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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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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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
I've gotten to the point where I like the store-brand sodas better anyway. They're less sweet and also considerably less expensive. Big K cola (from Kroeger) rulez.
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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!
It always annoyed the hell out of me that you could get a two liter of pop for the same price as a 20 oz. I don't drink pop though so it doesn't really affect me.
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!
I actually didn't read the original (/.ed) article so I didn't know that it was the reflection that was being used. That makes this slightly more novel.
Now if only Dr Pepper were giving away free music...
Lasers Controlled Games!
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.
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.
1. 20 fl oz (fluid ounces) is a measurement of volume, not weight. It is commonly (yet incorrectly) abbreviated to simply 'ounces' which is a unit of weight. One fluid ounce is the volume which an amount of pure water weighing one ounce takes up.
2. 20 fluid ounces = 1.25 pints = 591 mL (okay, I have a bottle next to me, I'm cheating)
~ Aero
I've got your company's tagline:
"1 in 2^(# of bits on a CD) chance of getting the software you wanted!"
1 in 2^5452595200. Or roughly 1 in 1-then-560,000,000-zeroes.
Second place: referring to a pizza as a "pie".
So I guess it boils down to who you want to screw over
So I'm screwing somebody over by just tilting the bottle at a 25 degree angle?
What's going to happen next - is Jack Valenti going to go on record that it is every person's duty to buy up all the bottles in the shop?
You might want to look at this another way: They may not mind the cheating at all.
What they want to do is convert Coca-Cola addicts (like me) to Pepsi addicts. This is a back-handed bribe for me to switch from Coke to Pepsi for a month. The economics actually aren't bad, since as well as shifting my brand, they want me to buy more expensive single bottles at over $1 each, as opposed to my usual 6 and 12 packs at under $ 0.50 each.
The actual sugar water component of a soda costs around $ 0.10. The wholesale value of a song on iTunes is probably around $ 0.50. If they have about a 100% markup at retail, the $1.20 pepsi bottle is giving them $0.60, so they are roughly breaking even on my sodas which are a guaranteed win.
What they're counting on, of course, is that I switch to Pepsi and continue drinking it after the promotion. This is surely not impossible, as long as I decide I like the taste better. If they wind up doing that, they may not care that I'm only picking winning bottles, and they might have even made it deliberately trivial to cheat. They won't tell us that; it ruins the fun. But they may well have done it. Of course that's also why there's a 200 song limit for each email address. They'll let me have $100 wholesale, no matter how I get it.
Interesting, no?
D
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.
Oh I did this with coke contests a long time back.
I sifted through the gas stations 1:6 winners til I bought all my friends a free coke. we were kids and half the fun was just biking to the gas station. As long as you get some minimumwage employee... no one seems to mind.
Then I discovered the real fun in contests. At the time you could call in an 800 number and punch in your numbers to see if you won a real prize. So, I read the rules and nothing said I oculdn't enter as many times as I liked.
At that point I setup all my little memory dial buttons to enter the sequences for entering. I even played around with it and found certain numbers gave a spanish version.
After school I would sit down and enter a few hundred times a day and even my brother got in on the fun. This went on for a month or so.
In the end we only won a game gear... which was quite expensive and only 500 game gears were available nation wide.
Since then I have never seen coke do such a contest or at least allow the kind of entry I was performing.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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
iTunes codes are also in the Big Gulp cups (but not the other sizes) at 7-Eleven. They're rolled into the lip of the cup...cut the lip and unroll it to see if you have a winner. Fill it with Coke (or Diet Coke) and you have a chance at getting free music without putting up with that Pepsi swill. Free music and a chance to fsck over Pepsi...what could be better? :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
The idea isn't a new one. The NSA (and I dare say the KGB and GCHQ) have been using cosmic background radiation to generate their one-time-pads.
You can apparently get software for your email. (Not sure about 2048 bits being stronger than military though, they have bigger guns :)
A simple FM radio, tuned away from a station, would generate suitable data.
BB
Actually, no, I don't need to learn about Apple history, I know it rather better than you apparently do. You also seem to be conflating the posts of two different people, but . . .
The number of Macs sold in 1994 is not available from the SEC 10-K filings the above figures were drawn from. However, the year-to-year percentage change in sales are available back to the 1994 filing (earliest available on the web), which has data back to 1993.
Reconstructed from those, we can derive the following approximate figures, assuming I did the math right:
1996: 3,650,000
1995: 4,051,000
1994: 3,523,000
1993: 3,037,000
However, to really judge Sculley, we'd have to look at the 1984-1993 numbers, when he was in charge. If you can find them, I'd be glad to see them. I'm willing to bet they show continual sales growth 1984-1993, vs. the stagnation that's happened since.
The economy's current shitter-dwelling state also might have something to do with that.
That might make a good explanation, except that worldwide personal computer unit sales have climbed.
IDC estimated numbers, total personal computers shipped, vs. Apple 10-K numbers of Macs shipped:
1994: 47,300,000 vs. 3,523,000 (est.)
1995: 59,500,000 vs. 4,051,000 (est.)
1996: 70,200,000 vs. 3,650,000 (est.)
1997: 81,400,000 vs. 2,874,000
1998: 91,900,000 vs. 2,763,000
1999: 112,000,000 vs. 3,448,000
2000: 134,800,000 vs. 4,558,000
2001: 133,500,000 vs. 3,087,000
2002: 136,900,000 vs. 3,101,000
2003: 152,600,000 vs. 3,012,000
If Apple had maintained its marketshare after Sculley left, it would have sold 11.4 million Macs last year. If it had just maintained the clone-eaten marketshare it had when Jobs took over in 1997, it would have sold 5.4 million Macs last year. Hell, if it had been able to simply maintain pure volume numbers after the 2000 surge, it would have sold 4.5 million units.
Instead, in a year when the worldwide computer market showed double-digit percentage growth, Apple managed to sell fewer computers worldwide than during the previous year!
Jobs is doing a pretty good job running Apple as a profitable buisness. But he's clearly either unable to sell computers, or doesn't care to, merely using the Macintosh as a source of funding for other projects he finds more interesting. If you're a Mac user who would like to be able to buy a Mac five years from now, instead of merely an Apple-the-company fan, that's a problem.
I did something similar but it wasn't quite the hack that yours was. When glass bottles we're still used the openers in convienent stores dropped the bottle caps in an attached bucket. I would go to several convient stores and collect the caps from the buckets. My best take was $50 from Pepsi's 21 game (I found an odd numbered cap!) but it was worth it just for the free soda.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.
Any idea how much the wholesale cost is to your regional grocery or convenience store chain that buys them by the thousands? (Having never worked in such a capacity I haven't the faintest). Just wondering how much margin Pepsi has in the long run.
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....