pizza.”

TiVo subscribers can seamlessly access their Domino's Pizza order from various advertising entry points on the TiVo user interface including Gold Star Sponsorship, Program Placement, Interactive Tags in live TV spots, and through Music, Photos, Products, & More by clicking on “Order Your Dominos Pizza Now.” TiVo is serving up a piping hot new service that’s truly made to order and gives a whole new meaning to the term “TV dinner.”

TiVo subscribers can set-up a user name and password on Dominos.com so that each time they use their TiVo remote to place an order, they can log-in with a simple account number. Alternatively, TiVo subscribers can enter their delivery address, build their pizza order right from the television set by selecting type of crust, toppings, and sauces, and get the pizza delivered by their local Domino’s Pizza.

Bressner added: “Our commitment to revolutionizing interactive advertising and commerce on the television is a direct result of the innovative solutions and features we provide. TiVo’s growing list of interactive features also includes the ability to find and purchase products on Amazon.com related to a customer’s favorite TV show or the convenience of being able to search for a movie that’s playing nearby and purchase tickets through Fandango – all by using the TiVo remote.”

Starting today, this new service is free of charge to all broadband connected TiVo subscribers and supports both delivery and pick-up orders. Viewers pay in cash when the pizza is delivered.

Are you profitable?
Byrne: Yes, that's real GAAP profit, not Amazon-bullshit-accounting profit.

In fact, it was neither. Overstock.com was then a private company, but it later revealed, when it filed for an IPO, that it had lost $13.8 million in 2001. With the latest financial restatements, it's been revealed that the company has never made an annual profit since its inception. And yet Byrne would rather blame a conspiracy of rogue traders for his company's woes.

Note 10 — Subsequent Event
In October 2008, a third party announced the acquisition of a company in which we held an equity-method investment. Subject to the closing of the acquisition, which is expected to occur in Q4 2008, we will receive approximately $150 million in cash for our equity ownership.

• Jealousy. Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos wished his company, not eBay, had bought Bill Me Later, and didn't want to give his rival credit.
• Remorse. Did Amazon.com actually profit from its Bill Me Later investment? We may learn more next quarter, but note that Amazon only disclosed how much cash it received, not how much money it made.
• Shame. Bill Me Later charges a 19.99 percent interest rate, which is higher than many credit cards. Sure, that's lucrative — but does Amazon want to be associated with a website personal-finance experts say you shouldn't touch "with a 10-foot gift-wrapped pole"?

Google is the one whose X-rated product directory turned up even when the searcher turned on "moderate filtering." On the other hand, say "spit happens" to most any man in the 18-to-34 year old demographic, and you'll either get a jovial fist bump or a politely restrained grimace. The phrase hardly connotes innocence. And the algorithm tries to give the people what they want. Maybe Google knows something you don't?

Facebook creates a certain fixed number of each type of gift. When the number remaining for any particular gift drops below 100,000, Facebook displays the number left. (The most common size runs are 100,000 and 1,000,000 but they range as high as 10,000,000 and as low as 15,000.). For those items where less than 100,000 remain, we can track how many gifts had been sold in the preceding week by subtracting the number remaining from the number remaining the previous week.