For an hour on Tuesday, an image on Republican presidential contender John McCain’s MySpace page proclaimed that he had dropped his strong opposition to gay marriage and was now in favor of it, “particularly marriage between passionate females”.

Senator McCain’s MySpace page made use of code written by Newsvine creator Mike Davidson. The Myspace code was offered free on the condition that users credit the author. McCain’s page did not credit Davidson, and moreover, hotlinked to several of Davidson’s images which he provided as samples to be replaced with a user’s own images.

Upon discovering who was responsible for the theft of bandwidth, Davidson carried out “the immaculate hack”. He replaced the image McCain was hotlinking to with a a fake McCain-for-gay-marriage graphic. News of the graphic spread rapidly through cyberspace.

Unfortunately, McCain’s staff have resolved the matter. For additional info on the hack, visit Davidson’s article at Newsvine.

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