Amazon's Latest Blunder

Over the weekend, in a move that defied any logic, Amazon suddenly removed all gay and lesbian themed books from their top-selling and recommended lists. This sparked thousands of Tweeters and Bloggers to start posting. Using the hashtag '#amazonfail' the entire incident became the most talked about topic on Twitter almost overnight. Suddenly we have a prime example of what Social Media can do when a business does something stupid. It also doesn't help that Amazon failed to properly monitor their online reputation.

So what happened?

While Amazon remained mostly quiet all weekend with the only explanation of the event coming from Patty Smith, Amazon's director of corporate communications, that the event was a 'glitch', Gawker reported that the hacker Weev had claimed credit for the whole thing. He was quoted as saying it was an "exploitation of a vulnerability in Amazon's product-rating tools." This in turn drove a large amount of interest in the hashtag #glitchmyass.

Amazon has since responded saying the incident was "embarrassing and ham-fisted", giving no further insight into the origin of the mess. However, it isn't really important if the event was a glitch or the work of a hacker. The main point of all this is that Amazon completely failed to monitor social media and online conversation. If they had had any sort of reasonable system in place they should have been able to deal with the whole thing much faster then they did.

This is just another example of why companies can't turn-off and go home for the weekend. The rest of us don't sleep, and if something goes wrong we're going to talk about it!

Google Easter Egg

Check out this funny little Google Easter Egg:
1) Go to Google
2) Type in 'Google Easter Egg'
3) Hit 'I'm Feeling Lucky'

Lets Talk Twitter

Following the weekends Twitter events I thought I'd share this great video of Evan Williams (co-founder of Twitter) talking about how many of the ideas driving the recent Twitter growth explosion have come from unexpected uses of Twitter invented by the users themselves.

Twitter Under Attack (Part 2)

In a follow up to my earlier post it turns out that there were two, and not just one, attacks on Twitter this weekend, and both originated from the same source. The attacks which were mounted using cross-site scripting (XSS) were the work of Mikeyy Mooney, the 17-year-old creator of StalkDaily.com from Brooklyn, New York. Mikeyy was quoted as saying:

"I am the person who coded the XSS which then acted as a worm when it auto updated a users profile and status, which then infected other users who viewed their profile. I did this out of boredom, to be honest. I usually like to find vulnerabilities within websites and try not to cause too much damage, but start a worm or something to give the developers an insight on the problem and while doing so, promoting myself or my website."

The attacks utilised a vulnerability by adding obfuscated scripts to the Name and More info URL entries in a Twitter user's settings.

Today, Twitter published the following blog post - Wily Weekend Worms.

Easter Sunday Music

It's funny how many times I must have listened to this song and never really thought about the religious imagery in it. Great song all the same; Dave Matthews - Bartender.

Microsoft's 2019 Vision

This is a really cool video showing Microsoft's vision of technology in a decade. Having said that, I would be surprised if technology had only advanced this far. Really all we're looking at here is superfast data transfer, improved touchscreen technology and overall technology miniaturisation. Thinking about it, that's not really a huge leap for the next 10 years considering how far technology has come in the last 10 years. Consider how common it is now for someone to carry around a device capable of broadband speed wireless internet access and real-time video communication. I would definitely expect more in 10 years.

Twitter Under Attack

Everyone’s favourite micro-blogging service hasn’t had the greatest of weeks, and it looks like things may have just gotten worse. It appears that the site under went an attack early this morning by a worm originating from the site StalkDaily. Some comments have indicated that this is an XSS attack, while others indicate the attack may have originated from a Twitter third party applications. Although details are scarce it seems that when you visit the profile page of an infected user your profile will become infected as well, with the worm modifying your ‘About Me’ section to include a link to the worm. Infected users begin to repeatedly spam tweets directing users to the StalkDaily website.