Apparently, Senator John McCain has a MySpace page. Rather than using the boring default design, whoever built the page for McCain used a customized MySpace template that he got from Mike Davidson.
Only problem is, he forgot to credit Mike, which is all Mike asks for if you want to use his template.
Well, that wasn’t the only problem. The web designer also left in the original image URLs, so that the template images were being served from Mike’s server rather than McCain’s server. Essentially, although probably unintentionally, the McCain campaign was stealing bandwith from Mike.
Mike didn’t like that, so he decided to teach them a playful lesson. You see, when you pull your page content from someone else’s server, you give them control over your page content… Visitors to Senator McCain’s page got a little surprise this morning:
This hack was in no way illegal, of course, because Mike is free to change the content of his own server any time he wants.
You can read Mike Davidson’s complete explanation of what he did.
(Hat tip: Sour)
That’s hilarious! Love it! I just checked out the myspace page and it seems that the links are still there below his picture, but there is no image. So if you mouseover in the blank space under the picture, you can see the links exist. Despite the prank, looks like there’s still no credit given to Davidson.
Btw, my URL has changed. I’m now at http://apublicdefender.com
The links on a MySpace contact box are generated by MySpace, so they’re always going to be there somewhere. The background, however, is an enhancement that MySpace users can add through a bit of CSS dropped into one of the profile fields.
When I checked earlier, the McCain page had a design credit for “Mike Industries” with a link to the page. I was mildly impressed that they did the right thing.
Now it’s gone.
Their earlier use of the template without proper credit could have been a simple mistake. This time, it’s intentional. That’s almost a real scandal.
So they’re just slow in updating that part of the background page. That’s not very good.
I wish I’d seen it live!