iPod sites duke it out

What started as 19-year-old Yegor Simpson's Web-based plan to raise money for an iPod that he would then smash on film, has evolved into a dispute between two rival sites: the original SmashMyIpod.com and knock-off Buy Me An iPod.com.

According to the Cult of Mac blog, Buy Me An iPod.com "briefly hijacked SmashMyiPod.com's traffic--if you visited SmashMyiPod.com at about 4 p.m. PST (Wednesday), you would have been redirected to Buy Me an iPod.com."

"The hijacking was only possible because SmashMyiPod.com contained hidden code to Buy Me An iPod.com that was intended to overwhelm and crash the site," Cult of Mac blogger Leander said, quoting 19-year-old Travis LaMarr, Buy Me An iPod.com's Webmaster.

In the meantime, bloggers like Leander and LaMarr have questioned whether Simpson's gadget-smashing project was a scam because he ended up buying and smashing an older model iPod that cost much less than the amount he collected from donors.

On his site, Simpson wrote that he found the scam claims "hilarious" and went on to explain that he bought the older model iPod because the store didn't have any of the new ones in stock.