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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".
They did not credit me for the template, even though the template explicitly requested credit.
Hmm. Sounds like someone broke a software license. Seems awful close to piracy. Someone call Orrin Hatch!
Mod parent ad hominem.
This is the danger of judging candidates not by their policy positions, but by their carefully constructed media hype. Remember that with McCain, one could just as easily assert (as some of his opponents will suggest) -- "After finishing fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, McCain was a bad enough pilot (probably flying drunk, given his history) that he couldn't keep his plane airborne and out of enemy hands. While in Vietnamese custody, unlike the many prisoners who resisted torture, McCain willingly signed documents 'confessing' to war crimes, and gave the Vietnamese classified information in order to receive more favorable treatment while in prison. Upon returning to the USA, McCain dumped his loyal and long-suffering first wife who had developed back problems, in order to marry a drug-addicted bimbo who had been his physical therapist. He showed poor enough judgment as to take money from Charlie Keating during the S&L scandals of the 1980s, that whether or not he was a crook for taking the money, he was certainly an idiot whose judgment shouldn't be trusted in more important matters."
Why not just judge the man on his policy positions? Oh, they've flip-flopped enough in the last decade that we can't be sure what his positions are, and all we really have to judge by is his history and his character. Oops!
By the way, many assume the bulge on McCain's cheek had something to do with his war injuries. In fact, it's the after-effect of skin cancer surgery.
When others leech your bandwidth you have to do this sort of thing, unfortunately. Whether you choose a joke like this, or Goatse, or a simple warning is really up to you. It's your image, after all.
I have a lot of reasonably large JPEG images on my site (800x600), and a number of MySpace users started to incorporate them directly into their own sites without having the decency to host them themselves. This is funny, because my CC license would have allowed most of them to use the images without even asking me, and the only real problem was that these JPEGs used a lot of bandwidth because visitors to countless MySpace pages were downloading them constantly. I didn't realize any of this until my site went down due to a bandwidth quota, after which I set up a rule to hand out an alternative image. A dose of Goatse would have been completely justified (and some of my friends were pushing for it), but I decided to make a small, low-quality JPEG containing information about what bandwidth leeching is and why it's rude. (Some people haven't noticed it yet, four months later.)
No nonononono! If you're going to prank, prank the hard issues :-)
.jpg header of a 10,000 by 10,000 pixel image. It tends to completely ruin formatting on the page it's embedded into so the whole page is unusable, and it's tiny enough not to impact on my bandwidth.
:)
Since most people either don't respond, respond with abuse, or tell me I can't dictate to them what to do with their web page, I gave up emailing them to ask nicely if they could host a pic of mine somewhere else if they wanted to use it. Now I just replace it like Mike did with something embarrassing to the particular site owner who's hotlinking to my images, or for myspace - more often than not I replace the image with http://www.danamania.com/temp/dontloadthis.jpg - I don't know the source of the image, but it's a 964 byte
It used to crash X11, make IE perform illegal instructions or freeze, and make OS X browsers beachball - but alas, in the years since I came across that file software has become more capable in handling extreme sized images
It killed Firefox 2.0.0.2 (Ubuntu Edgy version) which has admittedly been oddly brittle so far.
:)
Should be part of the standard display testing suite IMO
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Seriously, there's a reason for expert witnesses, and it's this: judges are there to understand the law, AND ANYTHING ELSE IS JUST ICING. Judges don't need to understand the internet, because any defense attorney worth half his salt will say "yes, and Mr. Davidson didn't change anything outside his own server," and the prosecution will be summarily laughed out of the building. If it's Wisconsin, they may have a large red "L" tattooed on their forehead first.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/14/teacher_faces _jail_t.html
She was in front of a classroom full of children, malwared-IE started popping up porn ads, everybody goes nipple-gate because "she's exposing them to porn!!!".
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
NASA has an 18.4MB 18000 x 18000 jpeg of the Orion nebula. We use it to stress-test our CAD systems at work.
u la_-_Hubble_2006_mosaic_18000.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Orion_Neb