MagiCan | Hacker News Reader

MagiCan

en.wikipedia.org

181 pointsLammy86 comments

It was worse than that.[1] One can was opened by cabin staff on an American Airlines flight. They weren't sure what it was, so they assumed the worst, a bomb. The plane made an emergency landing.

They'd succeeded in angering a customer who bought millions of cans a year.

[1] http://archive.is/gsl4f

To anyone on 1.1.1.1 who can't resolve archive.is, add this line to your hosts file:

151.106.9.30 archive.is

Ugh, why can't 1.1.1.1 resolve archive.is?

1.1.1.1 doesn't provide EDNS information, and the archive.is admin has decided that dealing with dns queries without this field is difficult/annoying and simply returns an invalid result.

That's not accurate, they use the information to combat abuse.

EDIT: Why the downvotes?

To offer an honest answer to an honest question:

Coming to this a couple of hours later I don't perceive what you're saying to be any different to the parent. 'Difficult/annoying to deal with' could easily match 'used to combat abuse'. An assume-good-faith reading of both of these looks the same to me. I'd guess you were downvoted for the "That's not accurate" bit.

I think this is more of a “yes and”, and you could have brought it up that way rather than as a “No”.

Do you have a pointer to how they use it to combat abuse? All I've ever read from the archive.is people is that they use EDNS to return geographically-close machines.

Regardless, it's a PITA and I've been avoiding archive.is links for a while now because of it.

I'm not sure I should say, but there are people who use legal means to take down their own material and cause trouble to archive.is. The DNS thing is to avoid leaking the servers' location, roughly.

Because archive.is uses DNS load balancing based on EDNS information which includes a user's IP address, and returns invalid results if that information is not present, while cloudflare's DNS hides EDNS information out of respect for the user's privacy.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317

Notably they return invalid results for queries without EDNS information from only Cloudflare.

Is Cloudflare's implementation somehow different, or is it an explicit blacklist of some kind?

They blacklist Cloudflare for petty reasons

Alternatively, nextdns.io can anonymise the EDNS client subnet so you can browse sites like archive.is without giving out a real ip address.

Perhaps cloudflare could do something similar.

It seems silly to give out fake information to work around a stubborn site with a vendetta. I think it makes sense to provide a distinction between no information and information instead of providing incorrect information.

Can’t they just send phony information that indicates the region the resolver is in?

"a flight attendant who couldn’t pour the liquid out of a Coke Magican suspected it had a bomb in it."

I don't blame them for being on edge considering the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing was barely more than a year old and fresh on everyone's minds.

Being on edge is fine but landing the plane and traumatizing everyone on board because flight attendants are unfamiliar with a dud can of coke? Why would the attendant immediately assume there was an inside job to blow up the plane? Did they instead think a random passenger rigged a can of coke and slipped it into their beverage cart before the flight? If you were on that plane, you just had otherwise legitimate figures of authority telling you that you are likely to blow up and have your life ended at any moment for however many minutes it took to land and disembark.

Good grief. Just thinking about this for a minute makes it clear that they shouldn't have prematurely landed the plane. This is an example of the "zero tolerance" mindset that ignores all collateral damage in pursuit of some goal which is often unobtainable (safety).

I don’t think it’s an unrealistic assumption. If somebody can sneak a device into the lavatory then why couldn’t they sneak a device into the beverage cart right next to the lavatory?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Airlines_Flight_434

So lets say I was really really thirsty, somewhere on the road in the middle of nowhere... and I stopped at a gas stop, bought myself a really really cold, refreshing coca cola, drive on, 10 minutes later decide to open it.. and a dollar would pop out? So i'd waste my time at the station/store, waste my time at another, all for 1 dollar?

This was my first thought. If you'd stopped for a drink, because you really wanted a drink, you'd be more than a little annoyed to get some small cash prize and no drink when you opened it. One could probably curb their anger if they won 1k-100k. I feel like this was their biggest mistake here, not just putting Coca Cola in the can.

EDIT: According to the advert it could be up to $500 in a can.

In the worst case scenario, you could consider the $1.00 a refund.

Except in places that charge a tax and $0.05-0.10 can deposit.

Though a can of coke wasn't $1.00 30 years ago, I might still be annoyed at a $1.00 prize for a $0.50 can.

On the other hand, the story itself would be worth more than $0.50.

Correct - I remember the MagiCan promotion. At the time (1990), a $1 can of Coke would be far above the norm.

(Later, in 1993, being charged the princely sum of $0.85 for a can of Coke triggered Michael Douglas' breakdown in the the movie "Falling Down", as it didn't leave enough change from a dollar for him to use the payphone. The past truly is a foreign country.)

It was still a dumb promotion. I was packing a can of coke with my lunch pretty much every day at the time, and if I'd opened one at the jobsite and discovered nothing drinkable, just a dollar (and no easy way to spend that dollar to buy a new coke), I'd have had some harsh words for the coca-cola company.

This assumes that you won't get another MagiCan at the next store. :)

Or a soggy, foul smelling dollar.

At least nobody died, unlike this competing sugar water promotion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Number_Fever

Don't forget disfiguring Michael Jackson in a pyrotechnic accident while filming a commercial, leading directly to his drug issues and two decades of publically-acceptable body-shaming about his nose and other issues: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/pepsi-nearly-kille...

"Jackson underwent a series of surgeries to fix his burns. The hair on his head reportedly never grew back, forcing him to wear a wig. The accident has been pinpointed as the start of a string of plastic surgeries that would come to define Jackson’s life and image, the medication he took to ease the pain becoming a life-long crutch."

That's really interesting. I had never heard of that before.

The fact that you’d never heard of that shows the power of good PR firms.

More likely it shows the fact that I was born in the late 1980s and Michael Jackson had fallen mostly out of favor by the time I had any wherewithal about pop stars.

That was a wild ride of reading,

>"They formed a consumer group, the 349 Alliance, which organized a boycott of Pepsi products, and held rallies outside the offices of PCPPI and the Philippine government. Most protests were peaceful, "

....

> "but three PCPPI employees were killed by a grenade thrown into a warehouse in Davao,[13] and a mother and child were killed in Manila on February 13, 1993, by a grenade thrown at a Pepsi truck."

What the hell

The Philippines is a former US colony and inherited many things from them, including liberal gun laws.

Recent HN submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23488462

> "We are winding [the promotion] down early. There is the impression we don't like among our consumers that there is a problem with the promotion."

Do they teach this in marketing school or do you pick up this kind of passive, responsibility-avoidance on the job?

"Marc A. Franklin, a professor at Stanford University's law school and an authority on product liability, said that anyone who drank the liquid could make a strong product-liabiity case.

''All he would have to do is hire an attorney, sue the Coca-Cola Company, and he would win,'' said Mr. Franklin, the author of a standard textbook on personal-injury law. ''The only question is how much he would win.''"

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/24/business/problems-pop-up-...

As a company, you NEVER admit to problems; this opens you up to lawsuits, class-action ones that can end up costing hundreds of millions.

They leave it up to a court to decide if there was a problem.

I think the closest you get to an admission of fault is the language used in recalls, and even in those the language will be carefully chosen and reviewed by lawyers. They will NEVER say anything like "the battery in this product has ballooned up and exploded, grounding planes and burning children". At best they go "There may be an issue with the battery in this product", and that's not even the language they use, just what I vaguely remember.

My all time favorite is "Mistakes were made"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made

Check out the advert for the MagiCan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBCKnhFwE_4

"If you see anything other than coke, don't drink it!"

I'm not sure I'd want my customers to associate my product with a "foul-smelling liquid."

I never understood why they didn't fill the sealed container with regular coke anyway.

Probably because they were using well-circulated currency for their lower prizes ($5, $10, etc...), and they were afraid of contamination as the prize appears to be touching the liquid itself.

A little extra cocaine wouldn't impact Coke though.

Since they specifically don't want people to drink it (contamination, perhaps), how would that get them closer to the objective?

Weight. You need to approximate the weight of a full can using less liquid.

Tell that to the Coors Brewing Company!

Beer and soda cans used to have removable ring-tab openers that people would drop into the can before drinking, so they could accidentally swallow it and slice up their digestive system. If they didn't just drop them on the ground to slice up people's feet.

http://westerndigs.org/ring-tab-beer-cans-are-now-officially...

>The ring-tab design began to be phased out in 1975, after injuries were caused by people swallowing the metal tabs. It was replaced with a new modification called the StaTab, which used a flange of aluminum on the lid as a lever to press down on the sealed opening, a design that’s still in use today.

https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-switch-from-pull-t...

>They were a litter problem but they also hurt people who would (stupidly) drop them into the can and then choke on them, or drop the on the ground to get stepped on. The sharp edges ehre just asking for trouble. Also they were generally more difficult to open than pop-tops are.

As a kid, I loved the ring tabs. You could break them apart and use the tab part to fling the ring pretty far.

Soda companies are basically marketing / advertising machines. Their products are mostly worthless, as in, if all Pepsi and Coke disappeared from the world suddenly, nothing whatsoever would be lost. Except, eventually, an untold amount of pounds of fat in the belly of their former customers.

So it's no surprise their marketing department go wild with completely ludicrous ideas.

Silly question maybe...

Why didn't they just put the prize in a sterile packet and fill it with Coke like normal?!

Seems like it would solve pretty much all the complaints and issues!

Sounds like it'd be risky. Either it's small enough that it might come out while someone is drinking, posing a potential choking hazard, or it's big enough that people would need to open the can. Want to bet on what the accident rate would be for kids trying to cut open a can?

Not sure I'd be happy to find something floating inside a can...

Plus how do you get it out? The opening of the can is pretty sharp, could be dangerous especially with children

i think the US has some laws that forbid non-edible products being embedded in the middle of foodstuffs. IIRC that's the reason kinder surprise eggs are banned.

I'd be surprised. Bags of toys in sugary cereals is a mainstay of the breakfast cereal industry

That's not inside the food. It's next to the food.

I suppose you could argue the same thing for this drink too, but I imagine it was just hard to get the spring loaded mechanism to be sterile and food safe.

> To make the cans feel and weigh normal, and prevent people from easily finding the prize cans, a sealed area within the cans was filled with a mixture of chlorinated water and a foul-smelling substance to discourage drinking.

How does the foul-smelling substance prevent easily finding the prize cans? I don't get it.

Did that fluid actually touch the money? If not, why not make that fluid just also cola?

My understanding is that this was a separate compartment that existed to provide weight and "slosh" as if there was cola inside. I presume the didn't use Cola because it was a sealed compartment and wasn't expected to be opened, so why waste the resources?

The water was used to prevent easily finding cans. Chlorine was added to prevent muck growing in the water. A foul-smelling substance was added to discourage drinking the water.

> How does the foul-smelling substance prevent easily finding the prize cans? I don't get it.

The fluid was used to artificially weight the can so people couldn't easily detect. The foul smell was simply to prevent not-so-bright consumers from trying to drink the fluid.

> Did that fluid actually touch the money? If not, why not make that fluid just also cola?

The fluid was sealed in the can and segregated from the spring loaded payload (money or certificates). So, two chambers: one with fluid for weight decoy, and a second for the payload prize. As for why they didn't just use cola vice chlorinated water, it could have been a number of reasons (e.g. corossivity of cola on the sealed chamber material, cost at scale), but if I had to guess it was that the magican's we produced in a separate facility using separate tooling than the cola filled cans.

I have no idea why I'm spending my time writing this, but I do appreciate the post as I vividly remember being enthralled with the prospect of money popping out of a coke can as a child and wanting to then rip-open the can to see how it worked. Though this never happened for me or any of my friends who were pretty avid coke drinkers back in the day :_(

> I have no idea why I'm spending my time writing this, but I do appreciate the post as I vividly remember being enthralled with the prospect of money popping out of a coke can as a child and wanting to then rip-open the can to see how it worked. Though this never happened for me or any of my friends who were pretty avid coke drinkers back in the day :_(

+1 on all counts. I still remember this promotion vividly from my time as a kid. In spite of the mishaps, it was pretty effective marketing.

and Kinder Eggs are not allowed?!

I've done a bit of googling and if I'm reading this correct it was always forbidden (or as long as the US Code has been around) to have products containing "a non-nutritive object", but it was re-emphasized for Kinder Surprises specifically after they investigated some imported ones. This was in 1997, while the MagiCan was 1990.

Anyway, reading the text there, I'm fairly sure that this thing would also have been illegal under that code.

my understanding is that the non-food item may not be enclosed by the food, because someone could try to take a large bite and swallow the non-food item.

the coke prize cans don't seem to violate that as the non-food item and the liquid are separate.

lucky they didn't outlaw cherries, plums or peaches.

Isn't that why kinder eggs have a rather large plastic shell that contains the toy? I haven't seen one in years, but from my memory, even an adult would be unable to consume - or swallow enough to choke on - the plastic shell.

right, you'd have to wolf it down believing that it must all be edible.

it is conceivable that someone takes a large bite that causes the inner container to open up and let small pieces of plastic fall out into the mouth.

but the law was not written for kinder eggs. i can imagine much more dangerous products.

i believe in germany they approach this with better product testing. instead of blanket rules for what is allowed and what not, individual products are tested for safety, and get regulated based on that.

This might also be the reason why they used non-potable liquid (even if it was harmless).

i think so too, but selling a non-consumable in a package that claims to be a consumable is also a problem, so i am not sure they thought this through

>Pepsi's promotion also suffered from negative publicity when it was discovered that if two specific Cool Cans were stacked in a certain way, the designs appeared to spell out the word "SEX".

Makes me wonder why there was never a moral panic around Post Alpha-Bits breakfast cereal or Campbell's Alphabet Soup.

The allegation toward Pepsi was that the can design was intentionally done so that—when six-packs were stacked in the grocery store—some portion of them would line up to spell "SEX".

There was (still is?) a mini-moral panic around subliminal advertising, and Pepsi trying to do that wasn't well received.

You can judge for yourself here: https://i.imgur.com/H1OV1iC.jpg

I'm not sure Alpha-Bits or the soup have had labels with naughty words on them.

I’d have to see more of the can design but this looks weak to me. The 'S' and 'E' are each one color. The ‘X’ is both red and blue, and seems to only exist because part of a 'P'(?) intersects the background. But what do I know?

Then how do you explain the fact that you just bought a case of Pepsi, despite not having done so in years?

But yeah, I'm leaning toward this being a coincidence rather than a masterful scheme to juice sales. The 'X' isn't even fully-formed. It is a "P", and the can designer was probably just plonking down random letters from "PEPSI" in the background.

This is funny, I don't remember it at all from my youth, but they mention the Monsters of the Gridiron promo by Coca-Cola, and I remember brute-forcing that number to guess a Super Bowl winner. I never followed through because you need to actually mail in your cap to claim the prize :(

The Monsters one was a halloween promo, and I still kind of vaguely remember the haunting vincent price talk track when you call the 800 number, but I'm sure i've constructed that memory :)

When I buy a can of coke I don't want a stupid MagiCan.

I wouldn't mind! Pre-owned, opened $5 MagiCans are going for $650 - $800 on eBay now.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Ultra-Rare-MagiCans-COCA-COLA-Class...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1990-MagiCan-Promotional-Coke-Can/2...

While you can get an opened can of Billy Beer for less than a buck.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Billy-Beer-Billy-Carter-Beer-Can-Pu...

But you still would have been better off investing that $5 from the MagiCan in Apple stock.

They are listed for those prices, but those listings have been around for a while; the $650 one has been listed for at least 2 months, the $800 one for at least 8 months, and neither is sold. It would be more informative to find listings where the can actually got sold, there's no evidence here that people are willing to pay $650-800 for these (in fact, I'd say there is evidence to the contrary)

You can filter for recently sold listings on eBay. There are zero relevant results for "coca cola magican" under the "sold" filter. The evidence demonstrates nobody is buying MagiCans on eBay.

I bet this is what Donald Norman has in his nightmares

I'll remember this whenever someone waxes lyrical about the subversive 'genius' of their New Coke campaign.

I remember seeing the commercials for this. I never saw one in person though.

    >Be blind.
    >Buy can of delicious Coca-Cola.
    >Crack open that cool crisp refreshing beverage.
    >Sip from that cool, sweet, BLURGRGH!!!

is that you anonymous?

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