Has Amazon been hacked (wrong author attributions) | Hacker News Reader

Has Amazon been hacked (wrong author attributions)

amazon.com

30 pointsgshubert1714 comments

Amazon 3rd party book sellers can list whatever information they want for the metadata. This is probably one seller's script gone wrong.

This. Or someone intentionally abusing the feature.

Although I was under the impression Amazon manages the metadata of products they sell first-party.

Also, interestingly, all these books have different sellers that own the "buy box".

Makes me wonder how Amazon chooses which seller's description and metadata to use.

Yesterday, when I looked up the newest book by Juval Noah Harari, "Homo Deus" on Amazon, I noticed authorship was attributed to a "Booby Brown". This author's list had 4,335 titles on it today. I let Amazon know about it yesterday, and a robot sent this reply:

http://imgur.com/a/UyvAe

Yep, 4,335.

https://www.amazon.com/s/&search-alias=books&field-author=Bo...

archive in case amazon fixes it:

http://web.archive.org/web/20170415003429/https://www.amazon...

As of April 17, the authorship for "Homo Deus" was fixed, and the list was down to 4,334. I just had a brief chat with Amazon about the whole list, asking "I would be grateful if you would contact them, and have the Amazon team begin to fix this."

Amazon replied, "Yes, definitely, I'll contact them right away and sent all the details to fix this, you will able to see the changes within next week starting as fast as possible."

I don't know how this happened, but as long as it gets fixed, I'm good.

This is interest:

https://www.amazon.com/Bell-Jar-Harry-Hill/dp/0571245641/ref...

https://www.amazon.com/Bell-Jar-Modern-Classics/dp/006083702...

Two versions of the same book with different authors and covers. Makes me wonder if someone screwed up putting inventory online for a book store, or is attempting to pirate books....

If someone had access to change the amazon.com database entries for books, wouldn't they have access to much more sensitive information? Why would they make an obvious change like this?

Perhaps this is some internal joke default author name for testing that somehow slipped out into production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_booby

I feel like I just fell for click bait.

A hack is probably the least likely explanation for this.

Very weird...I wonder if this is some new scam?

It could just be simple trolling, basically funnelling money away from authors to some bureaucratic Amazon abyss. If it gets addressed I can only imagine the trouble that lies ahead for anyone that attempts to claim royalties due.

Lololol. That is funny but not funny.

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