I have found ample reason to mock the golden-glowed tech reputations of most of the tech giants, in addition to the supposed tech prowess of organizations such as the NSA. There is good reason to believe that old-style libraries are more secure.
I recently stumbled upon a rather glaring bug or result of hacking at Amazon -- and found that Amazon provides no way I could find to report the problem.
The problem was glaring and amusing -- a whole set of over 3,000 reviews of a book attached to a pest repelling product. As I'll describe in a future post, this isn't just a bug concerning bug repellers -- it's the tip of an iceberg about the foundations of AI/ML.
Here's how I found the bug bug.
Stumbling on the bug at Amazon
I was looking for a product to scare away some pests that have found their way into my house. I gave a close look at the following product:
I immediately noticed and was impressed by the large number of reviews, and how favorable they trended. What a popular product! I've got to look at this one. I scrolled down:
Things are still looking good. More details:
Uh-oh! Right after we see that it has 3,051 reviews with an average rating of 4.8, which is super-good, we see that this pest repeller is #2,695 ... in Books!! Something is seriously wrong. Scrolling down, we see some really weird answers to questions:
A couple of the people answering clearly tried to tell Amazon there was a problem.
This next one blew me away -- over 3,000 reviews for a pest repeller??!!
Now we know for sure something's seriously wrong -- a pest repeller is not Children's Literature!
Here is the nail in the coffin, the pictures of the product and a list of the phrases that frequently appear:
And here's one of the glowing reviews. It brought tears to the reviewer's eyes, and not because of the strong odor generated by the pest repeller:
What's going on, Amazon? I don't usually get to mock you. It's usually the other tech giants that receive my sarcasm, places like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft. Amazon has done a reasonable job maintaining quality and growing into new areas. This is such a peculiar bug -- it's as though some disgruntled employee were messing with things to show his displeasure with the world.
As we'll see in a following post, this is not an isolated bug, and it has implications that go far beyond Amazon -- implications concerning the glorious future promised by all the AI/ML enthusiasts.
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