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".

I for one...

[edwardpickman]

approve and support McCain's new and elightened postion on female marriage.

Re:+1 Funny.

[ArsenneLupin]

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:+1 Funny.

[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"

Actually..

[yamamushi]

Thats the whole reason I would have voted for him, hot one on one chick action legalization... :)

Re:Just wandering...

[Carewolf]

In fact making intentionally deceiving people illegal could have catastrophic consequences on Christmas and Easter as we know it.

Re:I for one...

[Jedi Alec]

Well, I for one don't. I'd much rather they slept around. Variation keeps things interesting ;-)

How many friends?

[pev]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Captain America is DEAD, you insensitive clod!

*runs off crying*

Step 2

[Registered Coward v2]

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...

OH GREAT! THANKS ALOT!

[notnAP]

I still believed, you insensitive clod.

Video link looks like a pacifier...

[mikael]

Has anyone noticed that the play button on the video link looks either like he's got a large pacifier in his mouth?

Re:This could majorly backfire

[that this is not und]

Now just make the car a BMW and we can move this discussion to apple.slashdot.org

Re:This could majorly backfire

[whathappenedtomonday]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

And Netcraft confirms it!

Re:In my day...

[19thNervousBreakdown]

What do you call someone who still uses leetspeak after 2000?

Re:In my day...

[stonecypher]

Yeah, as opposed to something new and inventive like an XML tagline.

Re:+1 Funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks ass hole. Why would you post a link to a source you know would cause some X11 systems to freeze up. You didn't even mention it was a possibility in your comment until after the link was presented. Hopefully someone mods you into oblivion.

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

[salzbrot]

There were guys there who made necklaces out of human ears, so the bar must be set pretty damn low.

Yeah, I saw this documentary, too. But the thing that really disturbed me is, that later, our government turned some of those guys into cyborgs to fight terrorists in a secret program called UniSol. Thank god it was all brought to light.

Re:This could majorly backfire

[nomadic]

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.

I wouldn't trust anyone who took 8 years to finish law school to understand much of anything...

Re:In my day...

[xdroop]

What do you call someone who still uses leetspeak after 2000?

Older than you.

Hey -- measured in Internet Time, we're Senior Citizens now! When do we get our pensions?

Re:This could majorly backfire

[stonecypher]

The thing a judge would (or should) look at is that the image was changed intentionally for the specific purpose of having that image appear on McCain's website.

And? What, you think it's illegal because it's mean? Can you cite a law to the effect of "508.c4.232 section 6 statute 5b states that no man shall place lesbian jokes on another man's webpage" ? Maybe there's that people's doctrine entitled "Leaving shit on your web page so someone else can use it?"

I mean, I seem to be missing something here. Did someone change the law to "thou shalt not thumb thy nose at thy Politicians" while I was sleeping? Have you pointed out something illegal, or do you just think people can go to jail for being funny, or what?

Yes, a judge should be looking at that. It's freaking hilarious. That doesn't mean incarceration, though.

Hey Everyone, Pitch In!

[carrier lost]

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

Re:This could majorly backfire

[Sloppy]

How can someone with as low a UID as yours be this fearfully clueless about the legal system?

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!

Re:+1 Funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't work in Lynx.

Re:In my day...

[PalmKiller]

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.

Re:+1 Funny.

[krakass]

I really, really want to click that link. But something is telling me not to.

Re:+1 Funny.

[Wingnut64]

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

Re:Could have been worse...

[gfreeman]

Having a photo of an unsightly asshole on a politican's webpage?

Who'd have thunk it?

Re:ABC News, Typical Mainstream Media Sensationali

[Jonathan_S]

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 his server would get the version w/o it.