To be honest, I'd rather have you, Jacques, be the recipient of my personal information than some random guy with the clear intent of selling that information. I don't even know you!
At the same time, I'm a pretty skeptical guy, and any domain name of www.freeproductx.com screams of fake and phony to me. Anyone that submits their information there, especially from the more technically savvy HN crowd, needs to take a look at what they are trying to accomplish. I do have to give you credit, the site does look amazingly legit, though Google does tend to use minimalistic themes so the time taken shouldn't be too involved. And because I am skeptical, the nameservers aren't all that convincing: NS1.MATTHEIJ.COM :)
There were more than enough hints that this was a prank that even a cursory inspection would show the truth, and that was a conscious decision.
It would have been fairly easy to make it a lot more resilient against that but we figured that by making it this plain those that fell for it would know that they had failed to do due diligence before entering all that data.
A simple whois would have been enough, as would have been a google search for 'second chrome notebook contest' or anything else like it. Google consistently refers to the device as a 'notebook', the site used 'laptop' in the domain but notebook elsewhere, the site was not hosted on a google IP range and so on.
At the same time, I'm a pretty skeptical guy, and any domain name of www.freeproductx.com screams of fake and phony to me. Anyone that submits their information there, especially from the more technically savvy HN crowd, needs to take a look at what they are trying to accomplish. I do have to give you credit, the site does look amazingly legit, though Google does tend to use minimalistic themes so the time taken shouldn't be too involved. And because I am skeptical, the nameservers aren't all that convincing: NS1.MATTHEIJ.COM :)