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Comment by decode | Hacker News Reader

Here's an interview with an unnamed Amazon employee about it: http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166384.asp

Basically, an employee in France (possibly due to a language barrier) flipped the "adult" bit on a bunch of stuff he shouldn't have, which interacted badly with recent changes to remove adult content from places where kids might stumble across it. It sucks that it affected a bunch of LGBT stuff, but it wasn't intentional.

If you're a developer who is like me, this is exactly the kind of thing you have nightmares about doing, because you know it could happen to anyone. How many times have you typed something, or committed something, and moments later felt the dawning horror of deleting some essential files or missing some essential step? Obviously we erect processes and technical solutions to make it rare for this kind of thing to make it into production, but it still happens.

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Wait, so this wasn't the result of a hack as mentioned here: http://community.livejournal.com/brutal_honesty/3168992.html

I keep trying to imagine the database query that would have resulted in this particular subset of items being altered the way they were. I guess my imagination isn't that great.

I suspect the troll/CSRF might be the simplest explanation here.

Yeah, exactly my line of thought.

From that article:

"Amazon managers found that an employee who happened to work in France had filled out a field incorrectly and more than 50,000 items got flipped over to be flagged as "adult," the source said. (Technically, the flag for adult content was flipped from 'false' to 'true.')"

Oh yeah real technical.

The problem is, without more information, I do not believe a word of that. Filled in a form incorrectly? What form do they have that does that kind of thing? And how can an employee in France cause some kind of cascading re-categorisation of data in the USA?

That explanation sounds like total BS to me. For now, the trolling/CSRF explanation is more likely, IMO. The "troll" has given specific technical details, all of which at least pass the smell test. Amazon's explanation - a foreign employee filling in forms wrong - is just too cute.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to order more tinfoil hats on Amazon ....

I don't think there's been any official explanation, though the 'employee cataloging error in France' has come through journalists with a chance to judge their sources.

The external flag-bombing initially sounded most credible to me -- as with 'Google-bombing', there's a precedent for such campaigns, either by earnest folks with a content agenda or pranksters. And Amazon would have reason to downplay any such explanation, to avoid encouraging copycats. But I don't think people linked to Amazon would lie to cover such an event.

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