Yesterday John McCain’s MySpace page was hacked and an image was replaced with a text box that read “Dear Supporters, Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between passionate females.” Sam Levenback has a screen capture.
It didn’t take too long for people to figure out exactly what had happened. Tech Crunch:
Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by NewsVine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.
McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.
Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement [quoted above]
The McCain campaign clearly dropped the ball twice and thus opened themselves up to a response. First, they didn’t credit Davidson for creating the template; second, they used images on Davidson’s server. McCain was effectively stealing bandwidth from Davidson and Davidson decided to respond.
This MySpace mistake can now be added to the growing list of the McCain campaign’s internet snafus. In the email department we have the blogger-hype message that quotes and cites two sources sixteen separate times and the email list-wide poll to determine the McCain campaign priorities. McCain’s mini-announcement on Letterman included an even smaller video inside a massive donations page, which was both graphically unpalatable and blatant in its prioritization of money over communication. Lastly McCain’s own website is hideously designed in Imperial stormtrooper chic and his personal social networking platform is “total disaster.”
This campaign needs to get its internet shop in shape. It’s embarrassing.
Technorati Tags: John McCain, MySpace
2 Responses to “McCain’s MySpace Page Immaculately Hacked”
Something to say?
I think I read on Crooks and Liars the site wasn’t hacked. McCain was linking to an image hosted by the person that designed the MySpace template without giving them credit. So, they replaced the image on their own server which then displayed on McCain’s page. Since McCain was linking to someone else’s server and not hosting the image himself he had no rights to the image or what was displayed there. Chalk it up to good old fashioned Republican incompetence.
Left by Fred
March 28, 2007 at 3:08pm