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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 :)
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.
Huh? From the fine summary: "the McCain page was pulling an image from Davidson's site" - how can it be illegal to change the contents of your own website? How could this even be called 'hacking'? If you pull graphics from other websites, prepare to get what you deserve! It says "Pranked" instead of "Hacked" in the summary title for a reason.
I think he did a great prank and I laughed my ass off - there are some funny comments, too:
> Jeff Croft
> Mike, your testicals are very, very large
>> Mike D. :)
>> Thank you. Please spellcheck your genitalia references though.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
Opportunities like this don't arises too often, Mike should have just replaced the image with hello.jpg.
Yes - but don't expect any common sense from the legal system in anything related to computers or (shiver) 'hacking'.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
But this is more like someone stealing gas from your car every day and putting it in their car. Then one day you buy a new car which takes diesel instead of regular gas, they steal that and it wrecks their engine. I think that even in the United States od Litigation your liability in that case is pretty minimal :)
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
You know what, it's not like a car. It's not like a boat. It's not like a sock. It's not like a mountain dew bottle.
You know what it is like? Someone had image image tags, which were references to a remote server, instead of a local server.
It is what it is.
ac