Worst. Puzzle. Ever.
rondam.blogspot.com
rondam.blogspot.com
However, the whole part of this post about extortion is kind of silly. How many of these have been sold? A thousand or so? Yeah, that must be a very valuable database of information they're keeping. Any company looking to target a rich demographic could advertise at a country club. Why cook up a hairbrained scheme surrounding a puzzle?
I doubt their business model is based on selling personal information. If I had to guess, I'd say it's based on huge profit margins from selling a silly aluminum sphere.
Are they telemarketing to a planet that I don't know about? Wouldn't that be hundreds of billions?
Are they buying lots of duplicates or something like that, then combining all the info themselves?
oops.
Nope, it's just a crappy puzzle from a company without a lot of respect for its customers.
Names and numbers on their own are incredibly valuable.
Names and numbers that you know exactly the demographic they come from, are gold mines.
I can tell you that some run of the mill name and number can easily be worth $1.
Gauging the fact that he assumes their target audience is rich (which I doubt this is the case), we at least know it is a very specific type of people. This is as close to texas tea as it gets for telemarketers.
First, you know hardly anything about these people. At best you have a guess about their income. You don't know age or occupation or education level. (Not to mention a large number of the names are probably bogus -- I would certainly fill out bogus data.) Realistically, you'd have to overlay it with data from other sources to make it usable to anyone besides, perhaps, other companies selling overpriced puzzles.
I can get much complete and valuable demographics for much less than $1 each. (Female C-Level executives in the marketing industry? $200 per thousand).
Like I said, it's not a conspiracy. It's just a junky puzzle.
I go with the "crappy puzzle from a clueless company" explanation.
These names/numbers aren't. Granted lots of people use bogus names and numbers, but the vast majority aren't going to that purchase an item of this value.
Yes, before you say it, I realize that nobody here does, and nobody you know does, and blah blah blah.
In the real world, most people do. I wouldn't be in business if they didn't.
I'm going to go with a crappy response, from a clueless person.
The conspiracy theories and moaning about why they'd want your name and address is just silly. Companies like having contact details :/
When the author suggested they were selling the user database on to marketeers I thought I'd stumbled upon theonion.
Lets say they had a customer database of 1000 names, addresses, phone numbers. I'd expect they could sell that for £50 maximum. It doesn't make any economic sense whatsoever.
You're right about companies liking to have contact details - every product seems to come with some kind of registration card - but until now I've never heard of a manufacturer actively withholding the instructions required to use the product unless you are willing to send it in.
They probably thought having the instructions online would be easier than printing. Especially if there were any mistakes. Then they likely thought they should protect them so not everyone can view them, only purchasers. Then they likely thought they may as well take contact details in case they need to make people aware of faults/errors/updates etc.
Creating a registration system, taking steps to only provide instructions to those that register - all of that has a cost. I doubt this company would incur a cost unless they considered it an investment.
The "solution" to the puzzle is basically the way Lisa and Homer accidentally discover the secret of the Orb of Isis in this episode.
It's basically a crap puzzle based on an in-joke that only people who had seen this particular episode would be aware of. The conspiracy theory stuff seems unwarranted. For example:
> [U]nsurprisingly, it would not let me register twice, saying "That serial number is already registered under a different email address." If there's a benign explanation for that, I can't think what it could be.
Crippling the product for customers who bought it second hand is really annoying, but it's not proof of a criminal conspiracy to harvest registration data and sell it. It's standard business practice in many otherwise legitimate industries (e.g. computer games).
And I thought that puzzle was stupid; though, probably because I solved it in seconds.
It takes quite a bit of energy to turn an ordinary object into a serious scam. Yet seems this kind of thing appears more and more. It seems that ordinary manufacturers have taken a clue from Nigerian scam artists.
"Extortion", "blackmail", the use of these words is pure hysteria.
I'm reminded of a friend of mine, another Internet privacy nut, who posted on his blog that these car insurance websites are a scam, they don't save you money. Turned out he'd registered with a false name and address... If the website couldn't credit score him, of course it would give him a bad quote!
In this case, I don't find out that I have to turn over my personal information until after I've paid for the product, and after I break the seal so I can no longer return it. And there is a penalty for not turning over my information: I don't get the instruction manual. It is certainly a mild form of extortion, but it is extortion nonetheless.
Secondly, you have statutory rights. That little EULA is meaningless and everyone knows it, hell there's a bloke on GMTV nearly every morning banging on about consumer rights. If the product's not fit for purpose then that's that.
No, physical harm is not a necessary element of extortion. All that is needed is a threat of harm. In this case, the threat of harm is to deny the customer access to the manual for the product they bought and can no longer return.
It is certainly not the most serious extortion ever perpetrated. But it is extortion nonetheless.
Of course they want your information, there is a very select target demographic that could be suckered in with such an expensive puzzle. It would be nice to have those addresses for new product releases and introductions. His cleverness just came off as annoying and somewhat done up, down rate this please.