Goatse Teaches Microsoft a Lesson

Pranksters embedded the image in a blog entry announcing the shipping of a new "Feed Headlines" gadget in the Windows Vista Sidebar.

The original entry featured this photograph of IE 7 product manager Dean Hachamovich wearing a "Longhorn Loves RSS" tee-shirt.

The image was replaced by this Goatse image, edited (thankfully) with the Creative Commons logo covering the most graphic section.

Looks like the blogging software has a security hole (excuse the pun).

UPDATE: It turns out the prank was pulled by former Microsoft employee Niall Kennedy, who wasn't happy with Team RSS linking directly to his Flickr image.

The explanation from Microsoft:

Note: Apologies to readers who downloaded an earlier version of this post, which used a photograph taken by Niall Kennedy and posted on flickr.com. He did not appreciate the usage, and replaced it with a different image. I forgot to include an attribution, which I had fully intended to do, but for which I apologize to him.

UPDATE:

Niall Kennedy says he did it to teach Microsoft a lesson about attribution:

Microsoft used one of my images licensed under Creative Commons by-attribution non-commercial without attribution on a commercial site, violating my copyright.

They used a photo hosted on Flickr without linking back to the Flickr page, a violation of Flickr ToS.

I could have e-mailed, but Microsoft's servers already send classify e-mails from my domain as junk mail. I decided to educate in a special way.

FINAL UPDATE: Robert Scoble weighs in, questioning whether Kennedy handled the issue professionally. Kennedy explains it all on his own blog.