Okay, maybe Amazon is off the hook. The well-known troll Weev is claiming that he’s actually responsible for Amazon’s sudden surge of LGBT prudishness. Which Valleywag says actually makes sense.

It’s startingly simple: It doesn’t take very many votes at all to get a product flagged as “inappropriate” and booted off the rankings. He says he created a script that generated a list of product IDs for every gay and lesbian book on Amazon. From there, he just needed a whole bunch of people to flag the books as inappropriate, which wasn’t hard, because simply getting someone to go the URL of a successful flag would count as another one. Using an invisible iframe on popular websites owned by friends and a group of “third-worlders” he hired to register accounts, he generated enough votes to de-list gay and lesbian books en masse.

Lending credence to his claims, Valleywag notes that the “flag as inappropriate” feature is currently disabled. Free reign for inappropriate books! [Livejournal via Valleywag]

Amazon’s now trying to explain that the blacklisting of LGBT books as “adult” titles that aren’t ranked or even searchable was just a “glitch” in its sales rankings. Amazon is not a good liar.

Let’s look at the evidence! When Amazon Advantage member and publish Mark Probst asked Amazon why sales rankings vanished from two high profile gay romance books—among hundreds of other gay titles—Amazon Member Services explained:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

HMMM.

Author Craig Seymour documents the timeline by which his memoir All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. was stripped of its sales ranking and branded an adult title over the course of the month of February—two months before the supposed glitch—even though Diablo Cody’s own stripper memoir’s rankings stayed just peachy.

So, expect their glitch explanation to become even more elaborate and ridiculous (maybe it was Conficker!!!!), since it really has to cover a lot of ground. And like Ryan says at Valleygawker, “The company will no doubt try to do that without reminding its homophobic customers that it is selling hot man-on-man and woman-on-woman and whoever-on-whoever purple prose for gays to read and do lord knows what else at the same time.” [Gawker,

Apple is joining Google in publicly opposing proposition 8. It has a history of supporting same-sex couples, as well.

“Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights—including the right to marry—should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.”

Say what you will about their products, but as far as I’m concerned this is a commendable move that should be mirrored by even more Silicon Valley companies.

Update: Like Yahoo. Valleywag is reporting that Yahoo is the only one of the big three Silicon Valley companies that hasn’t come out (no pun intended) against Prop 8. What’s the hold-up, Yahoo? [CNET]

Samsung ranked in the lowest tier of companies with a scant 4% of the polled population feeling the brand is gay-friendly. That puts them right between Quaker (5%) and Cracker Barrel (3%). Technically Samsung tied with Wal-Mart and Frito-Lay.

By the way, we attempted to Photoshop the gay pride/rainbow flag onto the old Apple logo, only to find that, duh, their original logo almost did the job for us. Read more about that here. [Prime Access via MacWorld]