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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 :)
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
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.
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.
Intentionally deceiving people isn't fraud, and isn't illegal. Deceiving someone to gain something from them would be fraud.
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.
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.
In fact making intentionally deceiving people illegal could have catastrophic consequences on Christmas and Easter as we know it.
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
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.
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.
Captain America is DEAD, you insensitive clod!
*runs off crying*
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.
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.)
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
The war of the world's radio broadcast had messages both before and after it stating that it was a play - not news. The problem was that some people tuned in during the middle and were extremely gullible.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
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
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
What do you call someone who still uses leetspeak after 2000?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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.
Yeah, as opposed to something new and inventive like an XML tagline.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I've just found (due to absentmindedly clicking the link without reading the description) that in Firefox on OS X, it causes both the browser and the OS X interface to become unresponsive. I ended up having to reboot the computer to get it back to working order.
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.
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.
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
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.
After using Mozillia and Firefox for many a year, the habit of opening links in new tabs as I'm still reading the article is quite ingrained into me. It was with much dismay that I read your last paragraph, noticed that my mouse stopped working and my harddrive activity light was solid. Firefox died a horrible death, and did so again 3 minutes later as I reflected upon the foolishness of choosing 'Restore last session'. 5 minutes later, I was berating myself for saving the file into a directory that nautalis had open on my desktop, forgetting that it creates thumbnails based on file type, not extension.
I'm now posting this from another computer.
# chmod 000 pandora.jpg
echo 'Header append X-HD-DVD "0x09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0"' >>