Simon Willison’s Weblog

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2 items tagged “amazonfail”

2009

Amazon Says Listing Problem Was an Error, Not a Hack (via) “A friend within the company told him that someone working on Amazon’s French site mistagged a number of keyword categories, including the ’Gay and Lesbian’ category, as pornographic, using what’s known internally as the Browse Nodes tool. Soon the mistake affected Amazon sites worldwide.”

# 14th April 2009, 8:32 am / amazon, amazonfail, csrf, security

How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code. Looks legit—the author claims to have sparked this weekend’s #amazonfail moral outrage (where Amazon where accused of removing Gay and Lesbian books from their best seller rankings) by exploiting a CSRF hole in Amazon’s “report as inappropriate” feature to trigger automatic takedowns. EDIT: His claim is disputed elsewhere (see comments)

# 13th April 2009, 7:48 pm / amazon, amazonfail, csrf, prdisaster, security