[thisisfmu]

Good story. Wouldn't a better hack have been to draw input values in both countries, then communicate this input to the other location and XOR the results to determine the final outcome, so the drawing will actually have happened in both territories? This would also scale to n>2 countries.

[StavrosK]

> so the drawing will actually have happened in both territories?

Or neither, depending on your viewpoint.

[ryandvm]

Laws do not work that way!

[You don't get to use a Morbo reference every day on Hacker News.]

[thisisfmu]

i did go to law school and am thus reasonably well aware of how laws work ;)

having no specific knowledge about sweepstakes regulations, i does not appear completely unreasonable to me that a random drawing in each territory completely changing the outcome might satisfy the requirements.

as a practical matter, when $1m in extra payouts are at stake it could be reasonable to accept a fine from regulators while at the same time avoiding civil liability to participants.