Honest Ape

John McCain is many things. Panderer, faux maverick and ass-kisser for example. One thing he is not, though, is in favor of gay marriage. Imagine the surprise of McCain supporters when they logged into Myspace and saw this picture.

To explain how this happened, you need to know what “hotlinking” images is. For the non-geeks out there, “hotlinking” is when you display an image on your site that is stored on someone else’s server. For example, if someone took the image above and used my image’s link to display it on their site, they’d, in essence, be stealing my bandwidth to show my image on their site. It’s usually considered poor net behavior to do this, and “hotlinking” has a rather negative connotation.

So, when John McCain’s web designer took someone else’s myspace template and used it without giving credit to the designer, he also hotlinked the images in the template demo. Meaning, instead of storing the images on their server, they’re using his server. When the designer, Mike Davidson, found out about this, he decided to swap the file on his server with another file of the same name, replacing the original image with the announcement above.

That, my friends, is how you teach someone a lesson. J. Walter Weatherman would be proud.

Along these same lines, check out this NSFW (and kinda disturbing) picture. When Niall Kennedy found Microsoft hotlinking one of his images, he swapped the hotlinked image on his server to another, more disturbing image. The logo, by the way is Creative Commons, which you can learn more about here.