Hacker To John McCain: Thou Shalt Not Steal (MySpace)
It looks like a US presidential hopeful has learned an awful lesson regarding the consequences of using another’s work and bandwidth without proper credit.
An employee of McCain’s office was using a template developed by Mike Davidson for their political MySpace page. Apparently they not only left off crediting Mike for the design, but decided to use his bandwidth too (by linking to his images) so Mike decided to have a little fun with the Senator involving some “humorous issues.”
(NewsVine) If you visit John McCain’s MySpace page (as of 9am PST Tuesday morning), you will notice an interesting announcement from him. He’s apparently reversed his position on gay marriage as well as revealed a bias towards attractive lesbians.
Why would a presidential candidate make such an important announcement on his MySpace page?
The answer? He wouldn’t.
But I would. […]
Luckily, I had already set up a special .htaccess rule on my server which served my real “contact me” image if the image was referenced from my own MySpace page, and served up a sample image if it was served from anywhere else. […]
So, the only thing necessary to effectively commandeer McCain’s page with my own messaging was to simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server. No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken. The immaculate hack.
Davidson replace the normal MySpace contact image board with this brief message:
Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate females.
John McCain’s office has corrected this error (as you can see on their MySpace page) although you can get screen shots of the “before and after” from TechCrunch regarding this humorous affair.
Morale of the story: Give credit where credit is due, and host your images too, and if you don’t then someone may make a fool out of you.
(Hat Tip: Hot Air)
While I find it hilarious that someone in Davidson’s position would do this, and like the article I find your title a bit misleading. Davidson is not a hacker, and only replaced an image on his own server.
Either way, kudos to Mr. Davidson.