John McCain's MySpace Page "Pranked" 503
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".
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]!
Never... er... always check your references (Score:3, Interesting)
Ya.
Just wandering... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.)
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
Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately it's not like that. In the case of letterhead, the offender has the opportunity to not distribute whatever it is would require the letterhead; in the "instantly live" world of the Internet such a change immediately reaches the public with no requirement for intervention.
While I don't condone misuse of letterhead or Internet links, abusing the responsibility of respecting the way links are supposed to work (e.g., same-named links are supposed to always have the same general content) is just asking to have the freedom to choose your links taken away.
Passionate about image leachers (Score:3, Interesting)
That is an immaculate hack. However an even more immaculate hack is the fact we've just Slashdotted him!
Re:A common issue with MySpace - and you have to a (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:A common issue with MySpace - and you have to a (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:+1 Funny. (Score:5, Interesting)
Should be part of the standard display testing suite IMO
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.
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!!!".
Re:+1 Funny. (Score:4, Interesting)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Orion_Neb
Re:This could majorly backfire (Score:3, Interesting)
If someone sues you and it's dismissed with prejudice, they pay your legal bills. Generally, for something like this, you wouldn't actually need to go to court; you'd just send your attorney. It would cost you several hours on the phone explaining the situation, and you'd be out the money temporarily until the judge said "fuck you, McCain, this is retarded, pay his lawyer." As far as an assload of money, this is fairly standard legal fare; you can get something like this covered for about four hours at $125/hour. If $500 seems like a lot to you to resolve legal disputes, I'm not sure what to say. Also, what makes you think that someone gets arrested and goes to jail for getting sued? You get something in the mail.
So yeah, you're out $500 for a few months, and you have to waste two lunch hours on the phone. So what? Big deal. You could easily take a day or two off over this. Your boss isn't going to get angry if you say "I have a US senator suing me, I need a day off to mount a defense." Chances are you'll be the office hero at the end, and you'll make more than your $500 back in free lunches before McCain would be forced to give it to you anyway. By the way, it's illegal for an employer to affect your employment status due to your court appearances, so you can skip the "but he'd fire me" right now, because if he did, you'd be a millionaire.
One of the most common misconceptions of the legal system is that being found innocent/not-guilty is free. It's not.
It is when the lawsuit is an obvious turd, and when you look at it from more than the two month perspective. Look it up. Barratry isn't legal in this country. That's why every time someone sues a big corporation, the big corporation doesn't just tie it up in counter lawsuits until the person has died of old age.
Just because you can see a way a conspiracy might work to stomp the little guy doesn't mean that's how it actually will work. Some time, try thinking about what might stop the obvious train wreck of justice from happening.
We're a nation of a third of a billion people, and I'm willing to bet you can't count your way off of one hand naming legal mishaps regarding computer ignorant judges that led to jail time in the last ten years. No system is perfect, and even a perfect system has problems when it's administrated by human beings. That our mishap rate is so low should be something you're proud of, not afraid of.
Show me a law that comes within ten nautical miles of what you suggest, making this image replacement illegal, and I will mail you a dollar and an apology. Until then, please accept this notification that you, sir, are utterly clueless as regards our system of jurisprudence. Show me another shaky metaphor or "well they might look at it this way" and you will be summarily subjected to laughter and derision. If what you cite doesn't have some legal index code at the beginning, it's a built-in larf.
Metaphor, viewpoint, simile, juxtaposition, parallel and hypothetical are all worthless in law by definition. Either you cite a code, you cite a precedent, or you stop playing dress-up in the basement and let your daddy do the lawyering. And please don't waste my time telling me that An Opinion, which is a specific thing from a judge which has concrete legal value, is the same as you giving your opinion, which seems to be largely a work of constructive fiction built on top of a miserable lack of actual legal training or comprehension.
If what you say isn't coming from a law book, don't bother hitting submit.
Re:If he's a good politician.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:+1 Funny. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Your analogy is wrong. (Score:2, Interesting)
While there is a certain amount of vigilante justice to that (and I'd be sorely tempted to do the same thing in his shoes) Davidson is probably going to be in legal trouble for this. You see, tort law is all about intent. It will be difficult to prove malicious intent on McCaine's part in this (his web guy was probably too dumb to realize that wasn't hosting the image himself). On the other hand, it would be easy to prove malicious intent on Davidson's part. The intent is what would probably skew the case in McCaine's favor. If I were the judge, Davidson would win, but there's a reason they don't put me on the bench
And furthermore (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
This has already inspired similar pranks on McCain (Score:3, Interesting)