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John McCain's MySpace Page "Pranked"
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Mar 28, 2007 03:51 AM
from the careful-who-you-leach-from dept.
from the careful-who-you-leach-from dept.
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".
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Let's see how McCain handles it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's see how McCain handles it (Score:5, Insightful)
If McCain is a good politician and decent human being, he should come out in support of gay marriage.
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Re:Let's see how McCain handles it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:If he's a good politician.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Graphic shoulda been a DMCA takedown notice. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm. Sounds like someone broke a software license. Seems awful close to piracy. Someone call Orrin Hatch [wired.com]!
This could majorly backfire (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Interesting)
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!!!".
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Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that's disturbing. Back when Slashdot only allowed current members of the state bar to register their usernames, everyone thought it would keep discussions intelligent. Now we find out that half the people forged their credentials and the other half were in the midst of ethics probes. (I always wondered about that "hot grits" guy's absurd explanation of the Interstate Commerce clause.)
As for me, yeah, I'll fess up: forged credentials. It was hilarious: the New Mexico board never did get any sort of confirmation call about me at all, even after I posted my first comment critical of Linux. People here are so naive and trusting!
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Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Insightful)
If you know that someone is stealing your lunch everyday, and you know who it is, and you poison the food, I'm sure that they can get you locked up for murder.
I'm sorry, but I couldn't come up with a car analogy.
Oh wait! If you set up the bomb in your car so it will explode if someone steals it, and then someone actually do steal it, thus dies, I bet they can lock you up for that too. If, however, you paint the seats, thus ruining the thief's clothes, I doubt the thief can sue you for the dry cleaning bill.
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Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Informative)
Uh. No, you really can't. You also can't come up with a crime that vaguely resembles my drinking coffee in the morning.
Anti-graffiti laws maybe, who knows?
Oy. First off, graffiti is illegal in less than a quarter of the United States, and in those places where it is illegal, it's almost always simply illegal on public property. There are almost no points in the United States where graffiti on private property is illegal. That's why almost all graffiti cases are actually tried as destruction of private property - graffiti isn't illegal.
Why is the difference important? Well, for one, destruction of private property is illegal, but it's not criminal; unless there's something particular about the content of the graffito, the person can't be sent to jail except overnight holding, there's a limit on the fine that can be laid, and they're not liable for concommitant damage. So, for example, if an artist painted a beautiful graffito painting on the side of a building, and some jerk was staring at it instead of driving and got into a wreck that killed a kid, the artist would not be accessory to manslaughter.
Graffiti involves you doing something to someone else's things, not your own. The reason you can't come up with a sensible example is because there isn't one. The legal system isn't a question of who can come up with the biggest stretch, and believe it or not, a judge is well within their rights to say "fuck off, that's not what that law means." In fact, that's their purpose, and they do that all the time.
What a judge cannot do is send you to jail without a damned good reason. If you appeal a judge's ruling and it gets overturned, circuit court is required to make a decision that they never seem to teach you about at the SlashDot J Fakespert Building of Almost Law at the NBC campus of the University of Law and Order: SVU. (That's right, I'm making fun of your channel 4 law degree. Maybe you can convince a judge that I'm putting a graffito on SlashDot?) Specifically, that decision is whether to overturn with or without prejudice.
Maybe you should get on http://notacollegeofjurisprudence.wikipedia.net/ [wikipedia.net] and track down just what happens to a judge when their rulings are overturned with prejudice? The actual count varies from state to state, but in Pennsylvania it's three a year, and in Washington DC it's zero tolerance.
A bit of creativity and liberal use of words and you can easily make this a crime.
Really? Go right ahead: we're listening. Show us something a little less ridiculous than laws designed to keep city signs legible. Or did you think graffiti laws were there to keep people from painting on things?
Have a look through your local law library for a 1970s New York City block of precedent that was taken state then national by Andy Warhol, surrounding the then-little-known street artist Jean Michel Basquiat. We've actually gone through this on walls in public, where Basquiat intentionally took it to a senator in public. The wall didn't belong to Basquiat, and Basquiat wasn't having a good old josh like Mr. Davidson is. The senator tried a bunch of stuff to get it taken down, including leaning with all his senatorial might. He got nowhere. Basquiat died a few
Basquiat died several years later on the wrong end of a heroin needle, a free man. At that time, most of America learned that paranoia does not generate legal fault. Our founding fathers went way, way out of their way to make what you're describing fundamentally impossible, and they did a beautiful job of it. Clueful legal commentators understand and respect that.
And please have the sense to stop pretending to grok the law. Lawrence Lessig you are not.
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Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Funny)
I wouldn't trust anyone who took 8 years to finish law school to understand much of anything...
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Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:4, Insightful)
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Didn't Last Long (Score:5, Informative)
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]" [myspace.com].
Will the incompetence ever end?
Could have been worse... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I for one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Funny)
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A missed opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually.. (Score:5, Funny)
New twist on old stupidity (Score:5, Informative)
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
How many friends? (Score:5, Funny)
~Pev
ABC News, Typical Mainstream Media Sensationalism (Score:5, Insightful)
ABC News has an "interesting" http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/03/mc cains_myspace.html [abcnews.com]article 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.
Step 2 (Score:5, Funny)
That would be funny...
A common issue with MySpace - and you have to act (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [uga.edu] haven't noticed it yet, four months later.)
The myspace page on google cache (Score:4, Informative)
http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:http://www.m
Re:+1 Funny. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:+1 Funny. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [danamania.com] - 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
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Re:+1 Funny. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:+1 Funny. (Score:5, Interesting)
Should be part of the standard display testing suite IMO
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Re:+1 Funny. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm now posting this from another computer.
# chmod 000 pandora.jpg
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Re:Just wandering... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Just wandering... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Just wandering... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:is Orson Welles's "deceipt " (Score:5, Informative)
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Oh, please... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Re:Never... er... always check your references (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Never... er... always check your references (Score:5, Funny)
Captain America is DEAD, you insensitive clod!
*runs off crying*
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Re:Never... er... always check your references (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:In my day... (Score:5, Funny)
What do you call someone who still uses leetspeak after 2000?
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Re:In my day... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:In my day... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey -- measured in Internet Time, we're Senior Citizens now! When do we get our pensions?
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Re:In my day... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Your analogy is wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Your analogy is wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:Your analogy is wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, Davidson also has a good basis for a counter-suit. McCaine's site did steal his bandwidth and use his templates without giving credit, both of which are clearly spelled out as against the terms of service for using the template.
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