Netscape vs. Digg battle escalates with hack

The rivalry between Digg and AOL's Netscape got dirty on Wednesday. Apparent Digg fans used a flaw in Netscape.com to send an expletive flying over the AOL social media site.

Other messages that popped up in text boxes on the Netscape Web site included pro-Digg messages and, in some cases, users were redirected to the Digg Web site.

Digg and AOL's Netscape have been at loggerheads since Netscape relaunched last month as a hybrid news site, with social bookmarking elements similar to Yahoo's Delicious, Slashdot and Digg. But unlike Digg, AOL is offering to pay top contributors to the site, where users recommend and rank their top choices for news stories.

"A couple Digg fans apparently took advantage of some inadequate filtering of stories submitted to Netscape to include some code that caused some pop-ups and redirects to Digg," AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein said. "It wasn't a hack, per se, but more of a filtering issue, which has since been fixed."

Blog community response:

"Attackers (who are obviously fans of Digg) have used the XSS vulnerability to inject their own javascript code snippets into pages on the website, including the homepage. As of now, it has only been used to display javascript alerts with "comical" messages and to redirect visitors to Digg.com!...Fortunately no one has tried to inject malicious code... yet."
--F-Secure

"Netscape was relaunched recently in an avatar that is a mirror replica of Digg. For the Digg loyalists amongst us, Jason Calacanis's offer to pay top digg submitters was the turning point in turning irritation to action...I used and propagated the use of Netscape Navigator/Communicator and Netscape 8 for ages. Funny that i couldn't care less about Netscape getting hacked!"
--http://gautham.maediratta.com
(Jason Calacanis runs Netscape.com. He co-founded blog publisher Weblogs Inc., which was bought by AOL last year.)

"The ridiculous feud between digg and Netscape escalates."
--SynaptiX

"Here's where the gloves come off. Kevin Rose, co-founder of Digg.com, said the Netscape situation was Bullshit on Friday in his weekly podcast. Jason retorted by saying, "This is a serious discussion and I'm saddened that Kevin has reduced it to personal attacks." Of course Kevin retaliated with this post on his blog, ending it with: 'ps--have a beer and relax, it's just diggnation'"
--:skyecade online