McCain MySpace site not hacked - 'enhanced'
Jay Baker
Issue date: 4/3/07 Section: Technology
"Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage... particularly marriage between passionate females."
If you happened to visit John McCain's MySpace profile around 9 a.m. last Tuesday, you may have seen that announcement and wondered why McCain would change his stance on such a controversial issue.
Furthermore, you may have wondered why he would make such an announcement on MySpace. Well, he didn't and he wouldn't.
It turns out, due to McCain's lack of "netiquette," Mike Davidson, co-founder and CEO of Newsvine (a social news Web site), played a prank on him.
"[T]his was a prank. I'm not politically inclined, I'm not anti-McCain, and I'd have a beer with the guy anytime," said Davidson on his Newsvine column.
So why would Davidson pull such a prank? Well it turns out that McCain, like many MySpace users borrowed someone else's profile layout (Davidson's to be exact). Unlike most other MySpace users though, McCain did not give credit to Davidson.
To further motivate Davidson, McCain did not host the images for his page on his own servers, he instead elected to pull the images directly from Davidson's servers, diverting his bandwidth each time a visitor loaded McCain's MySpace profile.
"Numerous people [had] written me over the last few weeks to tell me that McCain [had] been using my code, but up until I realized he was pulling images from my server, I didn't really care," Davidson said.
Because McCain was pulling images directly from Davidson's server, Davidson could replace the images with anything he liked (which is completely legal.) As long as he didn't change the filename, he had access to display any message he would like on McCain's profile.
Why gay marriage?
"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," Davidson said.
To add insult to injury, when the mistake was finally corrected by the McCain crew, the new image misspelled "group," and read like this, "Add to Gorup."
If you happened to visit John McCain's MySpace profile around 9 a.m. last Tuesday, you may have seen that announcement and wondered why McCain would change his stance on such a controversial issue.
Furthermore, you may have wondered why he would make such an announcement on MySpace. Well, he didn't and he wouldn't.
It turns out, due to McCain's lack of "netiquette," Mike Davidson, co-founder and CEO of Newsvine (a social news Web site), played a prank on him.
"[T]his was a prank. I'm not politically inclined, I'm not anti-McCain, and I'd have a beer with the guy anytime," said Davidson on his Newsvine column.
So why would Davidson pull such a prank? Well it turns out that McCain, like many MySpace users borrowed someone else's profile layout (Davidson's to be exact). Unlike most other MySpace users though, McCain did not give credit to Davidson.
To further motivate Davidson, McCain did not host the images for his page on his own servers, he instead elected to pull the images directly from Davidson's servers, diverting his bandwidth each time a visitor loaded McCain's MySpace profile.
"Numerous people [had] written me over the last few weeks to tell me that McCain [had] been using my code, but up until I realized he was pulling images from my server, I didn't really care," Davidson said.
Because McCain was pulling images directly from Davidson's server, Davidson could replace the images with anything he liked (which is completely legal.) As long as he didn't change the filename, he had access to display any message he would like on McCain's profile.
Why gay marriage?
"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," Davidson said.
To add insult to injury, when the mistake was finally corrected by the McCain crew, the new image misspelled "group," and read like this, "Add to Gorup."
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