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John McCain's MySpace Page "Pranked"
Several readers let us know about a little problem with presidential hopeful John McCain's MySpace page. Looks as though some staffer didn't read the fine print of the "credit" clause when selecting a template for the page. The template author and CEO of Newsvine, Mike Davidson, noticed this and didn't care too much. But the McCain page was pulling an image from Davidson's site, costing him bandwidth every time someone visited the candidate's MySpace page. So Davidson changed the image in question to read: "Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage... particularly marriage between two passionate females." Here is Davidson's account of the "immaculate hack".
If he is a good politician, he should make fun of the whole thing (and gain a few votes :)
How long until Mr Davidson gets prosecuted by some lawyer working for McCain who hasn't realised that laughing along with the joke is a lot more dignified than litigation? With the amount the average judge knows about the internet, he could actually be imprisoned for this if some arsehole in a suit and tie crys loud enough. As simple as the case may seem to us, to the general public, defacing a site is illegal hacking, nomatter how it is done and no doubt McCain could get a clueless PHB to testify to that as an "expert witness" if he wanted to.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
If McCain's people know anything, they'll play it off quietly or joke about it, knowing it could have been a lot worse. A less civil person probably would have goatse'd McCain's myspace instead.
...which would have been goddamn hilarious, but I digress.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
Opportunities like this don't arises too often, Mike should have just replaced the image with hello.jpg.
Oh please... Here's an idea for you: how about you turn on the brain and judge the man (or woman), not his email address or MySpace page?
Financial advice: either you trust that guy to be a competent economist, or you don't. That's it. If someone has a Ph.D. from Harvard, who gives a rat's arse about whether he has also a Hotmail address or not.
President: either you trust the guy enough to basically give him a hell of a lot of power, or you don't. The fact that he also has some stupid MySpace page should be the least of your worries.
Note that in both cases we're not talking about some Anonymous Coward with a Hotmail address or MySpace page, but about someone who's known and easy to check. We're not talking "Moraelin for president" or "NightElf12345@hotmail.com offers you free financial advice", but someone who's well known, and whose credentials and opinions are known, public and damn easy to check. So how about doing just that?
So you propose... what? That instead of actually checking and judging the person, you'd rather make some superficial meaningless criterion like their email address the top and only criterion? Would you rather take advice from the janitor because he has a more fashionable email address? Geesh...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
He's a war hero - ok, fine. What difference does that make to my point? I don't care if he was Roger Ramjet or Captain America himself, having some campaign flunky set up a myspace account to get in touch with youth is just dumb.
ABC News has an "interesting" http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/03/mc cains_myspace.htmlarticle about this that shows mainstream media's typical sensationalist hype of things and also shows most people's lack of knowledge and general disregard of technology.
I especially love how the opening line refers to this prank as "a new weapon in campaign digital media warfare", then the article goes on to use phrases such as "McCain didn't give him credit and Davidson sought retribution" and buzzwords like "The Internet battlefield".
I find Mr. Rasiej's comment that "This just goes to show that the Internet is an entirely new battlefield for many of these candidates and they are going to have to develop sophisticated new responses to deal with them" very interesting, since the "sophisticated new response" to this would have been to show some creativity, design your own image, and not leach someone else's bandwidth with an image that has nothing to do with your message. McCain's incompetent Web designer couldn't even be bothered to notice that the image in question said "No requests for design help please". I don't think I'll be asking McCain or any of his peoplefor design help, especially now!
The article also goes on to compare this incident with such things as a genuinely serious security flaw discovered in Rudy Giuliani's website and to Phil de Velis's Clinton/Obama mock political ad. And just to stir in a little more controversy, they had to add that de Velis "formerly lived with a current Obama staffer". Big deal!
Typical mainstream media sensationalistic BS hype! Hopefully nothing bad comes of this.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
But he has supported gay rights for a long time. Yes he has stated he thinks its immoral but I think drink is immoral but I don't support taking away your rights to do so. Look at his voting record he has voted against the marriage amendment and other anti gay stuff. Yea sure he isn't out campaigning for them that doesn't mean he hates them either.
Illegal? Oh come on! There isn't even a good analog for this in the world...What they should have done, if they were half intelligent, is made a copy of the image and kept it on THEIR site. What they did was just put a link on the site to a picture that someone else was hosting.
This is a terrible design practice...Not only can your content change in unexpected ways (this was intentional, but I've seen a lot of humorous unintentional stuff happen with this sort of nonsense) but you're also ripping off the guy who's actually paying for the bandwidth to host the content, because whenever someone goes to your page, he's the one uploading the picture. Total rip off!
In short, this is completely legitimate...The person who created, maintained, and hosted the image, changed his personal property, and you think that should be illegal?? If the author of the original stuff hadn't put his content out there to be used by other people, McCain's people could have been up for a breach of copyright.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's like someone driving through your property every day -- that still doesn't give you the right to paint slogans and ridicule on the trespassing cars as they pass.
No, they were not 'driving through' they were stealing. Every time someone hit McCaine's site the images were pulled from Davidson's site's server. It was just as if they had Mr. Davison's phone card numbers and were making long distance calls on his phone bill. IF you only understand cars then, "It was just as if they were jumping in Mr. Davidson's car and driving it around Mr. Davision's property every day". Does not Mr. Davidson have the right to paint "slogans and ridicule" on his very own privately held vehicle?
Davidson has the right to change the content on his server any time he chooses. He could have just renamed or deleted the image files and left McCaine with a bunch of red X's on the McCaine site. As other contributors have suggested Mr. Davidson could have chosen other even less friendly images to host on Mr. Davidson's very own privately held server using services for which Mr. Davidson is paying.