AmazonFail Continued (original) (raw)
My first roundup post is HERE, the latest HERE; I was been updating it from about 10am GMT+1 until 6 or 7 in the evening. Obviously stuff hasn't stopped happening in the meantime, so here is an attempt at another roundup. Apparently there is a large number of news reports and Google blog search gets you about 6,000 hits, so don't expect anything comprehensive (especially as I'll be going back to Uni tomorrow and need some sleep before that). On the other hand the need for sleep never stopped me from RPing. Hm. Anyway. Onward.
afterthree's excellent roundup of Day Two of #AmazonFail.
weev claims to be responsible. bryant largely debunks and troll-busts him. Judge for yourself, I am a little intimidated by their hack-fu and don't understand it.
l33tminion describes the sequence of events that's currently happening.
sbisson on why this hasn't been fixed overnight.
lysimachia offers another well-written post on the issue.
officialgaiman blogs about AmazonFail.
Deanna Zandt does another sequence-of-events post, links to 
teh_dely and also suspects hackers.
Mark B. Lewis on the significance of #AmazonFail and gives some tips on damage control.
Mur Lafferty also writes on why the fail matters.
Broadsheet reports, and follows up.
Reunify on how the disability community is also affected.
Amazonfail.com for sale on Ebay. Apparently there also is merchandise for #amazonfail and #glitchmyass.
There also is some more or less major news coverage by now:
Channel 4 article and video report, CBC, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Advocate, Huffington Post, BoingBoing, Wired, and ITWorld.
ETA: Theories and explanation attempts on the Fail:
It appears like (some?) GLBT ranks are being restored. Still no word from Amazon, though, except that it defitely wasn't a glitch: Feministing has word from an Amazon Rep saying that 'no human is responsible for this'.
Amazon has, in the meantime, issued another statement, calling the situation 'embarrassing ham-fisted' and pointing out that not only GLBT titles have been affected. They also mention they are working on making this error less likely in the future, but so far no word of information:
Seattle Times has an Amazon Statement, so do SeattlePi. The LA Times updates on re-ranking the stripped titles.
The idea that an amazon coder is responsible is spreading via the grapevine; Mike Deisy sort of confirms this, Lilith Saintcrow also posts a heads-up, and SLOG's Anthony Hecht also updates on the supposed error in translation.
So we basically have these explanations: a new 'adult' content policy -> a 'glitch' -> taggings being tweaked -> a non-apology -> a coder screwup and perhaps trolling/hacking.
ETA II:
Some thoughts on amazonfail on ScienceBlogs, and the LA Times on how the deranking spread.
And with that I'm going to bed, it's past 2 am. Sporadic updates will hopefully be happening tomorrow, when/if I get a chance to hop online in between classes.