Hacking Amazon with a Quart of Vodka and Old Friends
Saturday, September 9th, 2006It’s been an incredibly busy week putting to bed the first phase of a development contract that met its deadline on the 11th hour. Next on the agenda was the rewrite of a lengthy functional spec for a full music e-commerce website with redesign and SEO for an older established site.
Old Friends
Last century (90’s) I lived in Washington DC for a while and had a few good friends there. After leaving and a lot of time in between I lost contact with most of them. One particular friend was Alex Newhall a very talented photographer. I had a lot in common with Alex and we became friends at an age when we were all in a rush to go nowhere very fast. In retrospect, we all seemed to be rushing around for no good reason. I often wonder what became of Alex and tried to find her online but to no avail except for a couple of sites that made references to her photography. Recently, I tried again and this tine turned up a website and a blog for her. Alex is still very much into photography and is the director of her own creative artist agency that provides photographers, hair and make-up artists. It’s been real great to catch up with Alex and renew an old friendship. Visit Alex here: Alex Newhall Management
Hacking Amazon
Another good friend Eric called me today to tell me that there was a review of a book by me on Amazon. The book in question is the ultimate Lifetime Diet by Gary Null. Apparently I had reviewed it from my account and claimed that the book had saved my life after I had supposedly been drinking a quart of vodka a day, smoked 40 cigarettes a day and was dying inside. News to me, considering I’m not a vodka drinker neither smoke 40 cigarettes a day.
I called Amazon who much to their credit responded fast and removed the offending review. Apparently this was written a few years back and has only just now surfaced in the search engines. It appears that the password has been compromised. This is the not the first time this has happened, it also happened to another good friend of mine though with more serious consequences. Thanks to Amazon’s fast response it is all cleared up now. I think a solution would be to create a verification email for each product/book review.
Search and Go will now enter it’s third phase of beta development in the coming two weeks while we add some extra functionality to the weather, create the news streaming and feeds, build a couple of extra modules and finally put the home page live.
Southbourne Internet our main business site will undergo a facelift in the coming two months as we prepare a complete makeover of the site and ‘up the ante’ on the design front.
