Auto-affiliate
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Apr. 22nd, 2010 | 04:21 pm
I saw rumors that the current LJ owners were trying the javascript affiliate re-writing code again. This is a link to a pdf where I know one of the authors. The link text is the simplest version of the amazon link that works correctly. I'm curious if the link one lands at differs from it.
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Testing-Applications-twill-Selenium/dp/B001O7HEPW/
Answer: Yes they are doing it, though its even subtler. When I clicked on the link in this post and for a moment I saw a redirect in the url bar. So I dumped my port 80 network traffic.
The first HTTP request. (Note the Host: outboundlink.me entry)
Next there's some json request:
Then there's the connection to amazon.
That GET has quite a bit more information than my initial URL. However then it finally finishes redirecting with:
which contains my initial url.
(I did remove the Cookie: header from these posts.
I am curious what the parameters tag, linkCode, camp, and creative mean.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596514832/thepolychromatpa Link to Web Security Testing Cookbook: Systematic Techniques to Find Problems Fast using joedeckers affiliate code.
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Testing-Applications-twill-Selenium/dp/B001O7HEPW/
Answer: Yes they are doing it, though its even subtler. When I clicked on the link in this post and for a moment I saw a redirect in the url bar. So I dumped my port 80 network traffic.
The first HTTP request. (Note the Host: outboundlink.me entry)
GET /anxo/dr_ta_1/dr_rwl_v2.php?DR_id=1111&r=false&link=http%3A//www.amazon.com/Introduction-Testing-Applications-twill-Selenium/dp/B001O7HEPW/&link_id=link_13&dr_log=-1&callback=DR_JSONP_callback&ref=http%3A//alienghic.livejournal.com/ HTTP/1.1
Host: outboundlink.me
Referer: http://alienghic.livejournal.com/
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.22.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Safari/531.22.7
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Next there's some json request:
THTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: closeDate: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 23:23:02 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.5
Content-type: application/json
TDR_JSONP_callback({"l_ID":"link_13","dr _af":"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Introduct ion-Testing-Applications-twill-Selenium\ /dp\/B001O7HEPW\/","log_id":"-1","log":t rue,"m":0})
Then there's the connection to amazon.
GET /gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FI ntroduction-Testing-Applications-twill-S elenium%2Fdp%2FB001O7HEPW%2F&tag=5336432744-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.amazon.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.22.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Safari/531.22.7
Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,te xt/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png, */*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
That GET has quite a bit more information than my initial URL. However then it finally finishes redirecting with:
HTTP/1.1 301 MovedPermanently
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 23:23:02 GMT
Server: Server
x-amz-id-1: 118NYYYJRESMA4CBCA7W
p3p: policyref="http://www.amazon.com/w3c/p3p.xml",CP="AMZN "
x-amz-id-2: +BtO3oszOFtkCQ6sGA4NuJ5QIUsoqqXz
Location: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Testing-Applications-twill-Selenium/dp/B001O7HEPW/
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
which contains my initial url.
(I did remove the Cookie: header from these posts.
I am curious what the parameters tag, linkCode, camp, and creative mean.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596514832/thepolychromatpa Link to Web Security Testing Cookbook: Systematic Techniques to Find Problems Fast using joedeckers affiliate code.
Re: Amazon might want to know this.
from:
alienghic
date: Apr. 23rd, 2010 12:15 am (UTC)
Link
The buggy version of the auto-affiliate script directed fees away from the person participating in the program which violated the Amazon TOS. However It seemed like their goal was to redirect bare links so they could profit off people who didn't already have a business relationship with Amazon.
My tests were just with a bare url. I'm not sure what'd happen if someone had a proper Amazon affiliate ID.
Though RE: Point 15. The auto-affiliate script does seem to violate that.
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Re: Amazon might want to know this.
from:
alienghic
date: Apr. 23rd, 2010 02:56 am (UTC)
Link
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from:
irilyth
date: Apr. 23rd, 2010 02:04 am (UTC)
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from:
alienghic
date: Apr. 23rd, 2010 02:29 am (UTC)
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from:
irilyth
date: Apr. 23rd, 2010 12:10 pm (UTC)
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