Hacker claims credit for Amazon "glitch"

Jake Widman
Tuesday, 14 April 2009 04:20

Business IT - Technology

Now comes the news that a hacker calling himself "Weev" is claiming responsibility for the assault on gay literature.

Posting on LiveJournal , the hacker explained how and why he messed with Amazon's rankings.

To hear him tell it, his motivation was to get back at homosexuals on Craigslist who would flag his ads looking for women to do heroin with. (Seriously.)

According to his boasting post, he wrote a script to extract the IDs of gay- and lesbian-themed books on Amazon.

Armed with those, he then created hundreds of dummy accounts on Amazon and used another script to report all the books as inappropriate content. The result: automatic de-ranking.

Amazon has not yet confirmed that this was the source of the issue, though it has been reported that the "inappropriate content" tagging feature has been removed from the site.