Blogger Teaches McCain Some Cyber Manners

STRAIGHT TALK? Mike Davidson's immaculate hack

You can't expect a 70-year-old guy to be all that Web savvy, but someone in John McCain's retinue probably should have known better than to lift elements of the presidential candidate's MySpace page directly from a territorial blogger.

Mike Davidson, founder of online news emporium Newsvine, recently realized that whoever created McCain's page not only borrowed Davidson's proprietary template but actually pulled images directly from his page, meaning every view of McCain's MySpace home cost Davidson bandwidth.

Davidson retaliated by replacing the borrowed image with a graphic announcing that the Arizona senator had "come out in full support of gay marriage ... particularly marriage between passionate females." The genius of the perfectly legal maneuver was that Davidson only had to go into his own files (which McCain's camp was pilfering with every page load) to twist the Senator's message—the "immaculate hack," Davidson called it.

As word of the prank got around, McCain staffers quickly responded, albeit with a new graphic containing a glaring spelling error.

Screen capture: Newsvine.com