Anyone understand the MySpace “salute”?

Following our recent conversation on finding the time to blog, Ted Howard pointed me to this fascinating page from MySpace.com:

In order to verify your identity, please send us a “salute”. This means we will need an image of yourself holding a handwritten sign with the word “MySpace.com” and your Friend ID (your Friend ID number appears immediately after “friendID=” in the web address/URL when viewing your profile). We can then remove the profile that uses your identity without your permission.

Please be sure to include the web address/URL to the profile in question when you send your salute.

If you do not have a profile on MySpace please write in the email address that you are emailing us from instead of your Friend ID.

If the profile is an extremely obvious attempt to be cruel/false, you may not need to send a salute. Sending a salute will definately help expediate things, though! If you are a teacher/faculty member at a school, please click on this link.

That's so bizarre.  I'm missing something here.  I asked Ted if he had any idea how this works:

I think the MySpace “salute” is just a photo of yourself holding a piece of paper that has your login name on it. Apparently, they consider this to be physical proof of identity – they have physical proof that a given face is linked to a given login name. Now, I don’t understand how this helps anything, which is why I find it interesting.

What stops me from saying that your MySpace account that claims you are “Kim Cameron” is a fake and then sending a picture of me holding a piece of paper with my account name that claims I am “Kim Cameron”.

Crap! I’m on your technical advisory team I guess. Are the benefits good?

Welcome to the team, Ted.  Someone will get back to you on the benefits question.

The truth is that Ted is one of those very lucky guys who gets to program video games.  I sure would like to see him blogging about what that's like.