Recently in amazon Category

Almost three years ago I wrote about how Amazon UK had stopped shipping a lot of goods to Ireland. At the time it was very hard to get any tangible details from Amazon about the change in policy. Eventually an answer of sorts was forthcoming, though it took a lot of effort to get it! Basically Amazon were concerned about the Irish (and EU) legislation affecting the recycling of electronic goods. What was incredibly annoying was that Amazon managed to apply the same criteria to a much wider range of products than just electronics.

In any case as of a few days ago the restriction has been lifted. I've successfully ordered a Logitech Harmony remote control (I'd been thinking of getting one for ages) and they took the order without any issue. Admittedly the Amazon site still has lots of references to delivery restrictions on the product details pages and the change only applies to Amazon not their marketplace vendors.

It would be interesting to know why Amazon took so long to make this change in policy, but it is very very welcome. More competition is always good.

Richard O'Connor, aka "Grandad", got a book deal about a year ago with Mercier press and the book itself will be out in the new year. When exactly I don't honestly know, but it's already available for pre-order on Amazon.

The cover image isn't available on Amazon at the moment, but Grandad posted it the other day, so here it is (I'm saving on his bandwidth bills by stealing a copy - he can sue me later!):
I really like the subtitle!

So who do I have to kill to get a signed copy I wonder....

Since I live in Ireland I'm used to waiting several days (or longer) for my Amazon orders.

It's not an issue.

Yesterday morning I ordered a few DVDs, but since some of them weren't due out for another week or so I wasn't expecting to receive anything immediately.

So I nearly fell of my chair when I took delivery of a DVD boxset this morning. They'd managed to get it to me in approximately 24 hours! And no, I hadn't opted for express delivery or anything like that - I'd chosen the normal options with a total postage cost of £2.99.

Here's the part of the email:

Delivery estimate: 29 Aug 2008 - 4 Sep 2008
Dispatch estimate for these items: 26 Aug 2008

Wow!

I am truly impressed!

It looks like Amazon is jumping on the Green bandwagon as well...

I don't blame them. If I could push the "green" aspects of our new hosting solution more and it led to sales I would without hesitation.

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Since my blu ray player is a US import I have to be very very careful about which discs I buy.

I either choose US region or multi-region discs, since there is no easy way to make a blu ray player recognise all discs (yet!)

Unfortunately Amazon haven't updated their website to take into account the Blu Ray regions.

Any film released on blu ray will end up with a DVD region listed beside it, which is, of course, incorrect. The silly thing is that Amazon's site has all the information on regions for blu rays - it's just the item display that is showing the wrong data.

It's a shame, but at least Amazon actually show the disc region, whereas a lot of the other sites don't even do that much!

Amazon.com had issues last week, but today it's Amazon UK's turn.

How long it was down for is unclear, but several people, including myself, got an unhelpful "service unavailable" message when trying to access the site earlier this evening.

It just goes to show - 100% uptime is a myth :)

Amazon's main site, Amazon.com, has been down for the last hour or more. Currently some sections of the website are available sporadically.

The really scary thing is that based on their reported revenues every minute of downtime equates to about $31000 of lost revenue!

Now that is really mission critical!

In the meantime you might amuse yourself looking at some of the craziness in the current whois output:

whois amazon.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

   Server Name: AMAZON.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
   IP Address: 69.41.185.219
   Registrar: INNERWISE, INC. D/B/A ITSYOURDOMAIN.COM
   Whois Server: whois.itsyourdomain.com
   Referral URL: http://www.itsyourdomain.com

   Server Name: AMAZON.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
   IP Address: 203.36.226.2
   Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
   Whois Server: whois.tucows.com
   Referral URL: http://domainhelp.opensrs.net

   Server Name: AMAZON.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM
   IP Address: 80.190.192.24
   Registrar: EPAG DOMAINSERVICES GMBH
   Whois Server: whois.enterprice.net
   Referral URL: http://www.enterprice.net

   Domain Name: AMAZON.COM
   Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, LLC.
   Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
   Referral URL: http://www.networksolutions.com
   Name Server: UDNS1.ULTRADNS.NET
   Name Server: UDNS2.ULTRADNS.NET
   Status: clientDeleteProhibited
   Status: clientTransferProhibited
   Status: clientUpdateProhibited
   Updated Date: 28-mar-2008
   Creation Date: 01-nov-1994
   Expiration Date: 31-oct-2017

Either there's an upsurge in Amazon phishing emails or the phishers only got my email address recently.

I've had about half a dozen phishing emails today purporting to be from Amazon regarding my "seller" account.

To start with I don't have a seller account.

The other giveaway sign is that although the links are similar to Amazon domains, they aren't Amazon domains.

They all seem to be subdomains of by.ru, which appears to be some sort of free hosting solution based in Russia (I don't speak Russian, so I'm only making an educated guess)

Unfortunately, while Amazon do have a facility for reporting phishing emails it is clearly not aimed at the "casual" end user or anyone who is short of time. It consists of a rather convoluted series of web forms instead of a simple email address.

While the likes of Paypal, Ebay and most of the major financial institutions make it relatively easy for even a novice to report phishing emails Amazon dare to be different.

While they may be getting the reports in from honeypots etc., surely it would make more sense to facilitate end user reports?
Am I missing something?

UPDATE: Over 24 hours later I got a reply from Amazon with the email address to use for reporting phishing emails.
In case anyone else needs it the email address is: stop-spoofing@amazon.com
If you forward phishing emails to that address as an attachment they get sent to their security team.

One of the nice features on Amazon's US site is finally coming to the UK store - pre-order price guarantee.

Basically if you pre-order an item the "guarantee" means that you are rewarded with the lowest price possible, so if an item is listed at one price when you order and it drops before the release date you'll actually get a refund.

Pretty cool!

For the geekier of you who maybe using Amazon's web services the news that Amazon is now peering with several Irish providers at INEX may come as good news!

You can check the peering matrix here

As I'm running several sites that pull quite a bit of data in from Amazon's backend this is good news !

EDIT: I meant to link to Paul's blog post