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".

Comments

Re:Never... er... always check your references

[Oh the Huge Manatee]

This man was shot down in the Vietnam war and a prisoner of war at the famous / infamous "Hanoi Hilton". This man broke both arms and a leg, was tortured and survived. He ejected from his plane back in 1967 and was released in 1974 I do believe. Quite a feat in my book. He might be labeled a bad political choice, but he deserves respect.

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.

Re:+1 Funny.

[danamania]

No nonononono! If you're going to prank, prank the hard issues :-)

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 .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.

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 :)

Re:This could majorly backfire

[stonecypher]

But would the general public and some random computer-illiterate judge understand [hotlink replacement]?

1. Would someone who went to law school for eight years, then acted as a lawyer, then went back to law school for four more years, understand simple propriety and ownership? Yes.
2. It's not the judge's problem to understand things. I don't know why SlashDot thinks it is. That's the purpose of the defense attorney. The system is simple: the attorneys both understand and explain the situation as best they can, and then the judges use the information presented by the attorneys to rule.

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.