About 7 months after I got my mac mini, the nasty slot-loading pioneer DVD drive could no longer detect that a disk was loaded. Replaced it with an external. So I'm not too impressed with the hardware quality. About equal to the PC I owned that I didn't build.

The first site's address to be "discovered" by fans was given in highlighted letters on a tour t-shirt. From there, further "codes" were solved and those lead to other sites, all related to NIN and the album.

I was reading about this the other day, and it's pretty cool. Usually when a company makes one of these fictional promo websites, it's lame, but somehow Trent and friends have caught the rabid fan interest. The clues are involved and difficult (running an MP3 from a USB drive through a spectrograph, WTH), and if anyone else had done it, no one would have even noticed that the promo campaign existed.

All for what seems to be a concept album (normally derided by everyone but progrock fans) (but not me, I like them).

Here is the site I came across that describes it, gives links to the various sites, and shows how the sites were discovered: http://ninwiki.com/Year_Zero_Research.

And some of the sites are pretty neat timecuberrific web design.