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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".
That should make the next list of great hacks.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
If he is a good politician, he should make fun of the whole thing (and gain a few votes :)
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!
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
The hacked version of the image was only up for about two hours before it was taken down. Of course, it's now been replaced with an invitation to "Add to Gorup [sic]".
Will the incompetence ever end?
The Slashdot Limerick
Any politician who thinks he's going to get votes by making a myspace account deserves whatever he gets dished. Reminds me of the clueless professor from Real Genius who thought his students like it when he would "get down, verbally" with them.
Ya.
Just wandering, couldn't this be construed as fraud? Taken as an attempt to intentionally deceive people?
Obviously I hope and doubt that anything like that would happen, but I'm just curious if John McCain tries to make an example of this - as so many politicians try to do.
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.
Why is it that no matter what you do, A myspace page doesn't look good. I'm not trying to be snobby or anything, I don't have a page, but All MySpace sights that I have seen hurt my eyes.
This guy wasn't to be president? Isn't this like getting financial advice from someone with a hotmail address? It just doesn't seem all that encouraging. And feels kind of creepy to boot.
approve and support McCain's new and elightened postion on female marriage.
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.
Off of the top of my head I can think of many worse things that could have been used to replace that image, at least he was civil and used a political joke instead of picking an image from a popular domain with a Christmas Island TLD. :)
Thats the whole reason I would have voted for him, hot one on one chick action legalization... :)
- Aetheral Research -
This story is very similar to a much older /. story from Sept. 3, 2005: Fuddruckers Called Out on Hotlinking.
.htaccess file to redirect the traffic from the Fuddruckers site to a page which bashed the Fuddruckers webmaster and opened numerous popups which contained graphic pictures of slaughter houses. Making matters worse for Fuddruckers was the fact that this all occurred during the Labor Day weekend, so the content wasn't removed for a few days.
For those of you out there who don't want to RTF/.A, the children's section of the Fuddruckers website was pwned because they inline linked a flash game. The game's developer set his
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
He doesn't really support marriage between two passionate females? Well he's lost my vote!
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
Well he's currently got 2813 friends on myspace - If I'm not mistaken, with Diebolds help that should be just enough to take the next presidency!
~Pev
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.
I find this very ironics that /.-ers are criticizing a website for increasing the traffic of another one after linking to it ..
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Now, when the candidate appears at froums, people should ask if he still supports his earlier announced position in favor of hot women marrying.
That would be funny...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
concerning the alien invasion still legal if it happened now?
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.)
Isn't this like getting financial advice from someone with a hotmail address? You mean I shouldn't have invested my pension in that Nigerian gold mine?
1. Linking to a site (hyperlinking) is different than feeding an image or other content from someone elses site and displaying it on yours (hotlinking).
2. I don't recall criticizing anyone for linking (either hyper or hot) to anything, simply posting feedback and commentary on another article relating to this story.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Connecting with the youth? And why?
The youth are not old enough to vote.
Google Cache have the version with the hotlinked picture if anyone want to see how it lookedy space.com/johnmccain
http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:http://www.m
Thanks for the link.. Seeing your graphic is nice. Slashdotting their site is priceless.
The truth shall set you free!
Predictably, the page ended up with a big shiny moon. Surprisingly enough, the moon did stay online for a couple of hours until it finally was taken down.
During that same year, a number of other Sql sewer shites that had the misfortune of being linked by Slashdot or other geeky sites were mooned in a similar fashion. IIRC, one gaming site was mooned early Saturday morning, and only demooned in the very late evening. So yes, even moons can survive more than a trivial amount of time.
... and he fumbled it. Sad.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
for leeching bandwidth. As for the license violation, an appropriate response would have been to send a Cease and Desist letter to MySpace.
If you don't want your images embedded in other people's pages, why don't you just add alien referrer blocking to the .htaccess in your root folder?
I still believed, you insensitive clod.
> Here is Davidson's account of the "immaculate hack".
:-)
That is an immaculate hack. However an even more immaculate hack is the fact we've just Slashdotted him!
How about making it mandatory as an clause attached to the 19th Amendment?
Has anyone noticed that the play button on the video link looks either like he's got a large pacifier in his mouth?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
..he'll actually change his position for real and support equality for gays instead of joke callously about it while continuing to support blatant discrimination.
A friend of mine at work had a similar problem; some guy was linking to images on his site, claiming that he'd taken the photos. Unfortunately for him, we're programmers at a web agency...
One of the designers knocked up a quick image of a stick figure man holding up a placard, saying something like "I'm a bandwidth stealing arsehole!" on it, and my mate set up the appropriate rules to have it served in place of the image that had been deep-linked to.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I've got to believe there's a better way to serve pictures so that they are only viewable from the appropriate website than a straight http request for the image file. That is how to prevent people from hotlinking, not changing a file so they get something unwanted from their link (because that doesn't prevent them from hotlinking, does it? What if they just hotlink on purpose to the image but set it off-screen or something so it doesn't display but is still fetched just to use your bandwidth out of spite?).
How about trying to solve the actual problem rather than addressing the symptoms?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Well, I have one myspace user that hasn't yet noticed how much I improved(flashing image warning) their background - any image leeched from that folder also doubles as a page widener for the benefit of forum readers. Elsewhere, I had one image hotlinked from so many forums, I changed the filenames, and added a note to the page specifically asking people to host elsewhere. That didn't work, so I made a custom job which nicely fits with the style of most forums. Next, it seems game screenshots were being borrowed, so another switch (scroll down to EMMA-LATION) was required. Finally, a picture of Maggie Thatcher was hotlinked, so it was swapped(flashing image again) a bit as well.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
What do you call someone who still uses leetspeak after 2000?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Welcome, Slashdot user! Your number is:
#1927465037863
Now serving:
#23740
We will be with you shortly!
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Yeah, as opposed to something new and inventive like an XML tagline.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I can't believe you used a football reference in regards to Goatse, and it wasn't "wide receiver."
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It is good that the tooth fairy wont get hurt!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Not that it wasn't a great prank.
Of course, I don't think it fooled anyone. No one would believe that McCain would take such a brave and principled stand anymore. Everyone knows that McCain left behind every shred of integrity after 2000. Now, if you had put up a picture of George Bush's dick in his mouth, now THAT would have been believable.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Hey -- measured in Internet Time, we're Senior Citizens now! When do we get our pensions?
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
It's a shame there's no (+1, scary) moderation. And also that I don't have any mod points.
You call them "roughly as cool as people who still think it's cleaver to in their sig."
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
You might want to check the parent of the comment in question. He wasn't responding to the "LoL" comment.
Apologies are due.
C.
Every time I read something that would make me want to vote for McCain it turns out to be a hoax. Like all that stuff someone said he said about the religious right in the last election when in fact he's so far up the religious right's ass he can see Bush's feet. Or all that stuff they say he said about corruption when in fact he's buddy-buddy with an administration that makes the Nixon white house look like a bunch of amateurs. And now this. Now I'm all for gay marriage. If I were in charge of things I'd make it mandatory. Especially between really hot women. However, being willing to just allow it would be a step down that road and you have to take these things one step at a time. So I guess I'm just going to have to keep voting for Democrats until gay marriage is mandatory in all 50 states!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We should do well to remember that McCain is a powerful senator and is (at least) in the running for president. Given the delight with which the media loves to change a small problem into a "crisis", and given the ability of attention-seeking politicians to take such crises and make them into world-shaking problems that Must Be Solved, we might be looking forward to legislation in the matter - or some kind of presidentially ordered "regulation". Given the way the Congress works, I can easily see some nice Democrat who owes McCain a favor sponsoring the legislation - just so it doesn't look like McCain is doing it himself - given enough support he could even vote against it. After all, it would probably benefit all politicians.
It is probably best that Davidson did not use goatse (or anything similar) as that would have just intensified the pressure.
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?
Even if McCain's team would be so politically stupid as to try such a lawsuit during what is evidently (but depressingly) the 2008 presidential campaign season, and even if they could find a lawyer stupid enough to help them, no doubt Mr. Davidson can find a not-so-stupid lawyer to file a countersuit, claiming that every instance where McCain's page loaded the image was a violation of the template terms of use, and thus a copyright violation... which, in turn, might bring his stance on copyright into political focus, where he faces the horrible choices of (a) pissing off the **AA copyright-holding consortia with their lovely financial campaign contributions, (b) pissing off the copyright-violating unwashed masses with their ever so important votes, or (c) coming up with a solution to the problem of balancing the interests of these two rapaciously greedy sides in the copyright wars that will prove universally acclaimed.
If he can manage (c), he is the reincarnation of King Solomon, and for his wisdom deserves to win the nomination and election uncontested; solving the Iraq mess, the impending US energy Crisis, and the US Left-Right political divide will be trivial challenges for such a man. However, I don't think that will be the case (and I still won't vote Republican even then; blame Tricky Dick and Shrubbery Junior). Choices (a) and (b) remaining, this leaves a lose-lose situation. Even without the fabled Wisdom of Solomon, I think his team has enough political savvy to avoid being that stupid. Most ex-soldiers turned politician have the sense not to start unnecessary wars.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The image killed Firefox 1.5.0.10 on Ubuntu Dapper, too. I saved a copy for... uh... "future reference."
Yeah, its trivil to configure apache to only service files if the $HTTP_REFERRER is an authorized site. You can also do this to serve the correct image for authorized pages, and to serve something else to unauthorized ones. The point is to drive a message home to people who make web pages, to NOT put images on their page that are hosted on a server that isnt theirs. Serving low-bandwidth images which help to convey this message is one way of doing that.
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.
Well, how about a few thousand slashdot visitors? Will that help?
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
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.
You call them people living in the past, 670 years in the past.
"Thirteen thirty seven called, and they want their idioms back."
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
...became unresponsive, but it did respond to a quit request (generated by clicking the close gadget on the window.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It works in Safari 2.0.4, but it's not very interesting to look at. :)
They still are.
His terms of use required credit for the design. They are not giving him credit, thus they can be sued for (c) violation.
He's already said he doesn't really care, so now he likely can't sue, but all the same...
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Damn I wish I had mod points right now. Thanks for the chuckle. :)
Bark less. Wag more.
Same thing you called them before 2000: Lame.
So sorry, the government drew too much social security money out to fund the war on terror. You will have to wait until you are 107 years of age to benefit from your contributions.
Yep, I guess he's trying to protect the rights of individual states to deny its citizens' personal liberties, rather than supporting this denial at the federal level.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
'Not sure about the sidewalks, but it certainly seems antisocial.'
If you barf on your own sidewalk, fine, but stay away from mine, or the ones my taxes help pay for, thanks.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
Presumably Slashdotting not only their site but also the GPs own! Better still!
The graphic is small and low res. A slashdotting for that small piece of data should only be a small dent.
The truth shall set you free!
Having seen the candidates last time around (They say, in America anyone can become president. - Well, that's certainly true), I suspect a lot of folks don't vote because of the missing option on the ballot - "NONE OF THE ABOVE"
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Sorry to break it to you, but there was never a time when "leetspeak" was actually cool. I'm guessing 2000 must have been when you were finally old enough to realize it.
I clicked it fully expecting my browser to crash.
What I got instead was this: "The image 'http://www.danamania.com/temp/dontloadthis.jpg' cannot be displayed, because it contains errors."
The header on my firefox browser said "20000x20000 pixels scaled 2%"
My page.
As a philosophy student, I'd say that you are the one with the uncommon conception of morality. (By which I mean only "you seem to understand the word 'morality' differently than most people do"; not "the things you approve of are immoral" or anything like that). Ethics is the study of systems of morality, of right and wrong, ought and ought not. Morality (and thus ethics) by it's nature concerns social behavior. There are still things which are good for you and bad for you outside of the realm of morality/ethics - eating sand, playing with scorpions, and excessive drinking and gambling being amongst them - but that doesn't make them immoral or unethical. Eating fast food is bad for you, but it's not immoral. Not exercising enough is bad for you, but it's not immoral. The list goes on and on.
Now, you can argue that the converse is true: that morality and ethics ultimately reduce to practical considerations of what's good and bad for you (your survival, your happiness, your reproductive fitness, whatever), and I think there's a few good arguments that could be made in that vein. But that still doesn't make everything that's "good" or "bad" in such a practical sense also "moral" or "immoral", or "ethical" or "unethical".
Maybe all moral/ethical issues are really just practical issues, but even so, that doesn't make all practical issues into moral/ethical issues. A lot of the problems with religious notions of "morality" arise from this conception. Yes, lots of promiscuous sex and eating a lot and drinking tons of alcohol and gambling is probably going to be bad for you. That doesn't make it immoral in the way that theft or assault or dumping toxic waste down river is. The latter things affect other people and are thus social, ethical, moral concerns. The former things concern only yourself and thus, while you shouldn't do them just as a simple matter of practical reason, such self-regarding acts are beyond the scope of morality or ethics.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You know what, it's not like a car.
Correct. Material possessions are an ill-fitting metaphor for most of the common elements in today's information landscape.
However, people will continue to use them, and there is a very important reason for this. According to the observations and models of Cognitive Science, the vast majority of conscious thought is metaphorical. Ultimately, humans tend to understand their world by relating their experiences back to a smallish set of "base concepts."
Base concepts arise within a human mind as a combination of genetics and experience. The lengthy process of evolution has resulted in brains that are more-or-less hard wired to understand their environments in terms of a basic set of operating principles. Examples would include distance, movement, impermeability (the *bonk* factor of material objects), permanence (it stays there even when I don't see it), consumption, and so on.
Humans are not born instantly knowing these things. They are born with brains that are predisposed to figure these things out as a result of the normal experiences that it has while growing up. Once in place, this set of base concepts serves as the foundation for all future learning and all future interpretation of what one encounters.
The problem we face is that information does not map very well at all to any of the base concepts that the human brain is predisposed to learn. Humans will still attempt to understand information in terms of this basic set, because that is simply how the human brain works...but the understanding that results from such metaphors will always be unisomorphic and problematic.
On the upside, the human brain is the single most adaptable of organs in the known universe. At any stage in one's life it remains possible to form new base concepts, even ones for which the brain was not evolutionarily predisposed. It simply becomes more difficult as the brain ages.
Computer geeks tend to be people who are adapt at the formation of new base concepts, and also people who have grown up in environments which provide a lot of exposure to the modern information landscape (thus providing an environment that naturally prompts the formation of such base concepts at an early age).
Thus, conclusions about information management, and about the moral/legal value of the sorts of actions one can take within this landscape, often seem very obvious to people who have a good set of base concepts. Such people naturally grow weary of the ill-fitting metaphors like the ones given above. However, the onus is upon us to understand the cognitive limitations with which other people are operating, and to construct metaphors that ARE isomorphic to the reality, and that give an accurate framework from which to make moral/legal evaluations.
The biggest problem we face, IMO, is the fact that most of the controlling powers of the modern world are not operating from a good set of base concepts (in the information realm, at least). Thus, they are making bad business decisions, bad legal decisions, and passing laws that make no sense and cause a great deal of confusion, hardship, and misplaced expense. I am not sure what to do about the situation, but simply expecting the uninitiated to figure it out on their own is a plan doomed to failure.
He's really really slashdotted. In fact, I think he may have the wrong idea about the slashdotting. He thinks he's under a DDOS attack. From his site as of 3:00pm eastern on 3/28/2007:
Dear Beloved Newsvine Users,
We are currently experiencing a possible Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDOS), possibly in connection with the John McCain MySpace prank on Monday. We do not suspect the McCain camp has anything to do with this, and Newsvine will be back in service as soon as things are under control. Hopefully within minutes.
Apologies for the outage,
The Newsvine Team
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
Or are myspace pages fscking ugly and unreadable? That is an atrocity.
Salut,
Jacques
WOW! If that is what uga is teaching as an acceptable page the net is in deep trouble.
My eyes are still burning.
qz
Ignoring web caches, only Davidson's myspace page would display the version w/ "No requests for design help please" and anyone who leached from his server would get the version w/o it.
McCain's incompetent Web designer couldn't even be bothered to notice that the image in question said "No requests for design help please". .htacess to serve up a different version of the image to anyone who hotlinks. The only reason the 'no requests for design help' showed up was because he had the image in his browser cache when he visited the site. Anyone who didn't have that version in cache would see a version of the image without the 'no requests...' line.
Actually TFA states that the newsvine guy uses a
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
...thus they can be sued for (c) violation.He's already said he doesn't really care, so now he likely can't sue... For the million-and-oneth time, failure to defend only affects trademarks. In the absence of definitive written license (i.e. more than a blog entry saying "I don't really care..."), copyright infringement is still copyright infringement.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Why hasn't anyone brought the Copyright tricks into this?
... So we can put songs that we purchased onto our website, where it is available to all, right? Oh wait. So is an image that you own now different from a song that you own? (Purchased at standard retail.)
"Considering that putting a link on the internet does not restrict who can use it, it really is a broadcast, so that means that anyone can use it.
Unless you put the images behind an https link or something else that requires authorization, the entire point of the 'net is "available to all". "
How is McCain's "borrowing/other" the image that wasn't his, different from users "borrowing" songs?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That however is an entirely different point from being unfashionable and indeed unfit for merely _having_ a MySpace page. If you want to question his competence in getting something done, sure, that's a very valid concern. Please do continue that line of thought. But deciding that someone's even trying with MySpace automatically makes him a loser, is already in the realm of the brain-damaged.
And I'll point you to the financial-analyst-with-a-hotmail-address example he's used. We're not talking someone who's, say, too stupid to even figure out how to use Hotmail. The point was that merely using Hotmail makes someone automatically too unreliable (or maybe too unfashionable) to get advice from. You know, without any further consideration for what their qualifications may be, or even whether he's using that Hotmail address well. That's it. Hotmail address ==> don't trust that guy.
I'm sorry, but that's on par with phrenology, astrology and palm reading.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Dacelo Gigas
Firefox 2.0.0.3 and OSX 10.4, did become unresponsive for about 30 seconds but came right, and then just displayed as a white image.
The parent is not necessarily confusing copyright and trademark law. I could see a defense based on some form of reliance-based estoppel, for instance.
see here for a pretty good one, referencing the new NIN album in the process.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Not sure about all these other people noting problems, Konqueror on AMD64 (Kubuntu Edgy, haven't bothered with Feisty yet though I had an upgrade going on another computer to test if the beta is worth switching to yet). It just displays nothing. Hmm, let me see if other browsers complain more, I'll go through the rest of my browser list in alphabetical order:
- Heh, Amaya goes "Not enough memory" and runs away (ie. it shuts down entirely after you hit "okay")
- Iceweasel says the image cannot be displayed because it contains errors.
- Firefox, whether 32-bit or 64-bit, gives the same complaint as its logo-less brother.
- Wait, why do I have Iceweasel before Firefox in alphabetical order? Whatever.
- Lynx couldn't care less, naturally.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
How about - perish the thought - renaming the image? Ok, it's a temporary solution, so maybe set up your site (assuming you can) such that your webserver periodically renames the image and alters your HTML accordingly? Sure legit users will still eat some of your bandwidth, but then again, they already are, right?
Tried it on the Opera browser on the Wii, and although it didn't crash it completely, it did dump it back to the start screen.