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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
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.
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.
...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...
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.
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
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
...but unfortunately this bottle cap is too small to hold it. - Fermat
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
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.
I tested the "crack" at work when I bought a 20 oz Diet Pepsi at the cafeteria, and accurately predicted that the bottle I had purchased was a winner. However, it has to look fishy to others when you're standing there holding the bottle at a funny angle, so I've refrained from actually trying to capitalize on it.
I could kill you, sure, but I could only make you cry with these words
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
But then ebay will yank the auctions, because the numbers do not belong to you, they belong to Pepsi.
hear that, all your numbers are belong to Pepsi. don't try any funny stuff, like making up your own numbers, or "adding" or "dividing". They'll get you... get you, I say!
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!
No, it's too hard to print the entire winning number on the bottom of a cork.
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
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 think someone should start a business selling CDs full of random numbers.
Now stop right here.
Anyone who thinks that the Pepsi/ iTMS 100,000,000 song give-away is charity needs some remediation.
Apple & Pepsi aren't being nice to anyone.
The whole iTMS sweepstakes, just like all sweepstakes, are to entice you ... the consumer ... to drink more Pepsi (or purchase/ consume a product). It just so happens that you're enticement here is a 33% chance of a free song.
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
I drink Pepsi like water, and friends give me their caps at school, so I'm already over the 200 cap limit. Really.
Maybe Pepsi should be giving away a free diabetes exam instead.
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!
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.
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.
for the next front page writeup at slashdot we have:
"WATER H4X0R3D... found to be wet" and
"GRASS P0WN3D.. GREEN ENSUES"
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.
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 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!
"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.
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.
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).
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.
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
The problem is that they are NOT fraudulent numbers. They are REAL tops from REAL bottles.
The only difference might be in that the ODDS are that the person winning IS going to redeem it...
--
Time is on my side
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.
359 7-11 employees are going through their Pepsi stock and taking out all the winners.
... (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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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....