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 announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate females.
The story is also up at Newsvine here. This reminds me of a similar situation when Microsoft used an image hosted on Flickr on one of its blogs without the permission of the owner, Niall Kennedy. Niall replaced the picture with a pornographic image, which was then published on the blog. His idea was to send a message to Microsoft on the importance of respecting licensing of IP, although some people thought it was childish.
McCain’s MySpace page is significantly higher profile than the Microsoft blog, and Davidson isn’t posting pornography to the site. He’s making a political statement while also sending a message about respecting the property rights of others. I expect the changes to be reversed quickly, unless the wrong person is sick or out to lunch today. Either way, we’ve captured it above.
The template doesn’t even look that good, rather dull in my opinion. He doesn’t seem to have as many friends as some people, he still has more than me though so I cant really say anything, lol.
Wow, that is actually pretty hilarious. I need to find time to meet Mike Davidson. We know how to pull the perfect pranks here in Seattle.
Oh yeah, and I wonder how long he spends in his myspace area adding friends, surely he would have more useful things to do. I suppose it draws up support though.
It was an extremely unprofessional thing for someone in Mike Davidson’s position (CEO of NewsVine) to do.
The staffer may have copied the template from another MySpace profile not knowing that it was something that is “protected”.
Just in case you’re wondering, no I’m not republican… but I feel this was way out of line.
I’m not going to lie. I’ve done something very similar to this when I’ve caught people using images without crediting me in the past….
trevo: Yep, no disagreement there. Occurring 20 months before the election, I’d file this under “harmless prank” though. We can’t all wear the suit and tie 24/7. If anything, it’ll bring Senator McCain some more traffic to his MySpace page.
Here’s my account of the Microsoft incident as well.
HAHAHAHAHAA! I’ve found most of the campaigns are pretty clueless on social networking but you think they would have some knowledge about basic web practices.
this is totally within the realm of fair game. if they use your stuff and don’t credit you — and beyond that(!) are pulling from your server and draining your bandwidth, you have every right to do whatever you want with your images.
and btw, 70 years old is way too old to be on MySpace. anyone over 24 is old enough to realize that MySpace sucks.
There was an incident on one of my blogsites Tech Review Zone, where one of my writers had hotlinked an image like this and the owner of the image changed it to something else (cant remember what it was though) but it took me hours to sort out with apologising onto all the blogs and forums that the owner of the image had posted on about the incident. A word to all bloggers, dont hotlink, lol
Don’t say the MySpace page was hacked. Because it wasn’t. Davidson just changed an image on his OWN server. I get that it makes for a better headline, but next thing you know, Davidson will be arrested on trumped up charges of hacking and unauthorized access of computers. That isn’t what happened here.
Mike D: Yup this probably won’t hurt McCain’s campaign.
But what I find ironic with all these comments who accuse McCain’s campaign of “stealing” are these are the EXACT people who think stealing music is okay and everything Web2.0 should be free.
Holy Purple Cow!
trevo: Agreed. Think of it this way. This sort of theft is not worthy of prosecution, but it’s worthy of a little fun, and so that’s what we’re having. I do not consider this harmful theft… just negligence.
Damn, I seriously L-O-L’d at that one
It just got pulled though. I checked his myspace page and there it was, 5 minutes later looked again and it was gone
It’s still there!
trevo:
Just in case you’re wondering, no I’m not republican…
That’s ok, neither is McCain, really. ::rimshot::
LOL. Nice find. Just goes to show you that one should give proper credit where credit is due. Maybe in the interim, John will pick up some new supporters.
It’s not there anymore, you just need to clear your cache.
I agree, calling it a ‘hack’ is very misleading.
Good move by Mike Davidson. The ‘web designer’ for McCain should have known better.
I did a similar thing with one of my images that I found was being widely hotlinked - using htaccess I had the hotlinked files replaced with a picture of an old lady flipping the bird along with a few words about bandwidth theft. Had some hilarious reactions to that - but the hotlinkers only have themselves to blame.
it’s gone now, literally in the last 5 minutes.
i agree, its not a hack. its a feature.
McCain suffered an Amanda Marcotte moment, described as a bad Internet experience related to blogging.
haha..
wow, the 14 yr old wont know who to vote for now! :p
MySpace is to the internet what Reality TV is to television. Totally worthless and way too popular.
It’s Newsvine, not NewsVine.
Almost as bad as calling Firefox FireFox.
Give credit where it is due!!!!
Now if someone could actually get him to reverse his position …
While a fun prank, and as a US voter I’m more than happy for someone to get one over on the Republicans, I actually think this crosses an ethical (and possibly legal?) line. Effectively it’s hacking to knowingly misrepresent a political figure in a way that most Myspace users might not recognise was a joke.
Recent events have suggested that there’s an immature hacker ethos still stinking up the web; this is another, more benign, version of the same. The dignified, professional thing to do would have been to send an email.
Ben, RTFA. Nobody hacked anything. McCain’s website used a template without attribution and was also hotlinking an image. The owner of the template merely changed the image. Perfectly legal.
Ben you need perspective alignment. Effectively you are saying that a thief has more rights over use of property than the rightful owner of said property. That is what this comes down to. The rightful owner of that image manipulated that image on their own server, not on someone else’s server - there is nothing wrong with that whatsoever. The rightful owner of the property has absolutely no control over someone hotlinking that image or where that thief uses that image. The problem is that the article is indicating McCain’s site was hacked, which it clearly was not.
trevo: “The staffer may have copied the template from another MySpace profile not knowing that it was something that is “protected”.”
So it’s okay to pull someone else’s template?
I don’t think so.
I find the riff on lesbian marriage and faux support of bisexual women rather offensive. Surely a sophisticated CEO could have come up with a better fake stance. F for effort.
THIS IS AWESOME! Takes a big set to do that, I can appreciate that sort of humor.
Marilyn: I actually took the weekend to decide which “issue” to jab at McCain with. The war would have been too heavy due to his former P.O.W. status. Abortion would have also been too heavy because it deals with death. The only other major issue I could find where McCain has failed to make his true opinion clear was gay marriage so I chose that. The line about “passionate females” was designed to skirt the line between “could actually be true” and “is too bizarre to be true”. I didn’t want people to immediately think it was a hack, but at the same time, needed to make it sufficiently funny for a guy like that to say. It’s really nothing against women, believe me. It’s more about the taboo among straight men that female homosexuality is “hot” and male is “not”. Anyway, like I said… not meant to offend. Apologies if it did.
Not sure if Techcrunch is the appropriate platform for these sort of hacks and political statemenets. Wasnt it supposed to be about profiling startups…
That is brutal! Awfully dirty though. Imagine if this had been done to Obama by one of his critics. There’d be an awful lot of outrage coming from the left.
I agree it’s a somewhat clever prank but also a pretty unprofessional thing to do. Mike should know better.
Of course, this is the same Mike Davidson who at the Webvisions conference last year used a video of Marc Canter’s little kids as an example of how not to market a startup, in front of a crowd of over 100 web professionals. Again, very unprofessional and lacking in judgment.
But we cannot all be Type A asholes smirking in our chairs at how clever we think we are. Whatever.
Hilarious!
http://www.thisblogisabomb.com
I wonder what McCain’s real position on gay marriage is. I know what his required position is as a republican candidate, but I wonder if he has ever stayed up at night thinking about the people that are hurt by this.
He seems to change his position on this, based on subtleties:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOL......marriage/
http://www.azcentral.com/arizo.....ves26.html
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/.....-marriage/
Homophobic closet gay quite likely.
Cameron - Mike isn’t an asshole.
I believe that the prank was both funny and lacking in integrity. Yes - it is possible to hold contradictory opinions in your head.
I am guessing that the McCain campaign made a simple mistake. I don’t think the poor intern who did this was consciously choosing to steal bandwidth.
Therefore, if it were me, I would have sent an email, told them that if they don’t change the link in x hours (or minutes if you want to play hardball) that I’d change the image to be something they would NOT want up there.
Then, if it wasn’t changed in my specified time frame I’d change the image.
To ME - that’s acting with integrity. It all comes down to intentions and civility. I believe in civility when dealing with well-intentioned people, even when they make a mistake.
I believe what MiKe D. did was petty and lacking in integrity. And sure, it was pretty funny too.
“Cameron - Mike isn’t an asshole.”
I guess my opinion of Mike D. is different than yours then. My experience watching him trash people at conferences informs me otherwise. This McCain thing just reinforces it.
Of course, there are people out there who think I am an asshole, so this whole online reputation thing goes both ways.
Petty and lacking in integrity would also be effectively taking credit for someone else’s design work, or stealing their bandwith to due it.
Mike D. rules
“Cameron - Mike isn’t an asshole.”
Thanks Mike. The problem is, I think Cameron might be. He apparently worships Marc Canter and didn’t like the fact that I pulled up Marc’s own promotional People Aggregator video as an example of a poorly executed promo. I don’t know Marc Canter, I’ve never met him, and I’m sure he’s a smart guy, but the video was just not good at all. Cameron approached me after the session was over, told me I was out of line, and pretty much everyone at my table was wondering why he was even talking. He continued to repeat his mantra until his gas ran out and that was it. It’s the only time anyone has ever said something negative to me after I’ve gotten off stage, and people who know Cameron tell me he does that a lot, so I took it with a grain of salt.
“Petty and lacking in integrity would also be effectively taking credit for someone else’s design work, or stealing their bandwith to due it.”
Or he could have contacted the campaign nicely and asked them to give him credit. Regardless of your politics, there is a level of civility and integrity that is missing here. If they ignored his requests, then it’s a different issue altogether.
But at some point the asshole in all of us overpowers everything else and we can’t help ourselves.
Oh, and if it had been the GW Bush Myspace page I would have been behind the prank completely, since he truly deserves it.
Agree with Mike that this is not a hack. Hacking implies that somebody gained access to McCain’s MySpace account, which is not the case. I usually don’t like to comment on the journalistic integrity of headlines, but in this case the use of “hacked” seems a bit sensational.
I’m not surprised that somebody working for a campaign didn’t quite “get” the fact the images were to be hosted on his or her own server. I doubt this was intentional (and almost certainly wasn’t something McCain controlled), so regardless of what you think of McCain and his political views, doing something like this without apparently sending a note requesting that the situation be rectified and giving a reasonable amount of time to do so (a few days), just makes the CEO of NewsVine look like an unreasonable, opportunistic and less-than-ethical individual. It’s unfortunate that some people lack the decency to give others a break and will resort to acts like these without first making an attempt to handle the situation in a professional manner. At the very least, the images could have been blocked using .htaccess or taken down altogether without being used to make a political statement.
We all have our political views, but any executive should be aware that politically-related actions he or she takes will reflect on his or her company, even if those actions are taken as an individual. Should CEOs not feel free to speak out? Of course not. But just remember that whatever is said can impact the company regardless of its justification or validity. This particular situation reflects especially poorly on NewsVine in my opinion because the service (ironically) has a Code of Honor (http://www.newsvine.com/_cms/info/codeofhonor) that states:
1. Above all else, respect others. If you see disrespectful behavior, report it, rather than further inflaming the situation.
2. Before you write, seed, or comment, ask yourself if your contribution increases the strength and virtue of the community.
ah, well, I didn’t realize there was pre-existing tension between the two of you. You guys should go out for beers or something.
When you steal someone else’s bandwidth by linking to an image on their site, they are absolutely in control of what appears.
The fact that McCain is a powerful politician does not make him immune from this.
On the other hand, I doubt McCain coded his site, or had any idea that this could be done, much less that it had been done.
Lesson learned, I bet.
“It’s the only time anyone has ever said something negative to me after I’ve gotten off stage…”
You WERE out of line and I called you out on it, but at least I had the civility to do it off-stage and not in front of everyone.
Like some people I can be an asshole at times. I admit it. But I think you are out of line here as well. I don’t like McCain much but I think his campaign deserves some civility and contacting them privately about their mistake was the approach you should have taken.
Cameron Barrett says: “Oh, and if it had been the GW Bush Myspace page I would have been behind the prank completely, since he truly deserves it.”
Wow. You had the whole faux-ethical/emotional/high-ground thing going on and then you ruin it with a statement about how this is OK if it’s done to a politician YOU don’t agree with, but NOT ok in other circumstances?
For the record: I’m not a politically inclined person, I’m not anti-McCain, and no one was hurt here. If the intent here was to do damage, it is possible to encode porn as an animated gif, you know.
I wonder how many other people who lifted the graphics using the original owner’s bandwidth were surprised to find they endorsed passionate gay marriage amongst females.
This was not a hack. It goes on all the time when bandwidth is stolen and it’s much more effective than sending off a curt, snippy email cease and desist.