28 March 2007

Senator McCain's MySpace page--hacked!

I thought this story was hilarious. This past Tuesday visitors to presidential candidate, Senator John McCain's MySpace page discovered that the Republican Senator had changed his position on gay marriage:
"I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage ... particularly marriage between passionate females."
Okay, okay, so it was a prank. But what I thought was funny was not so much the fake message per se, but the reason for it at all.

Mike Davidson, cofounder of Newsvine, claimed responsibility for the prank. Davidson says he hacked McCain's MySpace page because they were using a template he designed without giving Davidson credit. But that's not all. To rub even more salt into the wound, Davidson said that his images were used on the page and that McCain's office was using his server to serve McCain's MySpace page--essentially stealing Davidson's bandwidth whenever someone visited McCain's MySpace page.

Anywhoo, you can read the entire article in the above link, but because McCain's office was using Davidson's template as well as images on Davidson's server, Davidson was able to replace one of the images with the statement regarding gay marriage.

"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."--Mike Davidson (quote from PC World).

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