Newsvine CEO Admits To Altering Sen. McCain's MySpace PageNewsvine CEO Admits To Altering Sen. McCain's MySpace Page

Visitors to Sen. John McCain's MySpace page might have been surprised at the presidential candidate's sudden turnaround in some of his views Tuesday.

The senator was the victim of a prank that had his Web page stating that he had changed his mind and come out in favor of gay marriage, as well as stating a bias toward attractive lesbians.

Mike Davidson, CEO of the online news site Newsvine, is taking responsibility -- or more like full credit -- for tampering with McCain's site. And he said it's a bit of cyber payback.

Davidson said he designed the MySpace template that was used for McCain's MySpace page and that McCain's camp didn't credit him for the template as requested. He also charged that they're using his images and are pulling images directly from his server so that every time a McCain MySpace page is loaded on someone's machine, his bandwidth is being used.

"About 20 minutes ago, I single-handedly changed John McCain's opinion on gay marriage, at least as far as his MySpace page goes," Davidson wrote in a Tuesday blog post titled, "Hacking a More Tasteful John McCain."

A message under McCain's picture was changed to read: "Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriageparticularly marriage between passionate females."

The fraudulent information reportedly was up on McCain's site for about an hour.

"I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous, so I figured it was time to play a little prank on Johnny Mac," Davidson wrote in another blog entry. "So, the only thing necessary to effectively commandeer McCain's page with my own messaging was to simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server. No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken. The immaculate hack."

Davidson, who said he's not political and would sit down and have a beer with McCain, also said he thought subjects like abortion and the war in Iraq were too "heavy" to joke about, so he picked on McCain's stance against gay marriage.

Earlier this month, the official Web site for Bill O'Reilly was taken down by a repeated denial-of-service attack. The site for the controversial conservative pundit was hit over the course of two days.