I genuinely love that today I can see every single order I've made since 1998, with links to the same product pages.
This feels really unusual. I'm sure countless internal systems and storage changed since then but all the orders are accurate with working links and start to provide amazing historical insight into what I used to consider important enough to buy.
I can't tell you anything I bought in a physical store in 1998, 1999, etc.
Ebay is a dumpster fire of a website. I can't think of a more user hostile experience, aside from those websites that actively advertise to be user hostile, e.g. https://userinyerface.com/game.html
I recall seeing a talk given by Jeff Bezos years ago at some university where he described the early versions of the Amazon web site. One of the more interesting bugs was one that allowed a customer to enter a negative quantity of items to order, which meant that Amazon would credit your account and wait for you to send them the books.
There were web stores in the early 90s where the price of an item was contained within a hidden form field and not verified when you added it to your cart, allowing you to buy things for arbitrary prices, or sometimes zero.
The basic move was to post something mildly controversial in your "profile page" -- which often used the MySpace style of "whatever HTML you want" -- along with a cookie logger. Then be obnoxius in chat/forums. Pretty soon, an admin would visit your profile to check out the offending content and ban your account. In the process, they would give you their admin cookie.
I was a dev/admin for a few of these browser-based games and would also poke at other people's games, so I was saw both sides of the arms race.
That wild west still exists in browser based games, which were labors of love with large enough user bases to keep the steam going but not commercially viable enough to justify any sort of actual investment.
There are still a half dozen or so browser based games running on huge piles of PHP written by middle schoolers and high schoolers in the mid to late 2000s. Many still have XSS and SQL injections lurking in forgotten little corner features.
Similar with early PayPal integration. I played a mmorpg for a while and figured out that when buying credits and they sent the request to PayPal it was a post. Using Firefox tamper data I would modify the request to submit $1 and on return set it to $20.
Had a similar hack occur on a clients website at work. They sold flowers I think, and gift cards. But the max value was like $30 and we got gift cards for $100/$1000 but they only paid $1. I wasn’t invoked in that bug report but I suspect it was a similar issue.
I gave my sister a very nice upgrade on her first internet connection 25 years ago when the order form with the ISP had that the same feature. You could change the speed on any plans they offered. Ordered the cheapest plan but changed the form hidden speed field to maximum. It worked perfectly for many years without us ever being contacted by the ISP regarding this.
I think the story was that in the really early days, orders were fulfilled by hand by humans looking at a screen or a printed page. No one was expecting to see a negative value, so in the fast-paced fulfillment workflow, the negative sign was missed or interpreted as a separator. Your account would get credited and you'd receive a book!
A couple years ago I had a user report a bug where they couldn't remove items from their cart. I couldn't reproduce it.
Hopped on a WebEx, and they were trying to add -1 of the item to their cart. I understood how they thought it could work, but can't recall a site where it actually worked that way.
Amazon gave everyone in my school 100 dollars to spend on the store. Most people thought it was a scam, but I gave it a shot. I still have that 19" CRT TV I got for ~50 bucks out of pocket.
Well, it's currently embattled in a domestic dispute and is hiding under some clothes in the basement.
I don't have a great reason for keeping it to be honest. It's probably a dash of the memories it triggers when I look at it, a dash of respect for its ability to have survived multiple moves and 20+ years of not getting thrown away, and a dash of not being an inconvenience to keep around.
It came in handy a few years ago when I was testing the coax cables/attic antenna network I ran in the house. Much easier to carry around than the 50" lcd mounted on the wall.
The weird thing about the current homepage (at least the version I see in the UK) is it shows me lots of pictures of products, but without any description. So I just see lots of eg. grey cuboids with buttons and lights. Do they expect me to click on them all to work out what they are?
Ready to challenge reality? Take a mind-bending ride through an alternate universe with The Matrix. And on DVD, this year's coolest thriller looks even gnarlier. Get ready to follow the white rabbit.
Really?! I'm actually kinda surprised, I would have guessed it's a much more recent abbreviation than that. I think I only started seeing it around 2010 or so.
Anecdotally I remember first encountering it on the Something Awful forums. I always assumed it originated there (like lots of stuff did in the early 2000s).
“ Also, since this is very possibly the worst five-year period in history not to have equity ownership, you should know that compensation for all of our openings includes stock options.”
Pretty amusing seeing this on their careers page, considering this was 1999.
Readit News
This feels really unusual. I'm sure countless internal systems and storage changed since then but all the orders are accurate with working links and start to provide amazing historical insight into what I used to consider important enough to buy.
I can't tell you anything I bought in a physical store in 1998, 1999, etc.
I think it's fixed now.
The basic move was to post something mildly controversial in your "profile page" -- which often used the MySpace style of "whatever HTML you want" -- along with a cookie logger. Then be obnoxius in chat/forums. Pretty soon, an admin would visit your profile to check out the offending content and ban your account. In the process, they would give you their admin cookie.
I was a dev/admin for a few of these browser-based games and would also poke at other people's games, so I was saw both sides of the arms race.
That wild west still exists in browser based games, which were labors of love with large enough user bases to keep the steam going but not commercially viable enough to justify any sort of actual investment.
There are still a half dozen or so browser based games running on huge piles of PHP written by middle schoolers and high schoolers in the mid to late 2000s. Many still have XSS and SQL injections lurking in forgotten little corner features.
Had a similar hack occur on a clients website at work. They sold flowers I think, and gift cards. But the max value was like $30 and we got gift cards for $100/$1000 but they only paid $1. I wasn’t invoked in that bug report but I suspect it was a similar issue.
The good old days.
I think the story was that in the really early days, orders were fulfilled by hand by humans looking at a screen or a printed page. No one was expecting to see a negative value, so in the fast-paced fulfillment workflow, the negative sign was missed or interpreted as a separator. Your account would get credited and you'd receive a book!
Hopped on a WebEx, and they were trying to add -1 of the item to their cart. I understood how they thought it could work, but can't recall a site where it actually worked that way.
https://web.archive.org/web/19991012214158/http://amazon.com...
I don't have a great reason for keeping it to be honest. It's probably a dash of the memories it triggers when I look at it, a dash of respect for its ability to have survived multiple moves and 20+ years of not getting thrown away, and a dash of not being an inconvenience to keep around.
It came in handy a few years ago when I was testing the coax cables/attic antenna network I ran in the house. Much easier to carry around than the 50" lcd mounted on the wall.
The picture looks as good as the day I bought it so why would I throw it away?
https://www.howtogeek.com/435266/what-does-tldr-mean-and-how... claims early 2000s
Pretty amusing seeing this on their careers page, considering this was 1999.