Comments on: Amazon’s Response Raises Security Questions

By: Kimberly Saunders

Kimberly Saunders — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:19:53 +0000

I don’t care much for people who see conspiracies at every turn, but it’s so hard to believe this was an honest mistake because Amazon has issued multiple explanations, and because if it was a software mistake, it should have been caught in testing–that’s a pretty big thing to miss, and for so long.

To make matters worse, the list of books that were affected are exactly the kinds of materials that fundamentalist radicals are constantly going after. I have Christian fundamentalist family members who are part of an organization that years ago was able to pressure Block Buster into dropping movie titles they found offensive, and to start editing the content of other movies it carried without notifying consumers. Amazon is the Block Buster of its day.

I’m not spending any more money on Amazon.com until I am satisfied that they are not bending to the will of some “family values” organization.

By: CLS

CLS — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:26:00 +0000

Amazon has a tendency to give answers that don’t make sense in many areas. And this doesn’t make sense. I can understand that someone might put “adult,” “erotic” and “sexuality” into the same category and that would cause confusion. But what I don’t get is how that confusion still only applied to gay titles and not to some very adult, erotic, sexual books for heterosexuals.

Wouldn’t there need to be more than this to explain why non-erotic, non-adult, non-sexual gay titles were blocked while very adult, very erotic, very sexual straight titles were not?

By: jim

jim — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:24:41 +0000

You forget that many (if not most) commercial companies don’t support “peer reviews” of software, since it’s costly and lengthens the amount of time to market. This has been going on for years – where people would just hack some code and release it without testing. Windows 95 comes to mind… LOL

By: Laura

Laura — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:32:38 +0000

The fact is that this error probably exposed some missing regression tests – which I’d hope is being addressed. Unfortunately, as these systems become more and more complex, bugs become inevitable – especially in the new agile form of software development where developers are expected to produce deployable software within a few weeks and without thorough design and analysis.

Although this issue probably hurt some authors and publishers, at least there was no secure information leaked. In security terms, its better to block information then let too much out.

By: Erica

Erica — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:26:03 +0000

I still don’t understand the translation problem — ok, Heather Has Two Mommies goes Sexuality->Erotica, but why wasn’t Playboy Centerfold whatever classed as Erotica to begin with?

Regardless, I will accept there was a coding problem, but I do NOT want to buy from an online seller with infrastructure that weak. (The fact that their whole search structure is based on “sales rank” and books can’t be found if they’re missing that key feature is pretty bizarre coding anyway.)

By: David C.

David C. — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:30:08 +0000

We’ll probably not be privy to a postmortem on this defect and its consequences, though it would help all us tech-weenies to know what happened.

I’d refrain from getting too paranoid about this until the rest of the facts come out. The technical mishandling of a few classification terms is small potatoes in the larger scheme of things, especially if the blunder was a simple Business user error.

Until we know the facts, let’s not start sounding like the Religious Right and making everything into a federal case.