On: How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code

[stewiecat]

I see your point, but also that of the parent post. Is losing salesrank of a novel over the weekend (a holiday weekend no less), really a boom-or-bust kind of thing? If he'd been more malicious with this then this would be a crime with actual victims, but in this case I just can't reason through it enough to believe that.

[potatolicious → stewiecat]

How many customers did Amazon lose this weekend that will likely never hear that this was a hack? He directly and irreparably harmed the reputation of a company, how is this victimless at all?

[tutwabee → potatolicious]

He may have hurt the reputation of Amazon, but not through his crime. Publicizing vulnerabilities in Amazon's ranking system is what may hurt Amazon's reputation. The "crime" of messing with Amazon's system didn't hurt Amazon's reputation let alone their website much at all.

[jrockway → potatolicious]

You could also go out in the street with a sign that says "Amazon sucks" and it would probably deter as many people as this did.

[run4yourlives → jrockway]

Well, that's simply not true. If it was he wouldn't have done it.

While I admire the guile and technical reasoning required to pull this off, it's high time the community at large stop admiring this type of crap.

Authors of the books in question lost real money. It doesn't matter how much. Amazon lost credibility from all sides.

There is a difference between screaming that the Emperor has no clothes and stealing his wallet.

[johns → stewiecat]

If you walk into a bookstore and steal a bunch of books, even on a slow business day and it causes the store/publisher/author to lose sales, but not that much, is it a victimless crime?

[uninverted → johns]

What? He didn't steal anything. It's more like standing outside of the bookstore yelling about the owner.

[potatolicious → uninverted]

It's more like breaking into the store at night and changing all the signage to read "I molest little children".

[ori_b → potatolicious]

Through a door that was left wide open, and in erasable marker.

[potatolicious → ori_b]

Valid analogy - but flimsy security is still not justification for breaking and entering, nor defamation.

[run4yourlives → ori_b]

And?

The intent is the same whether or not you walk through the open door or break the window.

[johns → uninverted]

You're right. Replace "steal" with "deface"