McCain Was No Doubt Surprised By His MySpace Page
Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain is 70 years old. When he was young, the only way to get "online" was to stand in one. So he can be excused for not knowing some of the basic rules of the internet world. But his web team should know better.
Unfortunately for McCain, the people who set up his MySpace page broke one of the cardinal rules of the internet--by committing a sin called "hotlinking." And the victim got revenge. Just see the picture above.
For those of you not up on the internet lingo. "Hotlinking" is when someone copies the location of a picture or video on someone else's site (for example: http://sokpuppet.blogspot.com/PICTURE.JPG) and then inserts that location into the html code of their own site. Lost? Well, its as simple as this: The image appears on that person's page, but it's being loaded from someone else's. Anyone visiting the hotlinker's page sees the image and has no idea its from another site.
People usually do this because they're too stupid and lazy to download the image, then reupload it onto their own web server.
But it isn't a victimless crime. Every time an image is loaded, it uses up bandwidth (space) on the host's server. Web site owners pay good money for a limited amount of bandwidth, and when someone hotlinks to an image on their page, then their bandwidth gets eaten up without anybody actually going to their page. You can see how this could be frustrating. It's even worse when that image is original and/or copyrighted.
In this case, McCain's MySpace page "hotlinked" to this image:
When the original owner of that "contact me box" found out he was being hotlinked, it was very simple to get revenge. He simply replaced that image, hosted on his server, with a different one, but kept the name the same.
The Result: McCain suddenly supported hot lesbian marriage.
McCain should consider himself lucky. Other "hotlinkers" have suffered far worse retribution. Think about all the images someone less mature could have replaced that image with. We could have seen McCain's smiling face right above some farm animal in a compromising position...
I use Photobucket or TinyPic to host my images. McCain should look into it.
No comments:
Post a Comment