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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! ;)
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.
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.
I suspect not, but I'm sure it could produce music of the same quality as most of the stuff produced today.
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".
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
Most likely, no.
The majority of Pepsi drinkers probably don't care about the promotion.
Those who do will win. Those who don't care won't win and won't care that they didn't win.
The tunes go to the people who want them, and more or less everyone is happy.
I'd say this would hold true if anywhere under 10% of Pepsi drinkers wanted the iTunes songs. Once you get past that, you wind up having massive inventories of losing bottles nobody wants and things turn ugly fast.
But if that's the case, it's Pepsi that loses, not Apple. Apple has no liability for Pepsi's inventory problems or lack of same.
D
Eventually...yes...but maybe not before the contest ends.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
...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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
"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!
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).
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.
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.
...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..."
There are 10 alphanumeric characters in these codes, so around 36^10 different possible codes. If there are 100 million winning numbers, then about 1 in 30 million of them is going to be a winner. I would say that it would take quite a long time to brute force a 1 in 30 million code, considering that you have to wait for the website to respond to each request. Its fair to say that the contest would be over by the time you succeeded, and the time and bandwidth you wasted would be worth more than the 99 cents worth of free music (which you could just as easily download for free).
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.