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This unicode fuckery isn't just for domain names: I've had assholes list my books for sale on Amazon and Apple Books under an account that uses a unicode glyph to replace one of the letters in my name—the title shows up in search, but any payments for sales go into the grifter's account.
chaos.social/@Emathion/1146132…

Emathion :mastodon: 📯 (@Emathion@chaos.social)

Attached: 1 image Spot the Difference?
chaos.social
in reply to Charlie Stross

Thomas Sturm
Thomas Sturm
• •
It's stunning that Amazon is unwilling and lazy enough to not implement some simple filtering based on name and title similarities. This shouldn't even take a day to write the necessary code for.
in reply to Thomas Sturm

Charlie Stross
Charlie Stross
• •
@tsturm First ask yourself how many books have the same title. (Answer: lots.) Second, ask yourself how many authors have similar names. (Obligatory shout-out to tech author Randall Stross at this point.) Now ask yourself what lawsuits AMZN would open itself up for by auto-banning authors or book titles …
@Thomas Sturm
in reply to Charlie Stross

Thomas Sturm
Thomas Sturm
• •

Well, not banning, just running any vague matches of author+title involving unusual unicode ranges through a manual queue during title setup.

Amazon is a big company, pretty sure they could handle this pretty smoothly IF they wanted to.

in reply to Charlie Stross

Elena ``of Valhalla''
Elena ``of Valhalla''
•

@Charlie Stross @Thomas Sturm OTOH they could auto-ban names that use a suspicious mix of specific characters from different unicode blocks, as defined by the unicode consortium itself

unicode.org/reports/tr39/

(there are libraries that do all of the dirty work for you)

if they allowed for a manual override (after reasonable checks) for that one author who really wants to sell a book titled “don't go to aⅿazon.com” I'd think it would be a pretty reasonable restriction

@Charlie Stross @Thomas Sturm
in reply to Charlie Stross

Philippa Cowderoy
Philippa Cowderoy
• •
@tsturm Checking for a match on covers isn't exactly outside their budget these days though - just not something you can always take automatic action in response to
@Thomas Sturm
in reply to Philippa Cowderoy

Charlie Stross
Charlie Stross
• •
@flippac @tsturm The particularly pernicious trick the scammer used was to add a big gold medalion saying 50% OFF in the middle of the cover. Which might well disrupt a simple image match.
@Philippa Cowderoy @Thomas Sturm
in reply to Charlie Stross

Greg Egan
Greg Egan
• •

That’s terrible

It’s strange that Amazon allowed these accounts to sell the books at all; when I self-publish titles that either are, or have been, also published by traditional publishers, I have to jump through all kinds of hoops to prove to Amazon that I have the rights for the territory and format in question — sending them scans of my publishing contracts and letters of reversion. I’ve sometimes had to argue for *months* with multiple different Amazon employees following their opaque procedures to convince them that I’ve proved my case. So I don’t know what these grifters are doing to get their wholly fraudulent authorisation with such ease.

in reply to Greg Egan

Charlie Stross
Charlie Stross
• •
@gregeganSF I just point Hachette or Macmillan's enforcement people at the item in question and it goes away Real Fast. (All my books are still in print with one Big Five imprint or another, except for a web book from 1996 and a short story collection from 2001 that is superseded by a much better one.)
@Greg Egan
Unknown parent

Charlie Stross
Charlie Stross
• •
@complexmath @noahm @anthracite @gregeganSF I suspect it's an absolutely essential survival mechanism for an enterprise operating on that scale (global and over 100K staff): it allows for an emergency corrective to a snowballing crisis, hopefully before it *becomes* a crisis.
@Gracious Anthracite @noahm @Greg Egan @Sean
Unknown parent

Sean
Sean
• •
@noahm @anthracite @gregeganSF Yep the same works at Apple. Back in the day they were called “Steve escalations” and all other work was put on hold to address them, regardless of how silly the requests were. I think this is broadly a big tech thing in general. I’ve heard it works at Dell also.
@Gracious Anthracite @noahm @Greg Egan
Unknown parent

noahm
noahm
• •
@anthracite @gregeganSF Yep. It's called a "Jeff escalation" internally. Usually he (or more likely someone acting on his behalf) forwards the email with a body consisting solely of "?" in the right direction, and it fairly quickly works its way to the team involved. While there I saw this work for everything related to freshness of produce at the Amazon Go Stores to operation details in AWS. These days I imagine there's a similar "Jassy escalation".
@Gracious Anthracite @Greg Egan
in reply to Charlie Stross

Andreas K
Andreas K
• •

Well, yes.

And Unicode has a number of even more advanced fun topics. Like optional decomposition of diacritics. Yes, there are code points that serve as suffix to add all kinds of stuff to a character. So that à and ä have two Unicode representations and this also two utf-8 encodings.

MacOS FS is one place that uses decomposited Unicode. So zip files with diacritics look fine, but actually break when used say on Linux.

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