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The only way out of it I can think of would be: if the site could prove that some number of people, greater than 45, were hitting that specific query on that specific page, then vacuously, they could say that any number of people between 1 and 45 were also looking at the offer.

But then, why wouldn't they just display "at least 45 people" or the exact number? I'm struggling to find some way of doing this which could be any stupider (`view_notification_random` ??) than what we see.



The source code literally calls Math.random. I hope that defence wouldn’t fly in court, even if accidentally true.


Always get in the seat of the defense.

I would absolutely have made a few headless browsing bots masquarading as users just incase this scenario occurred

Look your honor the logs say other users, “people”, were looking regardless of our random function


Would admitting to gaming those numbers make your defence somehow stronger? Or would you withhold that information, and perjure yourself?


Depends on the charge and the consequences of those charges


Ah yes the classic legal principle of "two wrongs makes a right".


The legal principle of custom tailoring your defense based on what the charge and consequence is, after covering your ass based on what the potential charges and consequences are

Thats the literal theme of this website’s headlines where you been


My thought (giving them benefit of the doubt) was that perhaps they knew that somewhere in the vicinity of 28-45 had been looking recently, but not with per-minute confidence. So they fix that range and then randomly pick something from that range to display on each page load. But that is giving them a lot of benefit!


Maybe, then to be truthful you can display "Approx. 28-45 people are viewing this"


“But..” stammers the dev “I have no real way of knowing just how many people are looking at this offer.”

“But in Sprint Planning round 4 you told me the API is ready” responds the PO sternly. “Sprint ends tomorrow. I gave you the story. You committed to the goal. Them’s the rules.”

“Ok, Ok. Tell you what, I’ll make something work and we’ll write a follow up story to make this right. Does that please you, mighty Owner of Product?”




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