SEATTLE – John McCain in favor of gay marriage? That’s the message visitors to the Republican presidential contender’s page on MySpace got for about an hour in an “immaculate hack” by an Internet entrepreneur.
Before McCain’s campaign staff got the matter resolved Tuesday, visitors to his page on the social networking site received a graphic indicating McCain, R-Ariz., a social conservative who strongly opposes gay marriage, had changed his mind and was now in favor, “particularly marriage between passionate females.”
The graphic came not from McCain’s page, but from the MySpace page of Mike Davidson, 32, chief executive of Newsvine.com, a community-generated news media site in Seattle, who said he was responding to a breach of Internet etiquette and did nothing illegal.
“It’s been amazing how many people have picked this up,” Davidson told a Seattle newspaper Wednesday. “The reaction’s been pretty positive.”
Aides to McCain would not say how he responded to the kerfuffle, which spread rapidly through cyberspace after Davidson posted his own account on Newsvine, a company he founded a year ago.
Davidson said it began after he offered free on his blog, mikeindustries.com, some computer code he developed to improve the layout format on MySpace. He asked to be credited for the design and provided sample graphics to show what kinds of images could be incorporated but asked that users supply their own images.
McCain’s campaign was among 100,000 MySpace users that Davidson estimates have used his code, but he said the campaign did not credit him and – rather than developing its own list of links and contacts – linked McCain’s page to the list on Davidson’s MySpace page.
As a result, each visitor to McCain’s page pulled in the list from Davidson’s computer, reducing his transmission capacity, known as bandwidth, and potentially slowing his access to the Web.
Davidson said that when he determined what had happened, he created the phony McCain-for-gay-marriage graphic and primed it to go to anyone trying to grab his personal MySpace contact list – and that’s just what happened an undetermined number of times in the hour or so it took McCain’s staff to fix the problem.
In his blog, he wrote, it was “the immaculate hack.”
He said he didn’t do anything with the material on McCain’s page and broke no laws, adding, “it seems like everybody’s taking it with pretty good humor.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
