In Light of the Amazon Fail Hoax

Listen people, Amazon.com does not hate the GLBT community. AmazonFail was a hoax.

Deal with it, and FAU is correct. Twitter is for idiots.

Anyway...most of the people who got so up in arms about this kerfuffle, have not clue the power of the machine that they are using to post to the interwebs.

The Bash Shell is an amazing tool that allows you to do pretty much anything.

For instance...Weev (the perpetrator of AmazonFail) wrote a quick script that used the open interface of Amazon to gather the data he needed. Quick...simple...and what Web 3.0 (or the Semantc Web) has to offer is the inking of all this information...

Like...(and this is my favorite nifty little hack that I have seen recently)...finding out the travel patterns of sex workers via the Adult Personals on Craigslist.

In the notorious erotic classified ads of craigslist, thousands of individuals post classifieds, using the internet to sell themselves with an ease never before seen in history. Many resort to posting their phone numbers for their prospective clientele and establish a time and location where the exchange of money and sex will begin.

As these individuals move from place to place, they post their contact information in the respective city/state within craigslist in order to target the appropriate audience. These individuals will maintain their phone number as they move from city to city. This then leaves a record of a phone, a location and a time.

Using this data (phone numbers posted, time posted and location of the post), I've created a bash shell script that generates a Google Earth KML file, depicting the movements of these phone numbers as they post to the craigslist erotic services page relative to the city they are in.

How would one manage that?

Well...

The script is provided and it is nifty...

With that being said...

Don't go andblame Amazon for being Queer-Unfriendly before taking the time to look at why they would do something like this....

Edit: Amazon is claiming that it is not a victim of Weev and that it is a "glitch". BS.