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I think they’re do some level of sanity checking on those headlines – trying to add a “customized” headline to your cart throws an error.

Hilarious. Great find!

Most of the fun ones will of course involve CNN personalities doing inappropriate things (Lou Dobbs comes to mind)—followed nicely by the ‘I saw it on CNN ’ tag.

@Jerry: I got it to work no problem.

I really wanted to buy one that said “CNN is a cancer of society”. But alas.

At least 14 people agree with Jerry, altered title shirts cannot be purchased.

I don’t know how “GeelWonder” got it to work unless he’s just trolling.

Could screwing with their script be grounds for, well, anything?

Looks like there’s a checksum hash included in the URL that has to match the headline + secret stuff…

Too bad it prevents you from buying a T-shirt like that…

I want one that says “That’s what she iReported.”

I want this one...

why customize when you have so many to choose from: http://wtfcnn.blogspot.com/

This should be combined with http://wtfcnn.blogspot.com.

I tried creating an MD5 hash of the altered title… the timestamp + the altered title and the altered title + the timestamp… but couldn’t get it to work.

So, who knows what the hash it, but I’m guessing that if you could figure that out you could get the shirt to work.

Couldn’t resist:

“Those people…”

These guys are smart. Instead of making it impossible to create your own T-Shirts, they allow you to change the headlines with a simple hack, so that you show it to your friends and they get a lot of publicity. But they check it with a hash in case you try to add it to your cart, avoiding actually selling shirts that would damage their image.

The CNN Shirt site is not working right now (5:55am GMT ). There is the normal frame but in the content section it says: “An error occured. Please try again later.” The “custom t-shirt” link still work though. CNN is reworking maybe?

I tried to print this one, but it would not let me.

I like this one on the T-shirt: We are liars— CNN

CNN ’s done a masterful job of creating viral press for this… but at the end of the day, who really wants a t-shirt w/ a news headline on it?

Maybe if it were a Fark headline…

In the end the fatal flaw in CNN ’s t-shirt project is that they are just not that funny : ) i doubt they are going to actually print the ones that show up on the WTFCNN blog : ) I wrote about this yesterday as well, not sure If I broke it or not: Tcritic – the daily t-shirt blog

@Benjy yeah, this would work much better for the Onion :-)

Wow, I guess we know where CNN learned its tricks.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/985-custom-cnn-t-shirts-rails-urls-are-hackable-too-weeeee-time-to-switch-to-django!

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Yeap! I saw it and actually liked it… but its a shame programmers still do the same terrific mistakes! We are human beens… we fail… but there are some failures that makes you wonder if this career is for everyone :D

Great blog! fucking lovin it!

Regards from Costa Rica!

Anyone consider the possibility that this ‘hack’ was planned to build buzz? Notice that it was ‘fixed’ exactly 24 hours later? Heh.