Revenge Of A Geek v. 3.14159
Via Crooks & Liars a report on some righteous embarrassment for John McCain’s Myspace page.
Techcrunch makes a mistake in calling what happened a hack.
What Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson did was change a graphic on his own site: he didn’t access the McCain site at any time. It was the fault of the McCain’s people that they used Mike Davidson’s template and then stole his bandwidth by not bothering to create their own graphics. Mike Davidson doesn’t mind people using the template that he created, but he wants to be identified as the creator and to have people host the graphics on their own server.
The only reason I will use a graphic from someone else’s site without hosting it myself, is if they make it a condition of use, like my weather info in the sidebar. Whenever possible I identify the source of things and provide links, because it’s polite and a legal requirement. If you look at the source code for my page you will find the name of the guy who wrote the code for the Shrubbery and Osama trackers, and a link. I made modifications, but the original logic was his idea, his creation. People like to get credit for their work.
McCain’s site wasn’t hacked, it was shown to be a bandwidth thief.
3 comments
I agree that it wasn’t a hack in the sense you or I might use the term, but Mike calls it a hack on his own site; indeed, he says it’s “[t]he immaculate hack.” (Link via skippy; scroll down to “straight hack express”.)
Whatever you call it, it was exquisite!
I would accept all that is implied as an “immaculate” hack. I would also wonder if the McCain campaign was charged for the “creation” of the site. Having some kid use your stuff is one thing, but to have someone get paid for ripping you off is piracy, not fair use.
It, was nice, Jim, very righteous. Oh, I answered your e-mail, but I send e-mail from a different account.