Hacked Off

From National Review On line.

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:

Today I anounce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay mariage…particularly marriage between two passionate females.

Welcome to the digital media age, Senator.

— Greg Pollowitz

Comments

[Timothy]

If I could muddy the issue, the paying for bandwidth story is a bit of a joke. So the McCain site not only used the template, it did so in a way that pulled some of the images from the original author's site EVERY TIME the Senator's site had a visitor. So all the original author did is change files on his own server, knowing full well what would happen, and voila, a non-hack hack. That's the clever part.