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It's funny. Laugh. Government The Internet Politics

John McCain's MySpace Page "Pranked" 503

Posted by kdawson 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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John McCain's MySpace Page "Pranked" More

John McCain's MySpace Page "Pranked"

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  • That should make the next list of great hacks.
    • Not really. Changing hotlinked images so that, say, Goatse comes up instead is a time-honored tradition - perhaps even enough to be considered passé.
  • Well done to the prankster - although (from tfa):

    Abortion? The Iraq War? Probably too heavy to joke about. Gay marriage seemed like a more of a non-lethal subject to center the prank around.
    No nonononono! If you're going to prank, prank the hard issues :-)

    • Re:+1 Funny. (Score:5, Funny)

      by ArsenneLupin ( 766289 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:27AM (#18512935)

      If you're going to prank, prank the hard issues :-)
      I fully agree. He should have said: Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage... particularly marriage between two hod studs with hard cocks.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If you're going to prank, prank the hard issues

      "Today I announce that I have reversed my position, (placing my ass in front of me) and come out in full support of abortions... particularly abortions resulting from the union of Marines & Iraqi comfort women"

    • Re:+1 Funny. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by danamania ( 540950 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @07:39AM (#18513419)
      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 [danamania.com] - 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 :)

  • Let's see how McCain handles it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JudeanPeople'sFront ( 729601 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @04:59AM (#18512795)
    If he is a good politician, he should make fun of the whole thing (and gain a few votes :)

    • If he's a good politician.. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ..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.

    • Re:Let's see how McCain handles it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @08:26AM (#18513733)
      If he is a good politician, he should make fun of the whole thing (and gain a few votes :)

      If McCain is a good politician and decent human being, he should come out in support of gay marriage.

  • Graphic shoulda been a DMCA takedown notice. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @04:59AM (#18512797)
    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 [wired.com]!

  • This could majorly backfire (Score:4, Insightful)

    by donscarletti ( 569232 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:07AM (#18512839)
    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.

    • Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Informative)

      by chanrobi ( 944359 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:16AM (#18512887)
      If you'd even bothered to actually to read the TFA it says this

      simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server
      There is no "hacking" involved unlike what the title suggests. The image on McCains page was hotlinked off his site and he simply changed it to something else.

      • Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:35AM (#18512963) Homepage
        Yes - but don't expect any common sense from the legal system in anything related to computers or (shiver) 'hacking'.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by BlueTrin ( 683373 )
          Well, it will not happen for three reasons:
          • he is campaigning so it could be seen as very negative
          • he modified a picture from his OWN website, it would be something very easy to explain
          • the candidate was stealing bandwidth from his website and not respecting the copyright, although he can always blame the website designers he hired for the blog

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by stanleypane ( 729903 )
          While I don't think this is technically illegal, there is the fact that he intentionally replaced it with an image that was directly related to McCain's character. Intent goes a long way in US courts. Had he replaced it with a general image not directly related to McCain (Goatse?) than he'd probably stand a better chance if this does make it in front of a Judge.

          • Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:4, Funny)

            by whathappenedtomonday ( 581634 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @08:33AM (#18513787) Journal

            Had he replaced it with a general image not directly related to McCain (Goatse?) than he'd probably stand a better chance if this does make it in front of a Judge.

            Holy cow, imagine that! Judge: "Good thing you used the Goatse guy pic which is completely unrelated to McCain! You're free to go. And thanks for introducing me to such an interesting ho... person. I'm off to check that guy's website!"

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ArsenneLupin ( 766289 )

        There is no "hacking" involved unlike what the title suggests. The image on McCains page was hotlinked off his site and he simply changed it to something else.
        Exactly. But would the general public and some random computer-illiterate judge understand that? That was the point donscarletti was trying to make...
        • 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.

      • Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:4, Insightful)

        by kestasjk ( 933987 ) * on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:37AM (#18512973) Homepage
        You bet they can come up with some crime that vaguely matches this though. Anti-graffiti laws maybe, who knows? A bit of creativity and liberal use of words and you can easily make this a crime.

        • Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Insightful)

          by pipatron ( 966506 ) <pipatron@gmail.com> on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @07:20AM (#18513335) Homepage

          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.

          • Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Insightful)

            by radish ( 98371 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @08:57AM (#18514001) Homepage
            But this is more like someone stealing gas from your car every day and putting it in their car. Then one day you buy a new car which takes diesel instead of regular gas, they steal that and it wrecks their engine. I think that even in the United States od Litigation your liability in that case is pretty minimal :)

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by stonecypher ( 118140 )
            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.

            Wow, that's a great analogy. Now if only one person was hurt or killed in any way by a guy choosing to replace an image on his own webserver, that might be germane. What you seem to be missing is that embarrassment isn't criminal. The reason poison would be illegal is because it would kill someone. Nobody died here. Some jerk has egg on his fac
        • You bet they can come up with some crime that vaguely matches this though.

          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.

    • Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:5, Insightful)

      by whathappenedtomonday ( 581634 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:23AM (#18512911) Journal

      defacing a site is illegal hacking

      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. :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kv9 ( 697238 )

      How long until Mr Davidson gets prosecuted [snip] With the amount the average judge knows about the internet [snip] 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.

      +

      TFA

      = definition of irony?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheoMurpse ( 729043 )
      There are quite a few knowledgeable lawyers regarding the internet. I'm sure a good one would merely make this analogy:

      Suppose A owns a house with a painting inside near a window. He invites people to walk by his house and view the painting through the window under the license that they credit him for anything they do with the IP of the painting (perhaps A even charges admission); this costs A some money per view, say electricity to keep a lamp turned on and lighting up the painting (this lamp only turns on

    • Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:4, Insightful)

      by n5vb ( 587569 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @11:02AM (#18515623)
      McCain was hotlinking to his site without permission.

      He made a perfectly legitimate change to the content of his own site. The fact that the image McCain's site was hotlinking was affected in the process is not his fault. (And it's theft of service in a way, because he's stealing bandwidth from the legitimate content owner's hosting to do it.)

      I'm sorry, the idea of even someone like McCain pulling a stunt like that is too ridiculous to even think about. It's been tried too many times by too many clueless asshats to have any chance of success. Especially in the current DMCA-flavored IP culture. The fact that a site owner used a particularly creative form of DRM is no excuse to try to coerce him into putting content back onto his site that he chose to remove, and quite honestly, McCain or the staffer who decided to hotlink the image in the first place could actually face a DMCA charge for it. Serve him right, he voted for the damn thing ..

      (saying this mainly because the idea of being forced to keep content up on a site to support bottom feeding bandwidth leeches offends me to the very core of my being)

  • Didn't Last Long (Score:5, Informative)

    by 0rionx ( 915503 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:10AM (#18512847)

    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?

    • Am I the only one who finds it amusing that he was complaining about bandwidth usage, and now his prank just got him /.ed?

      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.

  • Never... er... always check your references (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Excelcia ( 906188 ) <slashdot@excelcia.ca> on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:12AM (#18512859) Homepage Journal
    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... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Smerity ( 714804 ) <smerity@smerity.com> on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:13AM (#18512867) Homepage
    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.

  • Could have been worse... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by L4m3rthanyou ( 1015323 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:15AM (#18512885)

    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.

  • 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.

    • Oh, please... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:39AM (#18512985) Journal

      Isn't this like getting financial advice from someone with a hotmail address?


      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...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Corporate Troll ( 537873 )

      Isn't this like getting financial advice from someone with a hotmail address?

      Yes, it is... but that is only because you're (probably) employed in IT. I had a real hard time explaining my father in law that he shouldn't be using the equivalent of aol.com (not actually, that, but from a national provider) for his business. The worst part is: he's got his own domain.

      No, he keeps using the old address. Normal people don't see the harm in such adresses.

      So, for the masses, I expect that a myspace page

  • I for one... (Score:5, Funny)

    by edwardpickman ( 965122 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:25AM (#18512927)
    approve and support McCain's new and elightened postion on female marriage.

  • A missed opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:27AM (#18512933)
    Opportunities like this don't arises too often, Mike should have just replaced the image with hello.jpg.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gbobeck ( 926553 )
      I think Mike did the right thing by not goatseing. Mike's image was up for roughly 2 hours. If he had goatse'd instead, most likely the image would have been removed much much sooner.

      As a side note, I am a webmaster for a few small sites. When I encounter inline image linking, I tend to replace the image with another which says "I am a Grade A Asshat. I steal bandwidth" or other suitable saying. I reserve hello.jpg for exceptional circumstances (read: someone uses my images on ebay, or some other site

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )
        I saw an interesting case where someone had an image hotlinked...
        He replaced it with:
        http://www.ev4.org/hotlink.jpeg [ev4.org]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gbobeck ( 926553 )
          Nice. :-)

          A friend of mine uses the image from the site "www bottleguy com" (I purposely borked link for everyone's protection) for anti-inline linking purposes.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ocbwilg ( 259828 )
          I bet a lot of people do similar things to deal with hotlinking. I once had an image hosted on my server that I discovered was being hotlinked for use in someone's signature file for a web-based forum. I just changed it so instead of getting the "cool picture" that he liked so much, instead he got a black box with white text that says "I love anally raping small children." You wouldn't believe how quickly the hotlinking stopped.
    • but then he would be serving that image from his server, which would open him up to all kinds of prosecution about indecent materials being displayed to minors without warning screens.

      By doing it this way he has an image on his own site which is satire, and therefore probably fair use - the fact that someone else is displaing that image themselves in a rather daft place is not his problem!!

  • Actually.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by yamamushi ( 903955 ) <yamamushi@gma i l . c om> on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @05:48AM (#18513011) Homepage
    Thats the whole reason I would have voted for him, hot one on one chick action legalization... :)

  • New twist on old stupidity (Score:5, Informative)

    by gbobeck ( 926553 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @06:04AM (#18513083) Homepage Journal
    This story is very similar to a much older /. story from Sept. 3, 2005: Fuddruckers Called Out on Hotlinking [slashdot.org].

    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 .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.

  • How many friends? (Score:5, Funny)

    by pev ( 2186 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @06:15AM (#18513121) Homepage
    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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gbobeck ( 926553 )
      How dare you make such a false alligation such as that?

      Everyone knows that it takes 2815 friends on myspace to win the next presidency via Diebold's help.

  • ABC News, Typical Mainstream Media Sensationalism (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bdub1982 ( 1080561 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @06:25AM (#18513149)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Jonathan_S ( 25407 )

      McCain's incompetent Web designer couldn't even be bothered to notice that the image in question said "No requests for design help please".

      If you'd RTFA (yes, yeas, I know this is /.) you'd have seen that the only person who would see "No requests for design help please" was Mike Davidson because it was in his web cache. Everyone else saw the 'normal' link picture.

      Ignoring web caches, only Davidson's myspace page would display the version w/ "No requests for design help please" and anyone who leached from

  • Step 2 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @06:53AM (#18513239)
    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...

  • A common issue with MySpace - and you have to act (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Random BedHead Ed ( 602081 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @07:04AM (#18513281) Homepage Journal

    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.)

    • 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?)

  • The myspace page on google cache (Score:4, Informative)

    by soilheart ( 1081051 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @07:31AM (#18513383)
    Google Cache have the version with the hotlinked picture if anyone want to see how it looked
    http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:http://www.my space.com/johnmccain [209.85.135.104]

  • Passionate about image leachers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BillGatesLoveChild ( 1046184 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @07:54AM (#18513507) Journal
    > 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! :-)

  • Video link looks like a pacifier... (Score:3, Funny)

    by mikael ( 484 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @08:00AM (#18513547)
    Has anyone noticed that the play button on the video link looks either like he's got a large pacifier in his mouth?

  • Hey Everyone, Pitch In! (Score:4, Funny)

    by carrier lost ( 222597 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @10:52AM (#18515463) Homepage
    my bandwidth is being used to deliver part of the page! Bad McCain!

    Well, how about a few thousand slashdot visitors? Will that help?

    MjM

  • This has already inspired similar pranks on McCain (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Phil Urich ( 841393 ) on Thursday March 29, 2007 @01:11AM (#18524909) Journal
    see here [cliveholloway.net] for a pretty good one, referencing the new NIN album [ninwiki.com] in the process.

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