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Crack the Pepsi iTunes Promo Code
An anonymous reader writes "Someone posted a technique to find a winner in the iTunes Pepsi promo giveaway." Next step: a Pepsi/iTMS winning number generator!
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Oops, there went that debt free memo! ;)
Welcome back to the world of debt.
No, really--this would never have occurred to me.
I mean, really--the tipping of the bottle I could probably get to, but then to look through the clear plastic--inspired, my friend, inspired. And differentiating between 'again' and a random string of numbers? This guy has to be into hardcore pattern recognition. NSA, are you seeing this?
Yeah.
There exist elegant solutions to truly vexing problems that, once discovered, are striking in their simplicity. There also exist people who try to pass off the painfully obvious as an elegant solution to a truly vexing problem.
A free iTunes code to the person who can guess which category this falls into...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
This is a crack? I mean, if you count the cap'n crunch as a crack, sure. But I don't consider tilting a bottle of soda a crack. It seems more like social engineering.
Darn!
Now I'll have to play fairly and by the rules!
That just ain't fair!
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
and criminals.
They are nice enough to give away songs. Unlike most things talked on slashdot, this is actually stealing.
As long as the "crack" can be placed in a secret decoder ring I'll be happy.
The American Dental Association, for the sudden increase in work coming their way. A Mr Orin Scrivello, D.D.S. will be presented with the award - a special enamel yellow I-Pod - at the next 'Fillings Across America' convention.
And neither did the slashdotting.
Anyone have a mirror of the article?
And is someone going end up in the same boat as Greg Dean?
Luckily, this sort of thing happens with a number of contests. Pepsi will just fix it in future bottles (if any) and go on; not going to affect mp3s-as-commerce at all, really.
Cool - a guaranteed way to pick a winner!
Now i'm off to buy many $1.20 bottles of sugar water so I get get a free $0.99 song!!!! I can't lose!
oh wait............
Never underestimate the stupidity of people in large numbers.
If this is about the "crack" I read yesterday (article is completely /.ed to hell) of tipping the bottle to see what's under the cap, all I can say is hoorah! for creative thinking.
When you set up something this stupid, you deserve to be caught with your pants down.
...Just one iTune, and Pepsi wouldn't give it to me!
The music's only awful if you make it that way. I've downloaded/bought some decent stuff off iTunes so far. Much better deal than going into some mega-cd store...
Wouldnt hardcore geeks drink so much caffine (ie pepsi) that they wouldnt need the generator?
People will be selling generated pepsi codes on ebay. This will probably make iTunes need to cancel the service. If that happens, then I'm mad at the hacker. Either way I am, because it will simply help pirating IMO.
http://www.beyourowneviloverlord.tk
http://www.frozenchickenthrowing.tk
http://www.killercamel.tk
That's pretty amusing but did the editors actually read this story before posting it? "Next step: a Pepsi/iTMS winning number generator!" WTF? Stuff that matters indeed.
Of course before I criticize them too much don't think I'm not going to try this the next time I go to the store. I don't drink soda (evil substance) but I can resell it to friends that don't use iTMS for the purchase price and pocket the songs ;)
1) Buy evil sugar water that's bad for you with winning code.
2) Resell said sugar water to friends who don't use iTMS.
3) Download songs legally while simultaneously screwing Pepsi and RIAA.
4) ???
5) Profit!
(I'm not trolling for karma. Feel free to mod this funny to avoid giving me any overrated if you disagree).
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The link is to a random character generator written in Java. Mods, do you think random characters will make an iTunes code?
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Hey guys, someone submitted when we were already at the top of our load. So while the host works things out, here are the images used in the story.
1) Submit the results from a iTunes number generator batch 2) Pepsi cancels the contest 3) ??? 4) Profit? I for one welcome our new...aww, forget it... I don't even own an iPod...or a Mac. grumble.
G. M. Manath
Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both 'Yes' and 'No.'
Since it's already slashdotted i'll paraphrase.
Tip the damn bottle.
If it constains the word "song" you won.
Buy that bottle.
The end.
No, people who lack the capacity to detect sarcasm ad absurdium is a truly vexing problem. What part of that post made you think the guy was actually singing the praises of an individual he considers an intellectual giant?
ORiON PROUDLY PRESENTS ...: Team ORiON ....: Team ORiON ...: Team ORiON ...: 02.18.04 .......: Keygen ......: XX/01
/sarcasm
iTunes Sweepstakes (c) Apple
SUPPLIER
CRACKER
PACKAGER
RELEASED
TYPE
DISKS
Has anyone got itunes to run under wine?
http://www.windmeadow.com/
No, I don't have algorithm to generate winning numbers. (I would have to assume that they are randomly generated anyways) But, after my 5th winning pepsi top in a row, I'm pretty confident in my ability to pick a winner by examining the bottle. Assuming that the intial bottles really are only 1 in 3 winners and are evenly distributed (which isn't a given) then 5 in a row is good, but not conclusive.
Anyways, on the bottles I've seen, you can actually see under the cap you down the kneck of the bottle. If the lighting is sufficient, you'll be able to make out at least a couple of letters. If you see a number then you have a winner. You'll look like a fool staring down bottles to find a surefire winner, but being a cheapskate isn't glamorous work.
I don't know any method to win with the 7-11 Big Gulp cups where the code is on the rim of the winning cup. I've gotten 2 of 3 winners using my patented "pick the first cup" algorithm. The only strategy I've heard of to increase your odds is the "double cup". Some people claim that the stores don't mind if you do it, but to me it's crossing over from legitimate "selection optimization" to "theft".
RTFA. It basically tells you to look through the bottle to read the inside of the cap. Purchase is still necessary.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
I tired this in our break room but I had to tip the entire Pepsi machine over to see which bottle I should buy! I hope the boss didn't see me.
Is that why they have that picture of the guy being crushed by the pop machine?
Is it to keep you from checking for iTunes winner bottles?
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Yes, this is too much to ask of anyone, I know, but maybe you should try reading the article. It teaches you how to tilt the bottle to identify losing/winning game pieces. It is not a method for generating winning codes.
The site has officially been ./'ed
Does it seriously just advise you to look under the cap? I have been doing that for years, no big suprise there.
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
We used to do this when Dr. Pepper was giving away free bottles when I was in high school. Because of the unique shape of the Dr. Pepper bottle you could easily tilt it and read the whole underside of the cap to see if it was a winner. We would make sure the first one was a winner and buy it, then use the winning cap to get another winner..repeat until no more winners in the display case.Pretty sweet. Nothing more difficult than trying to walk to the bus stop with 10-15 bottles of Dr. Pepper without caps though.
~dank
...but unfortunately this bottle cap is too small to hold it. - Fermat
Some advice: Please re-tune your sarcasm detector before posting again.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
The "hack" involves tipping the Pepsi bottle in order to see if it's a winner. How would these "cheaters" be tracked down? How would it effect your codes? RTFA.
Good thing we released it GPL. Now those Apache commies can't use it, either!
Free Tibet!
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
How exactly do you propose they "track down" people who generate random numbers? Bang down their door demanding to see the liners that correspond to their winning numbers?
I was working cleanup at a stadium over the weekend, as part of a church fundraiser (I'm an adult advisor for the youth group). Just by picking up empty bottles, I snagged 19 winning caps.
Here is a mirror of the relevant content.
http://www.str8dog.com/macmerc/
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
Warning: Too many connections in /home/macmerc/www/www.macmerc.com/mainfile.php on line 47 /home/macmerc/www/www.macmerc.com/mainfile.php on line 47
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in
Unable to select database
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
The moderators need to RTFA as well. Who the hell modded this +5 insightful? Karma whore.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
... if Pepsi filled their bottles all the way up.
If all you want is free music, can't you just use Kazza? Why bother scamming iTunes?
Here is a quick and dirty mirror.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
I am not sure if this only happens to Coke. Anyway, in one of a similar promotion (i.e. you win something if the cap says "Winner", otherwise "Again"), the message is in some sort of semi-transparent rubbery sheet, which is pushed into the cap, reversed.
So normally you cannot see anything thru this rubbery sheet, and the message is on the other side (i.e. facing the cap).
I wonder why Pepsi didn't use a better solution.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
what are you drunk?
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
All the bottle cap contests I've seen (since I was a little kid) had the answer printed on the cap liner, but facing inwards, not outwards. Hmm, maybe the Canadian version knows something the parent corp doesn't!
It's not truly a crack in my view, since one still has to buy the bottle to obtain the complete, usable code; I bet Pepsi really doesn't care since they're still moving product.
Ron
Of course when they get their bandwidth bill after this /.ing, do you think they will have come out ahead? They would have to drink a lot of Pepsi for that to happen.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I got a winning cap and did some math. Unless the codes are not random, this isn't going to happen.
There are 8 digits in the code, and they appear to use alphas and digits. Presuming they aren't using zero so it's not confused with the letter "O," this means there are 1.0E+35 possibilities. With 100 million winners, that means one in every 1.0E+27 is a winner. Spelt out, that is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
However, given that it is not random, I guess the odds are much better.
Alright guys, you can stop clicking the link now... The guys at the colo are rebooting that box, give it a few minutes :)
I found a $up3r 733T method to get my game on without
:)
buying pepsi products.
7-11
grab a big gulp cup (or two if you want to double your chances)
fill it with a Coke product and pay for it.
much better then tipping pepsi in the store.....
a gateway crime for sure, whats next? unscrewing the caps
and leaving with em?
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Ok, I didn't read the article because it is slashdotted, but I did look at this photo of the bottle cap seen through the bottle. That's a losing bottle, but 'AGAIN' is clearly visible (I'm presuming you'd be able to see an upside-down 'PLAY' if you turned it over) - so would a winning code not also be visible, and transcribable, without purchase?
http://www.obrien.ie/book505.cfm
I drink Pepsi like water, and friends give me their caps at school, so I'm already over the 200 cap limit. Really.
This must be a pretty poor quality server...it lasted 10 minutes before it stopped responding...
WASTE - The Secure P2P
It would be a nice gesture for the person who gets this running to give 1000 tunes to each of the pirates forced to appear in the Pepsi-Apple-RIAA Superbowl commercial as penance for their sins.
Steve Jobs once asked John Sculley if he wanted to change the world -- or just sell sugar water for the rest of his life. Now it seems that Jobs is the one selling Pepsi!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think someone should start a business selling CDs full of random numbers.
they may become obese and have painful problems, both emotionally and physically - later in life. Please turn them on to something healthy if you love them.
4. PROFIT!
I just got back from the store with my iTunes Diet Pepsi. Message under the cap: PLEASE PLAY AGAIN. Oh well.
Interestingly, the shelf was fairly barren. Want to bet that the majority (if not all) of the remaining bottles are losers? I wonder what this does to the one in three odds?
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Maybe this will result in pesi putting more soda in their bottles. Probably not.
I'd just like to point out again for the record that NO ONE has been arrested/sued by the RIAA for DOWNLOADING music. They have been sued for SHARING their music files. Yes I know the News and Magazines keep saying "Music Downloaders" and "Downloading Music" but thats just so people will be afraid to use P2P softare for legitemate uses, such as Downloading the mp3s to the Bjork CD I own that is scratched and unplayable...
With that said, I understand this is somewhat news, but honestly your not really scamming or solving anything here. People are buying songs from itunes - good for them, people are downloading songs from itunes for free - GREAT you just made the powers that be "right" that music "Downloaders" are "teh d3v1l".
Congratz.
Ave Molech Setting
> Next step: a Pepsi/iTMS winning number generator!
I know this is meant as a joke but some do not take it like that. I am tired of people saying hackers/crackers are bad. Then along comes a slashdot admin who makes a sly joke about hacking/cracking a system.
You cannot have it both ways! Do not make jokes about cracking to sound cool and savy. I consider it in bad taste.
And oh yea, remember the ebay post about auctioning phone numbers, that got twisted into auctioning slashdot uids? well, i think it would be savy and cool to code up a brute force tool to crack those same uids. for free. yea sounds cool eh?!?
how does it feel when someone makes a joke about cracking your fucking system? uid 69 will soon be mine after i crack the system!
my god that sounds retarded.
Stand outside 7-Eleven and ask people for their bottle caps.
For example, I was in Brazil in 1994 and Coke ran a promo for the World Cup. Each bottle cap had three teams on it in order. If you ended up with the top three teams in the correct order you won a bunch of money. Bartenders became very adept at cracking open your bottle open and pocketing the cap.
Anyhow, this is certainly a simple cheat rather than a clever hack.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Simple:
...oops, that code has already been used.
Person A peeks into the bottle at the store and finds a valid code. Redeems code for music.
Person B, sometime later, actually buys bottle and discovers valid code. Redeems code...
Person B reports incident and/or Apple logs attempt to use code more than once.
Jailarity insues. (Hope fully Person B kept the bottlecap and/or receipt...)
=Smidge=
The Four-Color Map theorem.
Kepler's Sphere-Packing problem.
Fermat's Last Theorem.
And now this.
Brilliant.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Way back when Pepsi first started with their Pepsi points, you could do the same thing to see if you had won a free bottle or not. Then Pepsi got sick of it, and made all of the cap liners grey so you couldn't see through them. This is in Canada anyway, and they still do it.
I remember a long time ago, when I was in junior high, Coca-Cola had an under-the-cap contest going. The twist was that every bottle had tick-code on the cap. If there were 6 vertical lines, you were guaranteed to at least win a free soda. Needless to say, the employees at the gas-station down the road from my school (right in front of the bus stop) got very sick of junior-high kids going through every last bottle in the cooler looking for a six-tick bottle that had been miraculously missed by the 200 other kids that had already been through the place.
You're right, cheat is a much better word for it.
I meant that it is more similar to social engineering than it is to a crack.
For anybody who doesn't catch the reference, it's from Suicidal Tendencies's song Institutionalized.
They put me in a DRM institution
Said it was the only P2P solution
Give me the needed Recording Industry help
To protect me from the enemy, myself
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
yes apparently I have been trolled... thanks asshat
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
MOD Parent Lighten-Up +1
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
for the next front page writeup at slashdot we have:
"WATER H4X0R3D... found to be wet" and
"GRASS P0WN3D.. GREEN ENSUES"
Nice try, though.
And they do have caps on the "Sierra Mist" (sprite/7up-esque) drinks too.
Still, some people will pay $1.10-$1.49 to get a free 99 song... that's just amazing.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Not if you just take the cap off....
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
As of about a minute ago, server went from, "Sorry guys, server can't take /." to 404 error not found.
well, I don't generally drink soda, but being a college student, part of what my parents pay for is my food money. That being said, if I start buying pepsi, I don't pay for it, my "lunch money" does. So I am technically getting free iTunes.
This didn't work for me.
I took the Pepsi bottle cap, inserted it into my PC CD drive, and could read nothing.
But I forgot to hold down Shift - that may be why.
I just wish people would document these hacks properly before publishing them. I'm pretty computer-savvy, so I don't think it was a mistake on my part.
I got it on my site, hopefully i'll save them some bandwidth. All that was there was a directory listing of some images, so i put them up.
Here
http://illhostit.com/ - Webhosting
I do think that social engineering is a form of hacking. I don't think that anybody would claim that the social engineering that Mitnick did wasn't hacking. This doesn't seem to rise to that level though.
Perhaps it is because you still buy the Pepsi and Pepsi didn't really take any measures to stop you from doing this. It there were some clever way to read the number without opening the bottle that might qualify as a hack. Say, taking an ultra-violet photo of the bottom of the bottle that allowed you to see through the Pepsi to read the complete number. That would qualify as a hack.
For some reason the approach we are discussing seems too pathetic to qualify as a hack. Perhaps my standards are too high.
Lasers Controlled Games!
You insensitive clod!
I don't drink soda.
# fuser -v
#
"Would you rather sell sugar water to kids for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?"
Steve Jobs to that guy from Pepsi. It's on folklore.org somewhere. The Bouncing Pepsis story, I believe.
sicko. stop posting tubgirl redirects
This is not a troll, and it is not Tubgirl! (I'd actually forgotten what that was and went looking - urgh.) Thanks for the mirror, Str8Dog.
The best part of this amusing if lame article, is without a doubt the Mountain Dew eBay link.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
You actually have to buy the pepsi! It costs $1.09-$1.29. Even worse if you accidentally drink the pepsi!
just take the winning bottle caps. the cool thing is when the RIAA comes a knocking at your door you could feasibly have hundreds of bottle caps to throw at their minions.
Just brabbed a Pepsi out of the vending machine. This "crack" doesn't work if the bottle has been through a vending machine. You can't see anything through the foam.
After the bottle settled a bit, you can tip it and rotate and if you're lucky see if you have a 3 line or 4 line cap. I was able to tell that the vending machine gave me a winning cap, but there is no way I could make out the text as the images show. The wavy design prevents it with a full bottle.
Even after draining the bottle I can't read the text. Either Pepsi has different bottles for different regions or the article aurhors put the cap on a 2 liter for their photos.
YMMV.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Oh bullshit. Be honest, when was the last time you - or anyone else out there - downloaded something you legitimately owned?
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
Claim 1: A technique for obtaining winning caps involving a person, a trash receptacle, and a collection receptacle wherein the user searches through the trash receptacle for winning caps and places them in the collection receptacle.
Claim 2: The method of Claim 1 where the trash receptacle is chosen for its likelyhood of containing Pepsi caps.
Claim 3: The method of Claim 1 where the user wears rubber gloves
Claim 4: The method of Claim 1 where the trash receptacle is a Dumpster
Claim 5: The method of Claim 1 where the user showers afterwards.
Claim 6: A technique for obtaining winning caps involving a person, a trash receptacle, an intermediate receptacle, a sieve, and a collection receptacle wherein the user sieves the trash receptacle into the intermediate receptacle to remove items larger than bottlecaps, then searches the intermediate receptacle for winning caps.
etc.
Do I want to steal music (pepsi promo) or steal music (p2p)?
This promotion is probably the best I've seen in a while. Three benefits:
1. To Pepsi - increased sales
2. To Apple - more people use and know about iTunes
3. To RIAA - people consider free music downloads a prize rather than taken for granted
Also, because it is so unique it recieves much more publicity than other promotions (such as this article).
Never trust an Anonymous Coward... parent's link is an actual mirror for the Pepsi/iTMS giveaway.
ahem, Dont reply with the same subject line as your troll.
Good thing that itunes doesnt store your IP address.
Im sure it would be impossible to track you down when you come up with 300 winners. So go ahead....you'll be fine.
OK, what next? Should we all send 99 cent micropayments to the genius who found a way to corrupt the process?
I'll bet my 99 cents there will be no more free music promotions like this. What if Apple and Pepsi have to cancel it due to these fraudulent "winning" number submissions? Who wins?
A few years ago pepsi did their pepsi points promotion. Several of us were living in DC at the time in an apartment behind the home of a couple that drove catering trucks to construction sites. They were a nice couple and let us take anything we wanted off the trucks each night while they were loading them for the next days deliveries.
We did this same thing back then and saved up thousands of those pepsi points in a matter of weeks. Unfortunatley, I never cashed in as the points were pooled amongst us in the apartment and I had to move soon after. I did gain almost 20 pounds while living there for only a few months.
I swear PowerPoint is going to be the downfall of higher education in western society.
I think the only crack here is the stuff the writers of this article were smoking?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
i used to do this all the time when pepsi had a promotion where you could get free pepsi by getting a winning bottlecap and i worked at a store that sold bottles of pepsi. it was incredibly easy, and i turned one winning bottle into about 10 free bottles.
But i like to download something that someone else legitimately owns is that a bad thing?
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
with the arrow saying "Look." Damn, without that arrow, I'd have looked at the wrong end of the bottle.
Like there are really iTunes bottlecaps out there. I've been checking daily at different gas stations, and at least once a week at grocery stores. I haven't seen a single lid.
/sucks being in New Mexico
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
I got hooked on Dew back in 99 or so when you could win a free pop (soda) in the cap. I worked in a gas station and had nothing to do but go through the stock room and tilt the bottles to look under the cap and see WINNER. Then I would just open the bottle, drink and turn in the cap when I was done. I had like 5 cases that were exclusivly winners that never made it on to the regular sales floor.
I assume this is sarcastic? It may actually work, i'm not sure.... I have a sony digicam that i modded to be X-Ray, maybe it can see thru soda :) i wonder how store employees would reat to my taking pictures of every soda bottle in the store....
Learn about Photography Basics.
359 7-11 employees are going through their Pepsi stock and taking out all the winners.
The premise of the grandparent post was that someone could nick the code without buying te bottle. However false that might be in reality, if that were the case then the method I described would put a pretty swift end to it.
Or did you not actually read the post you replied to?
=Smidge=
Step 1: Enter Supermarket
Step 2: Go to Soda Aisle
Step 3: Tip Pepsi, grab winners
Step 4: Unscrew Caps and stick in pocket
Step 5: Log on to ebay.com
Step 6: ??????
Step 7: Profit!
... (Here) I am concerned that either Pepsi's formula has become much more syruppy, or someone is screwing around with the gravity near MacMerc's headquarters.
It was a hypothetical. I have no idea if it would work. There is also a lot of distortion from the plastic bottle which you would need to compensate for.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Steps to get a clue
1. Go to local video store
2. Rent "A Christmas Story"
3. Go back home
4. Watch "A Christmas Story"
5. Realize how incomplete your life was until now.
Do you speak H4X0R?
Have you ever seen the movie A Christmas Story?
If you can answer yes to both of those questions (see also the parent parent post about a decoder ring) than you should get the joke.
either watch A Christmas Story (recommended) or learn to read leetspeak (not recommended).
Jailarity insues.
;)
Take your farkisms back to Fark with the other AOL noobs. It's encouraged to RTFA, it's not a trap.
MOD PARENT UP +5 Fucking Idiot...
Actually, it's 10 digits, not 8. And yes, they use both zero (0) and the letter O. The zero's are more elongated vertically, and the O's are actually slightly elongated horizontally. Therefore there's about 10^36 possible codes.
Winning caps look like this (fake number, obviously):
12345
ABCDE
ONE FREE
SONG
Centered. The blank line is actually about half a line.
Losers look like this:
PLAY
AGAIN
Simple enough. If you hold it up so that the yellow cap is facing the light, yes, you can peer down the side and make out enough to tell which is which, especially on the Sierra Mist bottles. The Pepsi bottles are harder, but since that foul stuff is undrinkable anyway, stick to the clear drinks.
Note, I have not tried this in a store. I have, however, won a few songs on Sierra Mist bottles.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
scripsit Str8Dog:
Looks like someone's out to burn your karma, amigo. Check your freaks list recently?
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
u say:
Easier still: "try again" caps have 3 lines of printing, centered. Winning caps have 4 lines and fill pretty much the whole space. You don't even have to make out the words, just avoid the caps with a fair bit of whitespace at the edges."
i say:
Easier still: Lookk t many. The winning ones are the few that look different; the losing ones are the majority. Simply be able to distingish:
SIMLAR OR DIFFERENT
Bartenders always open your bottle in Brazil, independent if there is a prize or not.
I remember as a kid going to restaurants and asking for caps for promotions like this, and they always gave me.
I am pretty sure if the consumer would ask for the cap, the waiter/bartender would give him.
Compensation lawyers are rubbing their hands with glee tonight, as another golden goose comes home to roost.
Several thousand viewers of the reality television show "I'm a washed-up old has-been, get me the f**k out of here, you c**t" were left without pictures last night after a prank went horribly wrong.
"I will be emotionally scarred for life," lamented 23-year old single mother of four Evan Spratsky, one of the viewers whose evening was ruined by the stunt. "This incident must be worth a hundred million do llars at least."
An amateur hacker -- using software he downloaded from the Internet -- was able to turn his own computer, connected through the Internet through a television cable, into a web site in his own home. With the help of a program called "Apache" -- intended strictly for industrial use by Internet Service Providers -- the young brainbox rigged up the hoax web site, which purported to tell the secret of obtaining free music downloads from the Apple iTunes music store.
Unfortunately, the joke backfired when news of the site was taken seriously and posted on an internet "bulletin board". As thousands of readers signed in and read their e-mail, they "surfed" across to the illegal web site, causing a fatal overload.
Thanks to a technology called "ADSL", or "broadband", computer signals -- which would normally be converted to sounds that can be transmitted over a telephone line -- can be transmitted over telephone or television cables at much higher speeds. This is possible because ADSL operates on much higher frequencies than the human ear can hear.
But the cables are only designed to handle a small amount of traffic at any given time -- not thousands of connections. An important piece of equipment in a street junction box failed under the strain, setting off a chain reaction. An eye-witness said that he saw a series of junction boxes erupt in showers of sparks. The anonymous grey-haired male -- obviously severely traumatised by what he had seen -- then attempted to hug our reporter and burst forth with a series of obscenities, before tripping over, vomiting up some foul-smelling liquid sick and collapsing on the floor.
And the joke?
The so-called "winning secret" involved tipping the bottle to read the writing inside the bottle cap.
YEah, this is off topic, but come on... can't someone catch the error that the connectionf ailed and print a more reasonable error message? I go to countless slashdotted site only to find half-rendered pages terminated with some form of a MySQL connectionf ailure due to a connection limit. Or, hell, why nto try upping the limits since the web server is obvisouly still alive enough to serve back the page. Surely even the most simplistic DB caching should be able to cope with the highly redundant request it would see from a slashdotted link.
I have, once, Monster Magnet CD scrached to shit, and my copys were in Real Player format.
Why should it be a joke? Sometimes you really want random numbers, not some PRNG. If you can't afford to (or don't wnat to) buy a hardware-based random number generator this is a good second-best. A couple of decades ago you bought books of random numbers, now you get a CD.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
I've been to 3 gas stations in the last couple days and haven't found itunes Pepsi's at any of them. Anyone not in a major city see these yet?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Yeah they're gonna be soooooooo pissed when they find out some guy in Utah downloaded 300 songs with those winner caps, yeah they're gonna forget the fact that the person with the caps probably just bought 300 bottles of pepsi.
You might find it easiest to practice while not in the store. Just buy a few and take them home. Get the knack for the angle, and it isn't that hard to pull off without looking like a huge tool.
Yeah, for that you need a website about it...
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
We used to do that back in Jr. High when you used to get free Mtn Dews from the under bottlecaps. We'd Tilt, Look, pick a winner and then open it and bring the cap up to the register.. viola.. free soda.
: ]
...that this hard-hitting piece of "journalism" made Slashdot's *front page*. I mean, I understand -- slow news day and all, and, well, Slashdot's front page was never a real "exclusive club" in the first place.... "Try to read the cap and see if you've won before you buy the Pepsi." That's it. THAT made the front page. He even put pictures for the, shall we say, "less intellectually fortunate" among the Mac faithful. What's next, "shake your Christmas present and maybe you can tell what's inside?" How about "Check your fruit for bruises BEFORE you buy it to avoid getting bruised fruit!"? GENIUS, I tell you, SHEER GENIUS. Yes, Bobby, "Genius" as in "Genius Bar". I bet Apple's already looking for this Einstein's number as we speak. But they'll have to beat NASA to him! He's like the guy off Phenomenon, I wonder if he can learn Spanish in a half hour. Frickin' Brilliant. I hope he uses his powers for Good, not Evil. Hey, I'm not kidding. He managed to make Slashdot's FRONT PAGE. The FreeBSD guys could cure cancer with their ass and they wouldn't make the front page.
Why do the Editors even *bother* with apple.slashdot.org when something this fundamentally NON-earth-shakingly important (ie remember that credo "Stuff that Matters"?) makes the front page? SLASHDOT is now apple.slashdot.org. Get it? Slashdot = Apple. Everything NON-Apple seems secondary. Linux stories are tolerated. Books are ignored. YRO is buried. Games are irrelevant.
You know, I used to think the guys who say "the Slashdot Editors are on Apple's payroll" and that "Apple is astroturfing here" were crazy. Now, I'm starting to believe it. Or has the definition of "stuff that matters" changed fundamentally since Apple is involved?
Either the editors are slipping or they have an agenda. Take your pick. I like cheating as much as the next guy, but this doesn't deserve front page coverage. I guess that's why I'm not an editor. I'd be fair, I speak in full sentences, and my spelling is adequate. Hell, right there my chances are shot.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
if people need a website to figure this out we have problems, me and my friends were doing this with free cokes when we were 12 without any help. Whoever made that has too much time on their hands and more so then any other geek they need to GO OUTSIDE!
Your first task is to find a store that has the coveted sugar water. Just look for the yellow caps. Diet Pepsi, Pepsi and Sierra Mist all have them, and some [surely single] nerds claim select Mountain Dew bottles do as well.
Every time you download a high-quality ogg or mp3 for free from p2p or better sources, you save $0.99 off an ITMS purchase.
Every time your convenience-store friend lets you fill up your personal cup with soda at no charge, you save $0.79 on a Pepsi purchase.
Never underestimate the resourcefulness of law school students.
And we did it...just like that
When we want something and
We don't wanna pay for it
We walk right
Through the door
We walk right through the door
I live in Pennsylvania where food, including pop (soda), isn't taxed.
This creates the following situation for me and my fellow Pennsylvanians:
I can spend $1.05 ($0.99 + $0.06 tax) on a song from the iTunes Music Store
or
I can spend $1.03 (there's no tax) on a song-winning Pepsi from my local Wal-Mart
$1.03 is less than $1.05
cygnuhchur
I drink Coke, you insensitive clod!
Doh! You're right. My mistake.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I've seen co-workers doing this.. It works. Although its not as easy to see through the plastic. You kinda have to try looking through the blurry plastic to see.
Course now they'll fix it...
If holding the bottle at 25 degrees is so important, and they're showing the angle verses the line of horizon, shouldn't the soda in the bottle be parallel to the line of horizon? I mean, I'm not by any means as mathematically and engineering-ly inclined to come up with such a "brilliant" way of peaking into soda bottles in convenience stores to get free music, but I think I could have at least figured that part out.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
this is certainly a simple cheat
Cheat? All he's doing is tilting the bottle!
Unbelievable - and while I'm at it:
'Don't look at the MS source code, Marion!
It's true!
I've already won 4 without even trying.
There aren't even ANY Pepsi bottles here in CT with this promotion on them.
Tommorow on Capitain Obvious: How to tell it's a slow news day without going past the front page of Shashdot!
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Kepler's mom was a witch.
7-11 have Big Gulp cups with the iTMS promotion. I have yet to actually purchase a Pepsi or related beverage with this promotion, sticking to the Coke side. Of course so far I'm 1 in 11 with said cups and fearful of being sued by the RIAA....
I've been doing that for years, especially with the sprite promotions. You can hold the bottle up to the light and look right through the other side of the cap since the sprite is clear. Even if you can't see the actual words, you can always tell if you've won by the pattern it makes. You can bring an extra cap in and keep getting more and more free sprite until you're arms are full:D
Shouldn't be too hard to get into iTunes as a registered artist, redeem the winning caps and get free Pepsi. Add some caps harvesting and you could probably collect a healthy sum of dollars too.
;)
Sounds too obvious to me, there is probably something wrong in my reasoning... I guess.
Maybe RIAA could get some cash inflow this way so that they don't have to sue kiddies?
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Just out of high school, I worked for apple as a phone jockey/dope in the thick of the Sculley era. Every single day my job consisted of taking desperate (to the point of suicidal) calls from these poor, pathetic bureaucrats in the purchasing departments at school districts who had sent their entire computer hardware budget to Apple some six, eight, 12, 18 months ago, and they had still not received their orders.
We were told explicitly and with great threat that we were never to reveal this to the customer, and were in fact to continue to feed them the "Real Soon Now" line of bullshit ("Next week, I promise... It's shipping tomorrow... It already shipped..."), when the blunt reality was that they would not be receiving their orders the next week, month, four months, six months, EVER - eventual refunds were assumed, amounting to a zero-interest loan from the school districts to Apple - because Apple had in fact shipped every one of their orders overseas, to be sold at a higher markup in foreign retail. They had sold their standing inventory at least twice, and probably several times more, and only actually delivered it to the highest bidder. It was pathetic.
Mind you, "profitability" of Apple aside, this was the height of the "MacInTrash" era, when every government department in the United States, outside of the toniest school districts, was replacing their entire IT infrastructure of Apples with cheap first-generation beige boxes running some godawful proof-of-concept "Windows." I vividly recall watching newscasts showing dumpsters overflowing with discarded Apple machines and thinking to myself, "this company is fucked."
Sculley made Apple "profitable" for the X many months it took him to ruin its reputation and forever doom it to the statistically irrelevant fringe market.
that's what pepsi gets for not filling the bottle to the brim
too bad the technique doesn't apply to those cereal boxes that always come half-empty
Reading a tilted cap is nothing new but does anyone remember in 1996 when McDonalds had the Disney trivia game pieces? Every card could be a winner if you scratched off only the right answer to a Disney related question. You recieved two of the game pieces with a supersized meal. It wasn't long before usenet posts and web pages[1] dedicated to the game answers were online. Lucky for McDonlads, not many people were online then or this may have turned into another 84 Olympics game piece fiasco for them.
;)
[1] I tried posting links to web sites that had the answers but they are all 404 now. I guess that specific information is not really useful 8 years later
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
So, Pepsi came out and basically sided against the RIAA in a way, so a bunch of guys pay them back by screwing their contest over. Way to make friends and get support for yourselves. Since the thing is hosted on SourceForge, it will be associated with OSS and the OSS community.
Great going guys.
seriously though, I wouldn't call you a
looser, so drop the extra o on Losing the attitude.
My sister and I have been using this method to get free sodas every time one of the soft drink makers have a promotion. She "cracked" the soft drink solution about 9 years ago. Hundreds of free drinks later, we've saved a couple of hundred dollars.
Lousy facepalm.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Silly, just silly LOL F'n Hilarious :)
One idea I have seen toyed with is to the universe itself as a random number generator. I may have picked the idea up somewhere on the 'net a long time ago.
Specifically the microwave background radiation.
Point microwave receiver at the (night?) sky, record appropriately. You need to make each channel wide enough to get the appropriate number of bits per second, and enough channels to get enough bits. If you want a huge number of bits at a large bitrate you may run out of resource.
You need to check against local source contamination.
Secure against intentional and design flaw.
Note the anistropy in the background microwave radiation will not affect this as you have to take in all the sky, not just a small patch to pick this up.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Serious..... Switch to nothing but bottled water
for 4 days and I'll be very surprised if you're
still as enthusiastic about soda.
Maybe off-topic, but isn't it somewhat hypocritical that Jobs won't let his kids drink pop, yet he has no problem running a promotion via Pepsi?
It's like a parent who doesn't want their kids to smoke cigs, but is the president of a major tobacco company...
However, given that it is not random, I guess the odds are much better.
I would expect that it is random. There doesn't seem to be much reason not to have the codes be random.
I can randomly generate a vast quantity of numbers and dump them in a database somewhere, and mark one as "used" every time someone turns in a cap. (Actually, Pepsi probably already does the database thing just to take advantage of customer data.)
There's no reason to have a mechanism like "if the third letter is "L", the bottle is a winner". That sort of thing was popular back in the day when isolated systems existed (like computers with software with serial numbers not on the 'Net and unconnected credit card-using systems). Today, there's no reason for it.
May we never see th
Crystal Pepsi appeared in 1992
Thanks for playing.
(You are right about Crystal Pepsi being a quality beverage. I just wish Coca-Cola would bring back OK soda.)
ok, please explain this: you're cheating so you can download music legally, instead of just downloading illegal p2p music. Anyone see a conflict there? At least the artist gets paid, but I think there's still a small moral issue to deal with whether you download illegal or cheat to download legally.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Oh GOD, the memories of being a fifteen-year-old street-roaming punk of a geek!
I just really did ROFLOL.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The CD tray is designed to hold the *whole* bottle (or cup, if you prefer).
I went out and tried this tonight after work, and ended up purchasing eight bottles that are all winners. (Oddly enough, most of the bottles in one of the cooler weren't...I went through a dozen and only found two. But when I moved to another cooler, every single yellow-capped bottle I checked was.)
But it's not as easy as the article makes it look. Due to the ribbing around the neck of the bottle, the view can be pretty easily distorted and reflections from overhead light can get in the way, especially if there's condensation or fingerprint smears on the bottle already. I suspect that carrying a small penlight to shine through would improve visibility.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Sorry but I just HAVE to chime in here :)
If Apple designed the bottles you probably would not be able to cheat in this manner. They'd just make all the bottles opaque with an aluminum-like finish with lots of little holes in them...
If you're a regular Pepsi drinker, you're buying your normal beverage of choice at your normal price and getting a song to boot.
Define "regular". If I was a regular Pepsi drinker, I wouldn't be buying one-off bottles at the expensive stores (ie, the ones I can inspect easily); I'd be buying them by the flat at Costco or equivalent for a lot cheaper. I guess with some time and privacy at Costco I could pull this off also though.
actually your (the parent poster's) uid is 1/10th of his (the grandparent poster's). but who's checking anyways.
I was using this trick to get free bottles of Mountain Dew when I was stocking milk at the grocery store back in high school. How, pray tell, did this end up on Slashdot?
http://www.walkingtaco.com
They should be putting more pepsi in those bottles! Gippin' us of our precious sugary water goodness.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Anyone who believes that a buck a song is a deal is being scammed. There are many cheaper, legal foreign mp3 sites. Why waste your money up front on sugar water? The song is only worth 5 cents on a less hyped mp3 site. http://www.museekster.com/clubmp3searchinfo.htm
Except that you forget..its a 1 in 6 chance of winning. so the odds that he bought 300 Pepsi's and won 300 times is not to likely. Conversely, it is also unlikely that he would have bought the1800 Pepsi's in order to come up with 300 winners. Either way, a red flag would go off.
At least, thats what we did as kids when we wanted to win a free soda.
I checked your calculation and it more or less works out (though it should be 104857600 Kb, since we're talking gigabytes), so then I checked mine-102400 MB @ ~1MB/min=102400/60/24=71.11.
128 kilobits a second. (I just checked file details on winamp to make sure).
So your result is short by a factor of 8. Multiply 9.04 by 8 and you get about the right amount.
The bit-byte confusion is nearly as bad as the chem/physics calorie versus the nutritional Calorie. The chem/physics calorie is amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water one degree Celsius. The nutritional Calorie (note uppercase C) is amount of energy needed to raise one kilogram one degree. Makes for confusing conversations occasionally.
Someone else (not a rabid Mac fan like myself) already taught me this.
Here's the kick for me: I'm a univeristy student. A freshman at that. Part of our freshman dining deal is something called Dining Dollar$ (that horrible, horrible $/S substitution should give away which school I go to to any of my fellows) which I can use to buy as much Pepsi as I can possibly consume. As a freshman, I'm forced to get DD'$ as part of my meal plan. So, I get a guaranteed winner, and subsequently convert my Dining Dollar$ (...) which I barely use (I had ~$100 left at the end of last semester) into music. Go me.
hate me, but i need some spam bob@techbase.ch SPAM ME: bob@techbase.ch
Pepsi probably *does* care. I'm shocked they were dumb enough to print directly on the inside of the cap.
The Pepsi Generation is apparently a pack of freeloading, self-entitled thieves. Groovy.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
A popular theme running through the earlier posts was about how Pepsi rots the teeth, yada yada yada, and somebody is almost certain to have mentioned an age-old experiment involving placing a human tooth in a sample of fizzy drink for several days and observing damage to the enamel. This is commonly held as "proof" that fizzy drinks -- which, lest anyone forget, are in contact with the teeth for a matter of seconds at most before being carried away to the stomach -- damage the teeth.
It is, however, rarely mentioned what happens when a similar experiment is performed using a quantity of apple juice in lieu of the fizzy cola. Interested readers are urged to find out for themselves.
Actually, they covered the tipping/clear bottle decryption routine here in Australia with a recent competition (not sure what it was for, I just remember the bottles).
Instead of having clear PET bottles of Pepsi, they made them from PET injected with silver colouring, making them opaque and therefore unable to be tipped to see what the cap said.
Simple solution to a simple problem, and the bottles actually stood out as an added bonus on the shelves.
Visceral Psyche Films
Byte is capitalized (B). Bit is not capitalized (b).
100GB = 100,000,000KB (by SI usage - not the typical computer science definition)
128Kb per second = 16KB per second.
100,000,000 / 16 / 60 / 60 / 24 = 72 days 8 hours 6 minutes and 43.2 seconds.
If you chose to use Mebibytes and Gibibytes (SI units for traditional computer usage of MB and GB) it would work out as:
100GiB = 107,374,182.4 KB
107,374,182.4 / 16 / 60 / 60 / 24 = 77 days 16 hours 8 minutes and 6.4 seconds.
Either way, not 71 days in any case, unless you were using VBR.
Sculley made Apple "profitable" for the X many months it took him to ruin its reputation and forever doom it to the statistically irrelevant fringe market.
It must be hard to move to a business where you actually have to make the things you sell at a cost as opposed to just fill another bottle with sugar, spice and water and use all money on advertising.
Is it really possible that people didn't know you
could tilt the bottle? Me and my friends used to
get perpetual soda like that when we were like
10 years old (`91). Oh, and I just wanted to see
myself talking.
One of my local Walmarts has already added sleeves to the tops of each bottle.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
"Free Tibet? I'll take it! Hello China? I have something you want. But it's gonna cost you. That's right... All the tea."
What do I do with the contents of the bottle once I've gotten the bottle cap. It's not like you can drink the stuff...
Isn't it just Pepsi being too mean to fill the bottles sufficiently to stop you seeing the cap. A few CCs extra Sugar/Water and you wouldn't be able to cheat.
This is excellent.... I want to get some Beatles songs off iTunes. Only thing is, I need to drink like 30 Pepsi bottles to buy all the songs I want...
Let me see, crack a contest to win free music, or maximize my Kazaa again and search for it..... Kazaa is quicker....
I haven't seen any of the specially bottles of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi & Sierra Mist at my favorite retailers. And I live in a major Midwestern metropolitan area. Oh well, I much prefer that nectar of the gods--Coca Cola.
You fucking asshole...how stupid are you? Your little 5 cent song is nothing compared to the $20 charge for dowloading....Considering Russia has some of the highest entertainment piracy rates in the world, don't kid yourself into thinking that horrid site is legal.
Just go BUY your music from a legit store like EVERYONE used to do before MP3.
Oh, WMA9 is way superior to shitty MP3...yet another example of Windows' superior quality.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19991130& mode=classic
Vote Quimby.
That's pretty amusing but did the editors actually read this story before posting it? "Next step: a Pepsi/iTMS winning number generator!"
Hey, by Hollywood's standards, that's full-on "crypto-hacking." That's only one step away from using your Flash-powered Mac laptop to reroute a Pepsi bottling plant's deliveries via a VR accousticly-coupled net uplink to send all the winning bottles to your house.
Hack the planet!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm not sure what 'type of gigabytes' Apple use when denoting their players, and I can't be assed to check out their site ;-) So let's assume a typical 20GB iPod is 20,000,000 KB.
The average song in my collection rattled someplace around 4 minutes last time I checked a couple of years ago, let's assume we're talking more mainstream than that and go for 3:30. So the file size would be 210 seconds * 16 KB/s, for a total of 3360KB per song.
20,000,000 / 3360 = 5952.381 128KBps songs on an iPod. Then 5952.381 * 3 * 20 liq. ozs. = 357,142.86 liq. ozs. of Pepsi Cola, or 10148.987 liters.
So, yeah, if you drank 17,858 bottles of Pepsi cola, you could statistically fill your iPod.
Making you, what, an idiot?
Do you think it is possible to use a strong flashlight and try to catch the reflection of the code in the surface of the Pepsi? If yes, the purchase may be made completely unnecessary...
Can someone please confirm if it is possible?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
If there are 10 characters with 36 possibilities for each then it's 36^10, which is "only" ~3.7*10^15 possible combinations, which gives a 3.7*10^7 or 1 in 37 million chance in winning if it's completely random.
Still a long shot, but not quite as long.
-Xur (still can't remember my password!)
The diagram on the MacMerc website shows the Pepsi at an angle. Don't liquids naturally level?
So where is the link to the iTunes promo code generator? I'm surprised you guys didn't crack it and post a solution before it came out. :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
They're giving the songs away for FREE, and someone STILL finds a way to steal them!
Great resource.
Was pretty sure it wasn't a new idea, but had no idea where I saw it.
Not sure I am keen on buying the software for it though.
"A simple FM radio, tuned away from a station, would generate suitable data"
What about a TV Tuner card in your PC?
Or
Plug out from FM radio into soundcard mic jack.
Mmmmm, software radio extension module?
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Monster Magnet??!? You LISTEN to that shit?? You must be fucking deaf.
Not to mention that the cap is 200 songs total per person.
So far the longest song I found was
DJ Shadow - Influx 12:14
I spent $1.19 on Pepsi which I don't drink just
to "stick it to the man" in my own small, small way.
I figure I'd get the most byte for my buck....
I wanted to drop a note to let you know about my latest creation. It is a spoof on the Pepsi/iTunes commercial and how to always win at the game.
. html. This song as well as the video are released under the Creative Commons License (cc)2004 Jim Younkin. Share and sample freely! Email me about this song at this email address: fluxdada-sodasong@yahoo.com.
Length: 30 sec. This was written for a short film I made on how to always win a free song. You can see the video at http://homepage.mac.com/jimyounkin/iMovieTheater4
I Bought Some Soda by Jim Younkin III (y3)
play hi-bitrate (mp3) (broadband) at MacIdol.
download hi-bitrate (856.69 KB) at MacIdol.
My other music is available on MacIdol here.
-Jim Younkin III
Lyrics: "I walked up to the Albertsons, I bought some soda and they all won. I bought some soda and they all won. Hi. I'm one of the people that figured out how to get free music at the grocery store and I'm here to say, in front of everybody, what the heck am I gonna do with all this nasty soda?"