[HN Gopher] Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse...
___________________________________________________________________
Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for
help
Author : parisidau
Score : 1448 points
Date : 2025-12-13 04:55 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hey.paris)
(TXT) w3m dump (hey.paris)
| iamnothere wrote:
| This is one of the worst stories I've seen yet. It sounds like
| they were "all in" on Apple with zero backups, which shows some
| questionable judgment, but still, this sort of thing shouldn't be
| possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money
| with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can't
| keep your money.) Maybe hosts should be required to mail you a
| hard drive with your data on it when they close your account.
| Regardless, never assume cloud data is in safe hands.
| parisidau wrote:
| I do have backups of most data, including photos, but there are
| things you can't backup like shared actively edited iWork
| documents, and things like that. I can rebuild from it, but
| it's still a shitshow and my very expensive devices are
| bricked.
| holigot wrote:
| What a nightmare - hope everything will end well.
|
| Concerning all those 'bricked' devices it would be really
| nice to get some more details concerning the 'block'.
|
| Can you use your iPhone to call someone, can you use your
| MacBook overall? Login, use Apple Passwords(!), looking at
| photos within photos app and so on...
|
| Or are all those devices completely locked?
| xigoi wrote:
| > there are things you can't backup like shared actively
| edited iWork documents
|
| If they're shared, surely someone else can still access them?
| Aachen wrote:
| What's an iWord and why can't it be backed up?
| thih9 wrote:
| Nobody said iWord.
| nickhodge wrote:
| When you are an Apple Developer, as the poster states - it goes
| deeper and more destructive.
| 0manrho wrote:
| > which shows some questionable judgment
|
| Convenience is a hell of a drug.
| st3fan wrote:
| Great victim blaming there buddy.
| beeflet wrote:
| To what extent is the victim their own perpetrator? They
| allow the status quo to succeed by endorsing it. They voted
| for this with $30,000 of their own money, and they will
| likely vote again.
| wiseowise wrote:
| So taking a wrong turn should result in you being mugged,
| raped and subsequently killed because apparently there was
| some "safe", but less convenient, passage? You're not
| helping OSS by making claims like these.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| Obviously you're being facetious, that is not at all what
| that poster is claiming.
|
| While I agree that entering a dark alley shouldn't result
| in ill effects, if ill effects happen in said dark alley
| it is still worth the discussion to remind people to stay
| out of dark alleys in today's day and age (or until the
| root problem, whatever it is, is improved).
|
| Pretending that it is OK to enter dark alleys and forcing
| blame elsewhere will continue to have people unwittingly
| enter dark alleys.
| lapcat wrote:
| > While I agree that entering a dark alley shouldn't
| result in ill effects, if ill effects happen in said dark
| alley it is still worth the discussion to remind people
| to stay out of dark alleys in today's day and age (or
| until the root problem, whatever it is, is improved).
|
| This is not a dark alley. It's the main street. It's the
| world we live in. iPhone has more than half the market
| share in the US and well over a billion users worldwide.
| Moreover, Apple, Google, and Microsoft collectively
| monopolize consumer operating systems on both mobile and
| desktop. Try going into a retail store and buying a
| computing device that is _not_ running iOS, Android,
| macOS, or Windows. That 's the reality for most people.
|
| The dark alleys are the non-mainstream options that
| hardly anyone knows about.
| chongli wrote:
| To further stretch the analogy: the main street is now
| full of potholes, sinkholes, and even landmines. The root
| problem is that, in exchange for convenience, we as a
| society have ceded too much power to these large
| businesses and we are now paying the price for it. We
| have bought the proverbial monorail [1] and now we are
| stuck with it.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taJ4MFCxiuo
| lapcat wrote:
| > The root problem is that, in exchange for convenience,
| we as a society have ceded too much power to these large
| businesses and we are now paying the price for it.
|
| I don't know why some people have made "convenience" into
| a dirty word. Almost everything we do is for convenience.
| You could live in a remote log cabin with no electricity
| and grow/hunt your own food, separating yourself from
| most of society, but that wouldn't be convenient or
| pleasant.
|
| Individual consumers have very little power over the
| market. There's a collective action problem, which is why
| governments and regulation exist... or should exist. The
| way I see it, the root problem is a massive failure by
| (corrupt) governments to protect consumer rights.
| chongli wrote:
| How do governments become corrupt in the first place
| though, if they don't start that way? It's collective
| action problems all the way down.
|
| Perhaps the root problem is that we've blown too far past
| Dunbar's number to be able to deal with the societies we
| live in. All of these systems we've contrived to mitigate
| the trust problem are full of holes.
|
| As for convenience, that carries a tradeoff. All of the
| technology and all of the revolutions we've had
| (agricultural, industrial, information technology) have
| come with these tradeoffs. Even the log cabin has
| downsides compared to the nomadic hunter-gatherer
| lifestyle.
| lapcat wrote:
| > How do governments become corrupt in the first place
| though, if they don't start that way?
|
| I think the US government did start that way. Maybe not
| "corrupt" as such, but the United States was founded by
| plutocrats and was clearly designed to protect the
| minority of plutocrats against mass democracy.
|
| > Even the log cabin has downsides compared to the
| nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
|
| Yes, but I'd say the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle
| has even greater downsides, and our current state of
| convenience is in many ways a vast improvement over the
| precarious existence of our distant ancestors.
| wiseowise wrote:
| There are 1.5 BILLIONS of iOS users. Is that what you
| call a dark alley? This is a broad day, city center
| attack.
| rvnx wrote:
| So many asslickers of Apple here, blaming the victim when
| clearly anyone could be the next victim. The same issue
| with clouds like Google Cloud that can charge you 100k
| USD tomorrow just because of someone doing a loop of wget
| on a cdn endpoint.
|
| The real solution is to have a neutral, efficient and
| formal process under supervision of regulators to have
| such case escalated and handled.
|
| I already see all the tech-bros coming: "you see it was
| not an issue, they reinstated the account after you
| posted" while ignoring there are silent victims.
| csomar wrote:
| That's not what happened here though. The victim _paid_
| the muggers... so as you can see something is very wrong
| in this relationship.
| xigoi wrote:
| More like taking a deal with the devil and then being
| surprised that you lost your soul.
| jbs789 wrote:
| Victim blaming is simply a way to feel comfortable that it
| won't happen to you. The takeaway should be that it CAN
| happen to you.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| read the TOS before agreeing
| left-struck wrote:
| Let's be real, the number of people who read it approaches
| zero.
|
| Not only does no one read it but it seems like they are
| intentionally designed to be difficult to read.
|
| They are written by lawyers for lawyers, not for common
| people to read.
| fmajid wrote:
| LLMs actually do a good job at reading legalese, this may
| finally reverse the trend of corporations using
| inpenetrable language to screw over customers.
|
| Of course, that doesn't help in the US with its vicious
| Supreme Court endorsing the most blatant abuses under
| cover of binding aritration.
| hollow-moe wrote:
| You don't even have to actually read them, just assume
| the worst case for the customer and you'll be right.
| wiseowise wrote:
| And then what? Go to Google, Samsung, any other Android
| vendor and read the same TOS?
|
| There should be laws to protect people, instead of blaming
| victims.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Every single cloud storage provider has a generic cop-out
| clause in their TOS that allows them to lock you out of
| your account for no reason at all, with no legal obligation
| to provide any proper justification.
|
| This leaves you with just about zero cloud storage
| solutions that you can use.
|
| Yes, yes, you can rsync your files to your NAS. Now explain
| that to your non tech-savvy neighbors.
| jbstack wrote:
| > this sort of thing shouldn't be possible any more than a bank
| deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can
| close your account, but they can't keep your money.)
|
| I once had to help a relative sue a bank who had closed his
| account after he refused to answer their very intrusive
| questions (they wanted to know details about distant relatives
| living in another country). They also refused to return his
| money (tens of thousands) and refused to explain why. No amount
| of complaining or escalating made any difference, although we
| did manage to get a nice recording of an employee saying that
| he thought the bank was in the wrong.
|
| It took me issuing court proceedings, plus several more months
| of negotiating with their lawyer, before they finally settled
| out of court. Even then they tried to not pay the court fee,
| and they tried to get us to sign an NDA (I refused to budge on
| both). Altogether, it took 6 months to get the money.
|
| Similar to how people in this thread are talking about
| mitigating reliance on cloud providers (e.g. with offline
| backups), I now do not trust any bank. I avoid being in a
| position where any one bank can ruin my life. That means having
| multiple accounts and spreading my money around.
|
| Luckily for me I have a legal background so when a corp (big or
| small) does this sort of thing to me I don't hesitate to sue
| them. In almost all cases this causes them to "wake up" and
| start taking your issue seriously, in a way that the front line
| customer support reps never do. I recommend this to the author
| of the original post.
| AH4oFVbPT4f8 wrote:
| Which bank?
| csomar wrote:
| _all_ banks. Any bank that can indefinitely freeze your
| money and get away with it will do it. And now that
| everyone is doing it, the reputation damage is minimized.
| AH4oFVbPT4f8 wrote:
| Some banks do things that make you never want to do any
| business with them. Wells Fargo would open
| checking/savings/credit card accounts without their
| customers knowing, then Wells Fargo fired thousands of
| employees as a result of being caught. I will do
| everything possible to never to business with them.
| csomar wrote:
| > I now do not trust any bank.
|
| It baffles me how much this community is opposed to Bitcoin
| (and fails to delimit it from the rest of the crypto-scams on
| going) when, for me, it is existential. When you go through
| 1-2 experiences of bank-freezing and you realize your life is
| literally at stake here, the abstract debates about energy
| consumption or speculative bubbles feel like they come from
| completely misinformed individuals.
|
| It's like watching someone on a rail track arguing not
| knowing what is about to hit them.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| Self custody of cryptocurrency, for the vast majority of
| people, is riskier than putting their money in the bank.
| Most people lack the technical competence to keep their
| crypto secure, and the downside of losing access is much
| more significant. Notice that the stories regarding banks
| go "I had to sue them to get it back". With cryptocurrency,
| in the vast majority of cases, it would instead be "the
| money was gone for good".
| djoldman wrote:
| I'm curious how big the bank was and what country this is in?
|
| It's my understanding that banks really don't want your money
| once they've closed an account, they want you to take it
| back.
|
| Bigger banks, at least in the US, usually do this.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| If they thought you were money laundering, maybe giving it
| back would be a liability.
| trinix912 wrote:
| > It sounds like they were "all in" on Apple with zero backups,
| which shows some questionable judgment
|
| iCloud literally encourages users to opt for storing originals
| only in the cloud. It's marketed as such, it nags you about
| this every now and then, and iCloud is the preinstalled default
| cloud storage on every iPhone. Consider non-techies dealing
| with this too.
| IshKebab wrote:
| You can probably use a GDPR personal information request to get
| photos and data at least. Doesn't help with other stuff you've
| paid for though.
|
| We really need laws for this sort of thing. They should have
| included it in the DMA for gatekeepers.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > this sort of thing shouldn't be possible any more than a bank
| deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can
| close your account, but they can't keep your money.)
|
| To me this is the biggest problem. Just like a bank can decide
| to close your account at any time, it's reasonable that Apple
| (or any business) could do the same. But they can't keep your
| stuff.
|
| You can say "don't be naive and assume your cloud data is
| safe", but in today's world that's like saying "don't keep your
| money in a bank". The reason I pay for iCloud storage is
| because it's supposed to be safe (safer than my local HDD going
| bust or getting lost).
| wombatpm wrote:
| Given how Apple Music has completely fucked up my wife's music
| collection, I can't imagine them being able to unfuck your
| situation at all. So sorry.
| baby wrote:
| oh man, I started with iTunes Match because that's the only
| service that I could use to backup all my MP3s, and now it's
| all messed up and so much music has just disappeared from my
| playlist... so sad.
|
| Unfortunately I still don't know a service I can use that will
| allow me to sync my current MP3s / what I have in Apple Music,
| and export it if I need it. There's really an issue of owning
| data and being able to take it elsewhere :/
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| https://tidal.com ?
| Groxx wrote:
| fwiw: when I've uploaded tracks I've purchased, it almost
| immediately locks them because they're copyrighted...
| because AFAICT it's a feature for _independent musicians_
| to upload their own stuff, not a library backup. all the
| text around it seems to support that interpretation.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| oh that's interesting. i'd tried it several years ago but
| had not tried uploading anything like you did, so had not
| noticed that deficiency (randomly).
| Groxx wrote:
| yea - in retrospect I think it's pretty clear about it
| from the text on the screens... but it surprised me too,
| because the initial UX is designed _exactly_ like every
| other "upload your own music library so you can stream
| it anywhere" feature elsewhere. which is rather strangely
| blind to their own ecosystem, and tbh I don't see the
| purpose of a lightweight "upload your recordings from
| your phone!" feature, artists generally like a bit more
| control? afaict? or they just stream it somewhere without
| any metadata, neither of which seems viable with what
| Tidal's UI supports... but it's pushed in a prominent
| location for every _listener_ on Tidal. surely there isn
| 't anywhere near enough use to justify that... right?
|
| I'm relatively happy with Tidal, but there are definitely
| a number of moments with it that make me sigh and
| internally say "see, this is why Spotify is winning". so
| much of it would be easy to change too, they just don't
| do it.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| maybe they use Spotify themselves!
|
| I've got Spotify as a native app in my 2024 ev and it's
| strange in that it starts songs like 1 second in, all the
| time. very unclear how that happens other than a software
| bug.
| paulrudy wrote:
| Same story here. I'll never go back to Apple Music, even if
| only for streaming. I had hundreds of tracks and albums just
| demolished by something related to iTunes Match, didn't realize
| for months, and didn't have a solid backup system at the time.
| pfooti wrote:
| I have had an apple id problem myself, for the past N years. Mine
| is an old mac.com account, which has my Gmail address as the
| backup email (and the primary one now that mac.com isn't doing
| email anymore). Because of this, I cannot sign up for a new
| account with my Gmail (it is tied to the older mac.com account).
|
| I've managed to reset the password, but I must answer a security
| question to log in. I mean, I answered those security questions
| probably a decade ago and I do not know what they are anymore.
| You can reset your security questions, but to do that you need to
| use an iPhone (last one I owned was a 4) that is still logged in,
| or, answer a security question. Which is as we established, the
| problem.
|
| So every couple of months I log in, try a few other possible
| answers, get them wrong, and get locked out for a bit.
|
| Anyway, I need to get this fixed my march, due to apple being the
| formula one streamer in my country now, so I have to actually
| solve the problem of logging in to my apple account. Or, I guess,
| making another random email just so I can watch f1. Sigh.
|
| But if anyone knows how to reset security questions, I'd love to
| know. I would way rather pay apple actual money than go back to
| torrenting the races.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Add and verify another primary email address.
|
| On a device: Settings > (iCloud user) > Sign-in & Security ->
| (+) {{name}}@gmail.com
|
| If that doesn't work, then use the dot trick..
| y.ourname@gmail.com = yourname@gmail.com.
| rendall wrote:
| > making another random email
|
| _youremail+anystring@gmail.com_ will always redirect to
| _youremail@gmail.com_ Before making a random email address, try
| using _youremail+f1@gmail.com_ or something similar.
| xoa wrote:
| It sounds like you unfortunately have gotten yourself kinda
| stuck, but I very much sympathize. I too have an account dating
| back to iTools, and for a long time it was a major frustration
| that I was stuck with that original email address as
| unchangeable for the Apple ID, unlike newer accounts. However,
| some time in the last, I dunno 3-5 years maybe? I can't
| remember now the exact time I noticed, but after over a decade
| of requests and fading hope Apple actually did allow me to
| change the email address for that Apple ID, which I shifted to
| my own domain. So for anyone else who hasn't checked in a long
| time, worth noting situation might be marginally better now.
|
| Re: "mac.com isn't doing email anymore", all the original
| mac.com email addresses still work fine. Apple has played
| around with various domains (mac.com/me.com/icloud.com) over
| their decades of bumbling with online services but they made
| them all interchangeable for older users, mails to the original
| @mac.com emails still go through. Even originally made aliases
| (they allowed 5 with iTools) still work. Not sure what your
| issue was on that one.
|
| Finally yeah, ""security"" questions are one of those horrible
| legacy anti-patterns that I will cheer to see finally be dead
| and buried. If you try to answer them honestly probably anyone
| can learn it with a bit of online searching, if you go for more
| obscure stuff they're easy to forget defeating the purpose.
| It's really best just to treat them as extra passwords, use
| random alphanumeric values and keep them in your password
| manager same as the password. Apple has also fumbled around
| with recovery over the years, at one point you had options to
| have a manual recovery key you could save but I think that's
| dead and can't set it up after already forgetting. Maybe if you
| go in person to a store with physical ID and evidence, if you
| had payment associated with the account and have that credit
| card for example that might do it.
|
| If you have nothing of value tied to the account though
| probably no reason not to just abandon it.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| It doesn't sound like you use your old Apple account. Why don't
| you abandon it and use a new one?
| baby wrote:
| If Apple engineers read this: I can't sign in into my iCloud
| account from my android phone, it just doesn't work, meaning I
| can't manage my subscription like HBO now that I switched to an
| android phone.
|
| PS: My plan is to wait for Apple to release a folding iPhone to
| move back!
| geekologist wrote:
| That reads as rewarding them for taking your account hostage
| stepquiet wrote:
| You can manage Apple subscriptions using your web browser (no
| Mac/iPhone needed). The subscription management page is:
|
| https://account.apple.com/account/manage/section/subscriptio...
| Beijinger wrote:
| Since your money is gone, I would file a complaint here:
|
| ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission): The
| primary enforcer of gift card laws, ensuring businesses comply
| with the three-year minimum expiry, clear terms, and fair
| practices.
| parisidau wrote:
| Absolutely, but that doesn't solve my immediate issue of my
| devices and accounts, but of course I will do that.
| Beijinger wrote:
| "Beat the Grass to Startle the Snake" (Da Cao Liang She )
|
| You would be better off in the US. Trust me, nothing creates
| bigger fuzz than complaining to financial authorities.
| brnt wrote:
| From the fire into the frying pan.
| bbarnett wrote:
| There are escalative methods to employ in such situations.
|
| In many legal jurisdictions, a 'demand letter' holds weight.
| These can be served by courier, with proof of delivery as
| valid. One aspect of such a letter is a hard, specific time
| by which you will start legal action, along with associated
| additional costs.
|
| You have two paths after the letter. The first is small
| claims court, or normal court. In many places, small claims
| court does not allow lawyers, and the judge will even have to
| explain any confusing terms.
|
| Which means the playing is leveled, including reduced or no
| disclosure requirements, and legal cost assignments. Where I
| am, it's $100 to file.
|
| The goal is to force a fix, at threat of legal consequences.
|
| I am sending an email.
| inkyoto wrote:
| It appears that the only way to reach Apple Customer
| Relations is by way of writing a formal letter to:
|
| Apple Pty Ltd, PO Box A2629, Sydney South NSW 1235
| shermozle wrote:
| Book a date with TASCAT. I haven't used the Tasmanian one but
| in NSW it cost me a couple tens of dollars from memory and I
| got a response in days. Once the case lands with the _LAWYERS_
| who are expensive, it'll get resolved.
| shermozle wrote:
| https://tascat.tas.gov.au/
| inkyoto wrote:
| Civil tribunals in Australia (an equivalent of small claim
| courts in other countries) do not involve lawyers in vast
| majority of cases and encourage self-representation instead.
|
| In fact, the NSW Civil Administrative Tribunal explicitly
| requires the Tribunal's explicit permission for a person to
| be represented by somebody else, including a lawyer.
|
| But tribunal's decision is binding on the commercial entity,
| should it be found at fault and incurs penalties for
| avoidance or non-compliance with the decision.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > do not involve lawyers in vast majority of cases and
| encourage self-representation instead.
|
| Sure, but if it's a corporation, who is going to represent
| the corporation besides a lawyer? In the US, some states
| explicitly do not allow a lawyer and require a different
| officer of the company represent them, but plenty do allow
| lawyers.
|
| If Paris is taking Apple to the tribunal, there's no single
| human equivalent to Paris on Apple's side. This seems like
| the exact sort of situation where a lawyer is approved to
| represent somebody else.
| inkyoto wrote:
| > Sure, but if it's a corporation, who is going to
| represent the corporation besides a lawyer?
|
| Under common law, lawyers (in the US sense) are not
| required on either side in the case of handling a dispute
| or a small claim.
|
| Specifically in Australia, the company would have a
| complaint department, and the case would be dealt with by
| a complaint officer, not a lawyer.
|
| If the scope of the case exceeds the tribunal's
| authority, the case is handled in the state's district
| court or in a federal court for cross-jurisdictional
| matters. The official title of the person representing
| the defendant (e.g. a company) in a courtroom is the
| barrister, but the case documentation and legal advice
| are provided by a solicitor.
| jackvalentine wrote:
| Hi, I'm closely involved in xCAT cases for my Australian
| organisation.
|
| We send an in-house lawyer to represent us at every
| mediation and hearing.
|
| Every complaint that goes to an official body is dealt
| with by the lawyers at that point. Only if they complain
| directly to us does our "complaints department" handle
| it.
| thelittleone wrote:
| You also get things like Stripe with mandatory
| arbitration. The arbitrator is chosen by Stripe.
| Naturally arbitrator wants to keep Stripe as a client.
|
| Stripe terms allow them to hold the funds until
| 'investigation' is concluded but while held, they have
| the right to invest the funds and keep the profit.
| thelittleone wrote:
| It's baffling that gift cards are so popular. You're
| essentially paying to decrease the value of your own money by
| restricting its use and adding an expiration date (and handing
| to someone as a gift as if it's a thoughtful alternative to
| cash).
|
| An even more egregious case is the corporate credit card. The
| company dictates its use exclusively for business expenses, yet
| pushes all the liability onto the employee. The business gets a
| massive, interest-free credit line with absolutely no risk. The
| company gets the float, and the employee gets the bill and the
| potential credit damage if anything goes wrong.
|
| </rant>
| plutokras wrote:
| I still don't get why my friends and family think gifting a
| less liquid form of money is better than just giving cash.
|
| Gift cards are the best proof against the existence of the
| homo economicus, that's for sure.
| immibis wrote:
| Same reason they gift you a book instead of a can of
| petrol. By giving you a gift card, they're forcing you to
| buy something sold at a specific store chain, not to buy
| more petrol.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| It can also be a way to make sure e.g. "fun money" gifts
| are actually spent as intended, getting around things
| like sense of responsibility, overbearing spouses, etc
| making the recipient feel obligated or pressured to spend
| it some other way.
| thebytefairy wrote:
| Because it shows some thoughtfulness. 'I know you like x so
| here's money to spend on that'. Cash looks like you didn't
| bother.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| tbf 95% of the time when I get a gift card these days
| it's Amazon or a big retail chain, that ain't exactly a
| deep cut in the gift department either.
|
| We should probably normalize Chinese Red envelopes
| because honestly I'd take a nice envelope with a hand
| written note and some crisp bills over the annoying gift
| cards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_envelope)
| jotaen wrote:
| It seems OP bought the gift card themselves as a means to top
| up their account balance
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252989). They
| basically used the gift card as an alternative payment
| option.
| Beijinger wrote:
| Sometimes you can buy gift cards with a small discount
| (cash back)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Gift cards are great for companies you don't trust with (up-
| to-date) payment details. Amazon, Google, Apple, whatever
| evil megacorp you can think of, they all have made the news
| with stories like these, and they have proven time and again
| that they will stand by and defend their arbitrary decisions
| in court if they have to, because involving basic human
| intellect in the chain is too much of a fraud risk.
|
| Even if you like their services, who knows what they'll do
| when they have access to your credit card information
| directly. I can completely understand why someone would pay
| for their services with gift cards bought from a well-known,
| respectable store instead.
| g947o wrote:
| This story proves that none of it matters if your money
| along with your account vanish because the megacorp doesn't
| like your gift card for whatever reason.
|
| In fact, it is far worse than paying with a credit card
| directly in terms of risk. At least, when something goes
| wrong (which rarely ever happens), the bank has your back.
| On the other hand, I have seen too many cases where people
| find their gift card codes invalid.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > At least, when something goes wrong (which rarely ever
| happens), the bank has your back.
|
| Not really helpful when your account is the important
| thing though, you can't do a chargeback without your
| account getting banned.
| dimaulupov wrote:
| It is saturday! Guy had a trouble during non-business times and
| advice to make a complaint to ACCC? People who unlock accounts
| do not work on weekends, it is not front line of support who
| works all the time. What happened with giving a chance to
| people (which is Apple consists of) to actually do something
| before complaining to 4 letter agency? Also ACCC will not deal
| with such complaints. It says right on their home page.
| faidit wrote:
| I didn't see a timeline but there were indications that the
| author has been trying to resolve this for much longer than
| one day.
|
| Regulatory agencies can forward complaints to other
| authorities and act based on them even if they can't resolve
| the particular issue for the complainant.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| [flagged]
| parisidau wrote:
| I would like to think you're wrong, but if they fix this,
| you're possibly right. My career is built on Apple
| technologies. I don't love that I'm captured by a vendor, but I
| have a lot of knowledge, and building to that level elsewhere
| is hard.
|
| I just want to keep using my stuff, and getting on with the fun
| things I get to work on. I don't have a strong attachment to
| Apple, I have a strong attachment to the familiar productivity
| I normally have.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| Even if you helped and this is fixed, consider the privileged
| situation you are in to even get this fixed. Most "normal"
| people would be doomed to lose their entire digital life.
| Evangelizing for a Megacorp is dooming more people into
| willing incompetence and dependency.
|
| Reconsider at least that part. You can work with and use
| their products (as I do at work with the GSuite or AWS) but I
| will never recommend or evangelize for them or rely on them
| with things I care about.
| parisidau wrote:
| Totally agree.
| valleyer wrote:
| Send this in an e-mail to tcook@apple.com. He has a team that
| reads for stuff like this and can magically fix issues.
|
| I've had to do it before, also for a gift-card-related problem
| (different from yours), and I was contacted by a member of the
| Apple executive escalations team a couple days later.
| parisidau wrote:
| It's been done, a few days ago. Nothing yet, but here's hoping.
| valleyer wrote:
| Good. Don't be afraid to follow up if they drag their feet.
| Be respectful but persistent. I'm sorry this is happening to
| you. It's a shitty feeling.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I don't see stories anymore from this working. Back when it was
| under Jobs, there were more concessions from his team operating
| the account. And maybe in the early Cook years. Apple has
| trimmed a lot of fat.
|
| I did read about part of the product development org having a
| standup about trending social media cases, and prioritizing
| followup on items that were under public scrutiny.
| kalleboo wrote:
| I have a friend who did this last year after he had a poor
| support experience with AppleCare for his Apple Watch and he
| got a call from Executive support early the next morning
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Good to know. They certainly don't care for emails about my
| dead AirPods Max (flex cable designed to fail after enough
| rotations back and forth)
| valleyer wrote:
| Mine happened earlier this year, FWIW.
|
| Believe me, I have no desire to defend Apple. Their behavior
| absolutely sucks. I just want a good resolution for the
| author of this blog post.
| g947o wrote:
| Care you write it down somewhere and share it?
|
| I imagine it could be helpful to other people in the same
| situation.
| superkuh wrote:
| Getting a special "notice me on social media (like HN)" fix won't
| actually fix the problem with using Apple's systems. It's just a
| temporary reprieve until some other aspect of their control of
| one's life breaks (by accident or indent).
| sho wrote:
| Wow. This is a cautionary tale. I don't think I'd be as
| devastated as this poor chap, but as it grew I realize I've
| allowed my iCloud photo library to become a single copy.
|
| How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a
| full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what's the best
| way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..
| stackghost wrote:
| I simply manually periodically download everything to
| disk/software raid. Really important/sentimental stuff like
| baby photos and videos I have on DVD with par2s.
| ycombinete wrote:
| Sync to Dropbox -> Dropbox hourly & monthly backups to my NAS
| using Bvckup2.
|
| (One of these days I'll setup my NAS to backup offsite fo a #3
| backup).
|
| I know that others with Macbooks sync their whole library to
| their Macbook and then Time Machine to a NAS as their copy #2.
| Is this vulnerable to the problem in TFA?
| mhammerc wrote:
| I run Arq Backup automatically in the background.
|
| It copy Photos, iCloud files and my mails once every days to S3
| with incremental backups.
|
| It requires to have a full copy locally.
|
| Works great!
|
| It is not hard to configure once, with the proper folders and
| settings.
| sho wrote:
| > It requires to have a full copy locally.
|
| yeah that's the thing. When my iPhotos library exceeded 1TB I
| lost the ability to store the full local copies. Since then,
| iCloud itself has been the sole source.
|
| Looks like there's some decent, reasonably priced apps to
| handle this like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-
| backup/id6748614170?... (no affiliation)
| mh- wrote:
| Thanks, I have the same problem and need to do something
| about it.
|
| I wonder if it can calculate (estimate) how big of an
| external disk I'll need. My wife and I each have 40-50k
| photos and a few thousand videos in iCloud Photos.
| bbarnett wrote:
| If you want to truly save your photos, make backups of
| the locals and put it in your safe deposit box at the
| bank. Or alternatively, at a trusted friend/relative's
| house.
|
| Even doing this yearly can save the immense sadness of
| lost memories. And of course, this works for emails, and
| everything else.
|
| If you encrypt it, make sure you use a method not tied to
| any external service, or the machine you're on. I don't
| use Apple, yet I suspect that an encrypted external
| backup might be tied to your Apple ID, or some such,
| because that's how the world flies today.
| mh- wrote:
| Yeah, the plan would be external disk -> offsite storage.
|
| I wouldn't bother to encrypt, it's just family photos and
| I wouldn't want to complicate restores. Especially if it
| was my wife who eventually needed to use it.
| subscribed wrote:
| To anyone who reads it: actually A HARD FISK, not a
| pendrive/SSD
| beala wrote:
| On my iPhone, I can see the size of my iCloud photo
| backups. Settings -> Apple Account -> iCloud -> Storage.
|
| Weirdly, that number is different than Immich's estimate
| of my photo library (95 GB vs 150 GB), but perhaps good
| enough to get you in the ballpark.
| mh- wrote:
| Oh yes, of course. Thank you. 422 GB. Looks like my wife
| has slightly more.
| leoxiong wrote:
| You can request an archive of all your data (including
| photos and drive) in 25gb chunks.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/102208
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I recently rebuilt my home server as an unraid machine.
| Currently it's mainly torrents and a Minecraft server but
| it's got 10tb of locally redundant storage with a sightline
| to scale that to around 24tb, so it would be a logical
| place to store a full gphotos copy.
| Timshel wrote:
| 10TB external harddrives are relatively affordable.
| geekologist wrote:
| immich is an extremely polished, FOSS alternative to
| google/apple photos. It's an investment, but a 4 bay NAS
| running immich should do nicely. Additionally I backup
| snapshots to Backblaze B2 via restic which runs another $5/TB
| redrove wrote:
| For me personally Immich is a non-starter because its not
| end-to-end encrypted.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| It runs on your own hardware. There is nobody else who has
| access to unencrypted data.
| subscribed wrote:
| Storage vps are cheap. Why would I have to run it in my
| own house?
|
| :)
| snowe2010 wrote:
| Why would you need it to be end to end encrypted anyway?
| You're running it. Set it to only upload photos when you're
| on your home network and you're fine. Or fork it and make a
| PR and make it e2e encrypted.
| redrove wrote:
| You can't just "fork it and make a PR and make it e2e
| encrypted". All the features run serverside, e2ee is
| fundamentally impossible because of its design, of which
| you seem to know fuck all.
|
| I'm being dismissed by I run a rather large homelab and I
| still want my photos iCloud like, where end devices
| decrypt and run ML. Immich is a Google Photos clone where
| you give it everything and some server does all the
| magic.
| snowe2010 wrote:
| What are you talking about. It's literally open source.
| Here's the server code https://github.com/immich-
| app/immich/tree/main/server You run the server. You can
| make the entire thing e2e encrypted if you want.
|
| You could even set it up so that it could only backup
| over tailscale or wireguard through a tunneled connection
| so ALL of your traffic is e2e.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Hm, you can just run it on an encrypted volume. And put
| an ngnix in front of it to handle https. There you go end
| to end encrypted.
| yardstick wrote:
| I run a Synology NAS with a docker container that periodically
| downloads new iCloud Photos to a local directory.
| sho wrote:
| this? https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd
|
| seems pretty high touch. A lot of hoop-jumping if you don't
| have a mac in the middle
| leobg wrote:
| Thanks. I had no idea something like that existed.
|
| How do we know using such a tool won't trigger an account
| lockout? How ironic would that be.
| yardstick wrote:
| No idea if it'll trigger a lockout, but if it does at
| least I have a copy of my photos already.
|
| Been running it for a couple years without issue. But yes
| your milage may vary.
| yardstick wrote:
| Yeah that's the one.
|
| I do have a Mac so it didn't seem difficult to me, but I
| accept it will be for those that don't.
| Rikudou wrote:
| Not an iCloud user, but I use Immich on my NAS.
| beala wrote:
| I self host an Immich [1] instance to backup photos on my
| iPhone. It's OSS and has a level of polish I've rarely seen in
| free software. Really, it's shockingly good. The iOS app whisks
| my photo off to my home server several times per day.
|
| What I'm not sure about is how to backup things like iMessages,
| Notes, and my Contacts. Every time I've looked, it appears the
| only options are random GitHub scripts that have reverse
| engineered the iMessage database.
|
| 1. https://immich.app/
| css wrote:
| What's wrong with `imessage-exporter`?
|
| https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter
| snowe2010 wrote:
| The imessage db is literally just a sqlite db. If you have a
| Mac you can read the entire thing with an applescript. It's
| really easy from what I remember from years ago
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| I run a nextcloud [1] instance and use it for contacts,
| calendars, and reminders
|
| 1. https://nextcloud.com
| arendtio wrote:
| I use Nextcloud for files/contacts/calendar/etc. as well,
| but for photos I use PhotopPrism [1].
|
| The reason is simple: photos require much more processing
| and focus on performance. In addition, photos take up much
| more space, so while my Nextcloud instance runs on an SSD,
| the photos reside on an HDD, mostly in sleep mode.
|
| [1] https://www.photoprism.app
| n2h4 wrote:
| I keep copies of any important stuff i need on my server, and
| in a few hard drives at my home. i don't use any "cloud".
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Back in the iPhoto days I used to symlink the library to an
| external drive.
| firecall wrote:
| One rather counter intuitive way to "backup" your photos is to
| install Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone!
|
| Google and MS don't charge as much as Apple for storage, and
| you probably need you need to pay beyond the free limits, but
| it's not a huge expense.
|
| Once your installed Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone,
| just tell the apps to sync all your photos all the time!
|
| Now I appreciate that isn't for everyone.
|
| But it works, is reliable, and requires no technical knowledge
| of running your own service.
|
| The other thing to do is setup a Mac that synchs all your
| iCloud data, One Drive documents and Google Drive.
|
| Then back up that device with Backblaze.
|
| This gets expensive as a Mac with decent levels of storage
| isn't cheap!
|
| I live in fear everyday or my primary Apple and Google accounts
| getting locked!
|
| I've had accounts since day one of iTools and very shortly
| after Gmail launched....
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| The issue with OneDrive is that it doesn't store metadata
| like the photo location, its damn near useless. But I do pay
| for storage for Google Photos and iCloud.
|
| If you take all of your photos from your phone, you don't
| need your Mac at all. Google Photos will sync directly.
|
| I wouldn't use BackBlaze (the $7 a month service). It doesn't
| support NAS at all and it has to phone home every 30 days or
| it will erase anything that is stored on external drive.
|
| I would use an app that backs up to their B2 service.
|
| I personally just use my personal AWS account to back up my
| Plex media and just use the AWS s3 sync command using the AWS
| CLI and store everything in S3 Deep Archive. It's less than
| $2 a month for 2TB.
| snowe2010 wrote:
| Backblaze doesn't erase after 30 days... I've had a
| computer be offline from it for several months and it still
| retained all data. And you can use the backblaze docker
| container to run on a NAS, much much much cheaper than B2.
|
| Wasabi is much cheaper than AWS as well.
|
| Finally the best solution for backing up your iCloud Photos
| is definitely Immich. Set it up on your own NAS or a VPS,
| back up to that, and then back up that server to an S3
| storage using rsync or restic. I'll note that I still
| backup to Backblaze because its so dang cheap.
|
| I spent months trying to find the best setup a few months
| ago and this is by far the cheapest.
|
| But still, this shouldn't be required for normal people.
| They should get what they pay for.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| > It has to phone home every 30 days or it will erase
| anything that is stored _on an external drive_
|
| It's actually more nuanced. It will back up files on a
| USB attached drive. If it doesn't see the drive attached
| for 30 days, it will erase the backup.
|
| If you have your computer off for more than 30 days and
| you bring your computer back on and the USB drive isn't
| attached when it connects to BackBlaze, it will erase it.
|
| Yeah I'm not going to trust my storage to Wasabi.
|
| AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive is $1 a month.
| snowe2010 wrote:
| > AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive is $1 a month.
|
| Only if you're backing up nothing and using non-encrypted
| files and making sure you don't delete anything (rsync
| with delete turned off). I tested this not even three
| months ago. I hit $30 with only 3 tb of data with deep
| archive while wasabi AND backblaze cost less than that.
| No need to even trust a single provider. If you're never
| changing your files AND you don't care about encrypting
| them then yes GDA is fine and pretty cheap. Otherwise
| wasabi and backblaze get more done for less cost.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I meant a $1 a month per TB for AWS S3 Glacier Deep
| Archive That was my bad.
|
| I am definitely a fan of B2.
| snowe2010 wrote:
| I understood what you meant about GDA. It just doesn't
| come out to that unless you put stuff in and never touch
| it, which is a valid use case! Don't get me wrong, I
| planned on doing the same but with restic it would cost
| so so much more than wasabi and backblaze that it was a
| massive waste of money and really revealed amazon's
| strategy, which is lock your data away and charge you to
| access it.
|
| I wasn't talking about B2 though, I was talking about
| Backblaze personal, which you can run on a NAS with a
| docker container.
| jval43 wrote:
| I run a separate Mac Mini that has the full iCloud Photos
| library on a massive external drive, set to "Download
| originals". I then rsync that filesystem to a separate Linux
| box. This works but you must not ever disconnect the external
| drive.
|
| I don't have a solution for iCloud Drive, as there wasn't a
| keep offline setting last time I checked. So use it only
| ephemerally.
| 4jck wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the "Photos Library.app", but I have an
| m4 mini with my photos in a Photo's Library. I'd love to know
| your script to rsync the photos into a separate
| drive/directory
| jval43 wrote:
| The Photos library "file" is just a big folder, I just sync
| the whole thing.
|
| _#! /bin/sh rsync --iconv=utf-8-mac,utf-8 -avh --delete-
| after --partial --progress /Volumes/myExternalDrive/Photos\
| Library.photoslibrary
| myuser@mylinuxmachine.local:"/srv/myExternalDriveBackup/"_
|
| (note: tested with brew rsync, IIRC the default rsync is
| outdated on macOS)
|
| Somewhere in the directory structure is a folder
| /originals/ which has all the actual files.
|
| Note that this is only a last resort backup. Restoring the
| library as a whole requires a Mac with a compatible OS
| version. Restoring without a Mac would only get you the
| originals, so only the out-of-camera files (jpg, heic,
| raw), with no edits or metadata changes from Apple Photos
| applied (Apple Photos doesn't touch the EXIF data). You'd
| probably also lose the video part of all live photos, as
| the live video files stored as separate files and not part
| of the .heic files. They're there, but not very usable.
|
| An alternative to this workflow is to export all photos
| (with edits applied) from the Photos app, but honestly I'm
| not sure if that even works and how long it would take for
| multi-TB libraries.
| NaOH wrote:
| At least as of Sequoia, the Settings > iCloud > Drive >
| Optimize Mac Storage option enables iCloud Drive files to be
| stored offline. Likewise, right clicking any iCloud Drive
| files in the Finder includes a Keep Downloaded option. Since
| I minimally use iCloud Drive, in the past (older OSes) I also
| had Hazel make copies of iCloud Drive files so they were
| certain to be in backups.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| Arq [1] has an option to "materialize" dataless files,
| basically forcing them to be locally available. The only
| issue is if it's a large file and it gets pushed off device
| often, you can burn a lot of bandwidth re-downloading it over
| and over again.
|
| 1. https://www.arqbackup.com
| wrxd wrote:
| For iCloud Drive have a look at rclone. You can run it
| straight from your Linux machine
| QuiEgo wrote:
| Time Machine backups to a samba share on the Linux box would
| get you both the Photos library database and the iCloud Drive
| stuff. It also means you don't need to bother with the
| external drive.
|
| There is a keep all files offline setting for iCloud Drive
| (turn off "Optimize Mac Storage" in Systems Settings).
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > How are people handling this these days?
|
| Syncthing is wonderful, and does a great job of syncing between
| an Android phone's photos/videos and a laptop. And if you have
| regular automated backups of the laptop, you'll have backups of
| the photos/videos too.
|
| For an iPhone, perhaps you could use iTunes to sync to a
| computer and back up that computer.
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| sushtrain seems like the best option for syncthing at the
| moment. its a bit more polished than mobius. neither of them
| sync in the background but i think i remember seeing someone
| using shortcuts to open the sushitrain app every now and
| again to wake it up so it would sync
| QuiEgo wrote:
| I'd like to give a special shoutout to the PhotoSync app. It
| has one killer feature that Immich does not (at least last time
| I looked): encryption at rest. I think someone breaking into my
| house and stealing my NAS is a real possibility (unlikely, but
| I'd give it higher odds that getting locked out of my account
| like what happened in the article), so this is super important
| to me.
|
| You could put Immich data on a LUKS volume I suppose, but then
| you have to fiddle with your server every time it reboots.
|
| I did PhotoSync for a while, but now I just set up my Mac to
| download my whole photos library, and do Time Machine backups
| of my Mac. This gets two copies of the data not tied to my
| Apple ID (the one on my Mac's local disk, and the one on my NAS
| on the time machine volume).
| croes wrote:
| > Support staff refused to tell me why the account was banned or
| provide specific details on the decision.
|
| That's always the most kafkaesque part of these problems and
| should be illegal
| bbarnett wrote:
| The broken logic is that it will expose why the account was
| flagged, and thus, allow 'bad actors' to better navigate and
| bypass such flags.
|
| Of course, this is absolutely silly and beyond absurd, for bad
| actors share information of forums, can deduce fairly easily,
| and even have help from people on staff.
|
| Such actors typically know about detection and flagging methods
| within days of implementation. There's literally zero benefit
| to secrecy. None. Security through obscurity can be a
| beneficial additional layer, but it simply never helps here.
|
| We really should pass a law requiring full disclosure of the
| precise method of banning. I can even see a 'trial' period,
| where accounts activated (and used!) for 3 months receive this
| benefit, but new accounts, or new + dormant accounts do not.
|
| This should likely be coupled with mandated full refunds of
| phones or computers, as an example.
|
| Note that this isn't a 'free' account we're talking about here.
| An Apple account, or a Google account is required to use an
| iphone or pixel in its default config, and all the features it
| entails. These accounts aren't free, they're part of purchase
| cost, and core-required.
|
| (Even if it's a, for example, Samsung phone? It comes pre-
| installed, with uninstallable Google Play cruft, as part of an
| agreement with Samsung. Same conditions need apply here)
| Rikudou wrote:
| You can use an Android phone without a Google account.
| bbarnett wrote:
| For the average person, including buying apps, this simply
| isn't a reality.
|
| And Google will now be throwing up massive "OMG! You're
| going to install an app that isn't from the Play Store?!"
| warnings to anyone that tries, including requiring some
| degree of technical skill to do so.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908938
|
| You can nitpick this, but the truth is my comments are
| about the average user, and from that perspective,
| factually accurate.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| Not for long. Android phones (with Google Play Services)
| will soon require some degree of authentication to sideload
| applications, once that happens then those phones will only
| have the barest of features available without a Google
| account.
| DamonHD wrote:
| I do.
| graemep wrote:
| > That's always the most kafkaesque part of these problems and
| should be illegal
|
| it is very likely illegal to tell him. it was triggered by the
| use of a gift card, and therefore very likely to be AML, and in
| many places (I am not sure about Australia specifically) it is
| illegal to provide information in the circumstances.
| croes wrote:
| Usually if you get punished they have to tell you the crime
| you committed.
|
| That seems like a dangerous loophole.
|
| Imagine being banned from all online activities without any
| reason given.
| x3sphere wrote:
| It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this.
| What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just
| locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not
| the entire account.
|
| But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the
| very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local
| copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create
| them under a separate email so they're not tied to my personal.
| At least it can minimize the damage somewhat.
|
| It sucks that I have to take all these extra precautions though.
| It's definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp
| mindset.
| breppp wrote:
| > It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger
| this. What's the rationale?
|
| If I need to guess, gift cards are sold online in money
| laundering schemes, also on some platforms they are used to let
| you buy apps from a lower priced country
| cemoktra wrote:
| Well from my view as European working in finance. Handling
| money for customers to pay (buy apps) likely requires an e
| money license (not sure about other states). And with this
| there is lot of things coming, like AML and what not. So
| disabling the account might be due to regulations required for
| the e money license.
|
| Of course Support should be able to resolve this if proves are
| given
| monksy wrote:
| > And with this there is lot of things coming, like AML and
| what not
|
| Whats coming?
| bbbhltz wrote:
| Money laundering, I think.
|
| AML = Anti Money Laundering
| nine_k wrote:
| Anti Money Laundering measures.
|
| Gift cards are often used for money laundering or scams,
| because they allow to transfer monetary value in small
| increments and without tracking: there's no link between
| the person who bought a gift card (anonymously with cash)
| and a person who used its code to put money onto an
| account.
| scoot wrote:
| That doesn't explain why an entire account is shut down,
| rather than just use of gift cards. Hammer to crack an egg,
| and just plain lazy/incompetent
| BaconVonPork wrote:
| It is probably lazy in the sense that they would need more
| lawyers and more careful ToS. Defending their ability to
| shut anyone off completely is a lot easier than dealing
| with lawsuits from customers denied X, denied Y, denied Z
| in regions A,B,C..
| beeflet wrote:
| anything can trigger this. it is totally at the company's
| discretion
| aengelke wrote:
| > What's the rationale?
|
| Gift cards are used by phishers. In our institution, we
| routinely get personalized spam mails (in the name of the
| corresponding group lead of the recipient, sent via GMail --
| this is not low-effort) that ask whether they are available
| and, when (accidentally) responding, ask for Apple gift cards.
| kstrauser wrote:
| My coworkers report these to me every single business day.
| They're usually like:
|
| > Hey, it's me, your CEO. I'm in a meeting with our big
| customer and I need an urgent favor. Thanks! You're a life
| saver.
|
| > - Mr. CEO
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Selling gift cards is like borrowing money at 0% interest. And
| because some people forget and never use them, it's negative
| interest.
| fooker wrote:
| Do not redeem /s
| harshreality wrote:
| Unfortunately, when you access multiple accounts from the same
| set of IP addresses and browser signatures, you can bet Google,
| Apple, Microsoft, and any other large company with that level
| of information collection has probably correlated all of those
| accounts to you. The company may lock them all if any one of
| them is suspected of "bad behavior".
| avereveard wrote:
| Yeah I dont remember the details but I remember a developer
| at a studio causing their account to lock up when google shut
| down the previous studio he was working woth account
| viktorcode wrote:
| > What's the rationale?
|
| Most likely stolen cards. Stolen credit cards are used to
| purchase gift cards which are then resold to unsuspecting
| buyers. Think of it as stolen money laundering.
| saurik wrote:
| > It would make more sense if they just locked the person out
| of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account.
| cheschire wrote:
| I always wondered why sites like g2a sell gift cards at a
| price higher than the gift card is actually worth.
|
| A lot of things are clicking into place for me in this
| thread.
| yreg wrote:
| Youtube is full of scam baiting videos - of people who
| waste scammer's time for entertainment.
|
| A very usual scenario is that the scammer pretends to be a
| technician doing some remote support and for example
| pretends to provide some refund. Then they pretend that
| they've mistakenly sent out e.g. 10x the amount and they
| ask for the difference back, claiming that their job is on
| the line.
|
| Crypto would work, but since they target old and tech-
| illiterate people, the easiest way is usually to ask the
| victim to go to a store, buy gift cards and read out the
| codes.
|
| Google kitboga (a known scam baiter) for the videos.
| nullfield wrote:
| "Do not redeem the...! WHY DID YOU DO THAT!?" _lol_
|
| They're great entertainment pieces, and almost a
| commentary on the state of the world through the lens of
| microeconomics, with both sides behaving in a way they
| think is best for them.
|
| For the baiters, they get engagement and, sometimes, the
| feeling of revenge for a scam visited upon an elderly
| relative; for the scammer, maybe it's worse, as we know
| some people are trafficked into places then forced to
| scam people (or maybe they just want money). Still, kinda
| paints the world in a sad light.
| rvnx wrote:
| Well on a similar topic, next step you could look at
| crypto's and casinos. What are the biggest players doing
| there.
| subscribed wrote:
| I had Amazon close my old, almostt-unused account in Amazon-in-
| another-country because I dared to add a new payment method.
|
| I proved them who I am, that the new payment method (virtual
| card from a well-known organization) is mine, everything.
|
| After lots of back-forth I've been informed their decision is
| final.
|
| I HAVE NOT BREACHED TOS. I wish I has a major law company
| behind me to force them to admit that.
|
| Very happy it was my almost unused account, heavily went down
| with my purchases in mt main account (in my usual country of
| residence) as well.
|
| And yes, I use login-with-companyName as sparingly as possible.
| We are not the users, we're beggars.
| left-struck wrote:
| Honestly, good riddance. Just abandon that company and
| everything they touch.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| If you can...
| monerozcash wrote:
| Emailing jeff@amazon rapidly solved the problem for me when I
| was in the exactly same situation.
|
| Of course it'd have been nicer to tell them to fuck off, but
| living without Amazon would simply be far too inconvenient.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| Are you in the US?
|
| I'm just always a little surprised to read things like "i
| couldn't live without Amazon," and i wonder if there are no
| other alternatives for two day shipping on other countries
| or what it is that keeps people stuck on Amazon instead of
| using other next-day deliveries
| jack_tripper wrote:
| It's not that Amazon is irreplaceable, but sometimes it's
| the best option by far depending on where you live and
| what you're looking for.
|
| I'm in Austria (not Australia) and local retail prices
| are infamous for being 25% to 100% higher than in
| neighboring Germany for the same stuff because of cartel
| behavior of local retail industry.
|
| Buying from amazon Germany means I can get the same
| prices as Germans (with +1% extra for higher Austrian
| VAT) for the same goods.
|
| I'd love to give up Amazon in favor of local stores but
| local cartels are just as bad or even worse.
|
| So to fix the Amazon problem you need to fix the
| competition problem first, which is caused by players
| other than Amazon too.
| rvnx wrote:
| This. 100%. Local shops are taking huge margins, have
| limited selection and are slow because they need to order
| from... central warehouse
| monerozcash wrote:
| I live between central London and a smaller European
| city, the competition is generally much much worse.
|
| Sure, for every individual item there _might_ be a better
| better local option. I 'd have to spend time finding
| that, then go through the terrible order process and hope
| their delivery service isn't utter shit. Oh, and yeah,
| half the time they'll probably block my order because I'm
| using a non-european card.
|
| Just being able to use Amazon for almost everything
| starting from bottled water and toilet paper saves me
| immense amounts of time. I can generally trust that the
| stuff I order reliably arrives at the concierge, which
| isn't a given.
|
| And FWIW, most of the time I've shopped around, Amazon
| has been cheaper or essentially the same price. Doesn't
| really matter to me, but it is a plus. I'd happily pay
| more for a more convenient service, but in this case it
| seems I'm usually paying less.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| Why i asked what country, here in the US i can order
| same-day or next-day from several other places than
| Amazon for roughly the same price, and without paying for
| prime
| macNchz wrote:
| People in my circles in the US (in an area with tons of
| alternative options) look at me like I have two heads
| when I say we don't have Prime and never shop on Amazon.
| For many, I think, Amazon has simply been the default
| option to buy anything for long enough now that it's
| ingrained muscle memory.
| monerozcash wrote:
| Big part of that is just that it's insanely easy to use
| compared to most of the competition.
|
| But still, most people go to the shop to buy toilet
| paper. Once you get used to Amazon, it just saves so much
| time and effort. The prices aren't bad either, I just
| checked toilet paper on amazon.com and 30 rolls of good
| quality amazonbasics toilet paper costs $0.22 more than
| the equivalent kirkland product on costco.com
|
| You can order almost everything you need in the same app,
| whenever you feel like it. Just a couple of clicks, no
| need to fill in delivery information or anything.
|
| The only part where YMMV is receiving the parcels
| obviously.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| Target will deliver anything i want next day for free,
| without a subscription, and same day with a subscription.
| Walgreens, 2 days. There's almost never anything i need
| faster than 2 days time that one of them doesn't have.
| And if i do, well, then worth the premium to go to an
| actual physical shop.
| cube00 wrote:
| For all the negative press he gets and the way he treats
| his workers I'm surprised he still has resources allocated
| to handle complaints sent to his inbox.
| shelled wrote:
| I am in a situation right now where Amazon delivered a fake
| product. Support suggested they can also try redelivery, and
| when I asked what if it happens again, they said it should
| not happen.
|
| It happened - fake again. Now the customer support flow is:
| you upload images of the product (max. three), and the system
| approves the verification or rejects it, and then you have a
| way to contact customer care. System rejected. The trick is -
| they do not know why the rejection happened, they are not
| able to tell me, they are confirming the images are very
| clear and crisp, but they can't do anything to help me
| because the system leaves them with zero options to move
| forward - in fact, there is no further escalation matrix
| either. Nada!
|
| The bank (credit card issuer) refused to raise the chargeback
| because "but the merchant 'delivered' the item". But it was
| fake, so? No, no, it "delivered" - that is what counts, so
| you have to sort it out with the merchant. But they are
| refusing any further help. You have to sort it out with them.
| And so on... in a loop.
|
| Can I take them to court? Sure. It may take weeks, months,
| and maybe years, and even then, in the end (if I win), the
| court may just instruct them to refund and possibly
| (possibly!) compensate a trivial amount for legal expenses,
| which is never even remotely close to the actual legal
| expenses in this country's courts.
|
| Just stonewalled. It almost feels Kafkaesque.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Unless you live in a jurisdiction that is known to have
| very generous court judgements that fully compensate all
| expenses occured... wouldn't this be true for literally
| every dispute you have above a certain threshold?
|
| That's simply the actual cost of living in your
| jurisdiction.
|
| I don't think any large retailer or bank on Earth
| guarantees there will be a viable escalation pathway for
| all possible combination of scenarios either.
|
| Maybe a very high end private bank but even that's iffy.
| smoghat wrote:
| My parents had their account with Deutsche Bank private
| bankers. They had moved overseas and sold their house in
| the 90s and were living off the proceeds. Everyone got
| lucky that they bought their house in a big city in the
| 1960s. Since they didn't spend too much money, the
| capital accumulated for a while. It could have gone the
| way of Detroit but went the other way. When they passed
| away, we inherited the money and bought a house in the
| suburbs. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but it changed
| our lives, no question.
|
| So, when my mom passed, our family had to deal with DB. I
| have never, ever hand such a bad experience with a bank.
| The bank overseas was so courteous and efficient that I
| asked if I could open a bank account with them but I
| couldn't since I don't live in the country, just a
| frequent visitor. The IRS and government were easy. The
| will was as easy as it gets. Do things by the book,
| you'll be fine.
|
| The NY DB office, to which I would have to go frequently
| and sit in some luxurious waiting room with nice art, was
| insane. My lawyer and accountant could not understand how
| they could repeatedly ask for the same information, deny
| they had received it, ask for information that literally
| the US government does not give out to anyone and on and
| on and on. And no there was nothing shady or shifty about
| my parents' lives. My lawyer started sending meaner and
| meaner letters to them, the kind that talk about making
| my client whole and litigation.
|
| And yet, a few years later it turned out that same bank
| was often in the news for, among other things catering to
| Jeffrey Epstein. Who knows, maybe he spent his last hours
| complaining about them too. I could only hope he had that
| experience to add to his all-too-brief punishment.
| Actually, I have often wondered if we got raked over the
| coals because they had genuinely fishy clients and thus
| all the clients, especially the ones overseas, were on
| some kind of government watch list.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| Wow, i received a fake product from Amazon ten years ago,
| their support gave me a full refund no questions asked.
| Shame how far they've fallen.
|
| (Fwiw, i never bought anything from Amazon again after
| receiving one fake item. If i want to gamble I'll pay
| Aliexpress prices)
| vladms wrote:
| The system works as long there is user trust in the system.
| It is sad and annoying when something like this happens,
| but occasionally the best thing you can do is tell your
| story and never use a service again. I find there are still
| reasonable alternatives to Amazon, maybe not at the same
| price, but at least they deliver less fakes.
| gcr wrote:
| I had the misfortune of visiting an Amazon Go store. They
| charged me for items that I never picked.
|
| No option to contest the receipt....until the "would you
| recommend a friend visit amazon Go" survey popped up. I
| responded negatively, then the "why?" question had a "My
| receipt was incorrect" option.
|
| Suddenly I was able to go through the "contest receipt"
| workflow.
|
| 100% completely automated.
| freeopinion wrote:
| And yet you keep paying money to this company. That is on
| you.
| storus wrote:
| Amazon expects you hire a consultant that is a buddy with the
| manager responsible for closing your account, and bribe them
| through that engagement to re-enable your account. They
| started doing that a decade ago with the mass-banning of
| legitimate sellers.
| stavros wrote:
| It would make more sense to stop offering gift cards, which
| make zero financial sense for the consumer, but why stop
| offering a lucrative product that people buy because they're
| bad at logic, when you can just shut down accounts and greatly
| inconvenience people at no cost to you?
| pflenker wrote:
| Gift cards are huge in the B2B business as they are used a
| lot as gifts from companies to employees.
| stavros wrote:
| Seems like restricting their purchase to companies would be
| an easy way to prevent fraud.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| In the US, gift cards seem to be popular with consumers.
|
| I regularly see people in line at the supermarket, buying
| gift cards. I notice, because it's a discrete workflow,
| that stands out.
|
| I doubt they are all feeding scammers.
|
| I think that charities often solicit gift cards.
| stavros wrote:
| I'm sure they're not all scammers, but what's the upside
| to the consumer? Why not just give the money directly?
| Seems to me like all the upside is on the company, and
| all the risk is on the user.
| cedilla wrote:
| For some reason, many people think that gifting money is
| gauche, but gift cards are somehow okay.
| generic92034 wrote:
| In some countries, where people receive conditioned
| social security benefits, just sending the money via bank
| account will have disadvantages (at worst the next sum
| from social security is lowered 1:1 by the money received
| and they try to keep it that way). So, if you do not meet
| the gift receiver in person and do not trust the postal
| service with cash, a gift card can be a solution.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I agree, but, still, it is what it is.
| stavros wrote:
| No argument there, but I'm sure the loads of marketing on
| how "cash is out, gift cards are the new hip thing"
| didn't hurt.
| badpun wrote:
| I joke that a $100 gift card is an "inferior $100 bill",
| because you can spend the bill anywhere, but the gift
| card only in one place. People give them as gifts because
| it shows marginally more effort than just giving cash.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The theory is that if you give someone cash, they're just
| going to put it in the bank or buy gas with it, but if
| you give them gift card to e.g. a game store then they're
| going to buy a game, without you having to know which
| game they want.
|
| It's the same premise as buying someone _any_ gift
| instead of just giving them the money so they can buy
| whatever they want.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't understand, what's the benefit to the recipient
| if I limit their choice for them?
| queenkjuul wrote:
| Arguably, they'll be happier with the video game than
| with a tank of gas, which you've ensured they'll choose
| by not giving them the cash
|
| Edit to add: kids often don't have bank accounts, i
| mostly received gift cards as a child, from relatives who
| wouldn't want to mail cash and couldn't give me cash in
| person. On a dark note, giving a kid a gift card to a toy
| store makes it harder for the parents to steal it for
| themselves.
|
| The whole practice originates from "gift certificates"
| where you'd maybe go to your favorite spa and get a gift
| certificate to give someone, so that the spa treatment is
| the gift you're giving, but the recipient redeems it
| whenever they want. That just got abstracted to non-
| service gifts as well, with the same idea ("treat
| yourself to a new video game, whichever and whenever you
| feel like it" -- that's the gift, facilitated by the
| card)
| nmcfarl wrote:
| Also for kids at least, sometimes they really will be
| happier with less choice. Sometimes kids make bad
| decisions and limiting choice to good options is helpful.
|
| Additionally the inverse is true. Sometimes kids choices
| are restrained, and they really would like to do a thing
| they are not allowed to, and gift cards offered them away
| to do that. Case in point: my tween figured out that we
| don't let him buy in game currency for any the games that
| we do let him play, however, when a relative gives him a
| gift card, we let him redeem it, making gift cards
| incredibly popular gifts.
| rvnx wrote:
| https://youtu.be/xj-7_YU-KIs
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| Wouldn't work for money laundering. As far as AML regs
| (and banks) are concerned a small business is
| indistinguishable from a personal retail account. This
| makes sense from a business point of view because a lot
| of small businesses are just one guy, and small business
| owners tend to mix their personal finance with their
| business finance. From an AML point of view, a lot,
| perhaps most money laundering is done with registered
| business entities. It's easier to create a numbered
| corporation than a whole person.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Which I find obnoxious - they're taxable benefits, so I'd
| really rather just have the cash.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| It's a financial gimmick. The company realizes the income
| immediately while service is rendered later. This has
| positive impact on the finances.
| stavros wrote:
| Well yes, obviously, and the company doesn't have to pay
| anything for the cost of locking you out of all your work
| files forever and costing you however much, so it's all
| upside for them.
|
| If they had to reimburse you for the cost of all your lost
| files, then we'd see the real impact on finances.
| quesera wrote:
| That's backwards. The company treats the GC as a liability.
| It cannot recognize the funds as revenue until they are
| spent. This is GAAP and law (but see exception below).
|
| GCs are valuable to brands because they are marketing
| tools. Recipients are prompted to go to the merchant to
| spend money, and they usually spend about 40% more than the
| face value of the card.
|
| Also, GCs are valuable to merchants for _breakage_. This is
| when a card (or partial balance) goes unused. Starbucks, as
| an imperfect example, recognizes about 10% of their total
| outstanding GC balance as revenue every year, due to
| breakage. This amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| Sorry I was not aware of GAAP. Anyways, I think the
| primary benefit is the interest-free financing. The
| company gets to hold the customer's cash and use it for
| operations (working capital) for the entire time the gift
| card is unspent. Maybe I was not right with the account
| terminology and should have mentioned the cash flow
| positive impact only.
|
| Maybe it is more accurate this way?
| quesera wrote:
| It's a combination of things: marketing (difficult to
| quantify, but > 0), interest/appreciation on the float
| (4-10% annually), forecasted overspend (30-40%), and
| breakage (5-10%).
|
| The GC face value is a liability on the books though.
| It's treated as debt when doing cash calculations.
|
| More broadly: All benefits of the cards definitely accrue
| to the merchant. There's absolutely nothing valuable to
| consumers about the deal!
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| But all those GC funds sit in investment accounts until
| they are used. It's genuinely profitable to have millions
| in unredeemed gift cards (and mobile app dollars) sitting
| around unused.
|
| I've never had my $100 GC be worth $104 a year later, but
| for the issuer it is. They just keep the $4.
| viraptor wrote:
| > which make zero financial sense for the consumer
|
| Not in all situations. Because of various cross promotions
| between car insurance, supermarket and airlines, by using
| gift cards for groceries I get an effective ~9% discount
| every time. That really adds up over a year.
|
| For Apple and others, you can use secondary gift card market
| to get some discounts too, if you wanna risk it.
| nullfield wrote:
| What kinds of stacked cross-promotions like this exist, and
| even work out financially for everyone?
| viraptor wrote:
| I don't think they'd work out if everyone used them. It's
| essentially companies paying for your shopping data. But
| a) they overpay to incentivise you, b) I'm buying the
| same boring things on rotation so it's close to useless
| to them.
| varispeed wrote:
| One practical reason gift cards exist is tax treatment. In
| the UK, small non-cash gifts to employees can be tax-free
| under the "trivial benefits" rules (each under PS50, not cash
| or cash-equivalent). For owner-managed companies, directors
| have a PS300 annual cap across such benefits. Cash or cash-
| redeemable vouchers don't qualify and are taxed like salary.
| pflenker wrote:
| I don't mean to defend this, but I know from experience that
| gift cards are frequently used for money laundring. The laws
| against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to
| overshoot and block false positives.
|
| At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded
| black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding
| out why is pretty difficult.
|
| To add more to the problem, some anti money Landry solutions
| are ... AI powered.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| > The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing
| companies to overshoot and block false positives.
|
| On that note[1] is a good read (Cmd+F: "suspicious activity
| report"), although this specific case is about gift cards,
| but the AML/T&S etc. space is remarkably similar.
|
| [1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-
| debunki...
| nullfield wrote:
| An excellent blog. Their piece on credit card rewards
| programs is an excellent read as well.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing
| companies to overshoot and block false positives.
|
| Yes, in many countries they are, but I don't think the laws
| are dictating Apple to completely turn off the accounts, but
| instead dictate that Apple should take measures against it.
|
| They could disable those gift card features + Apple
| wallet/pay if they suspect fraud, and if no one complains
| within a month, then disable the entire account, rather than
| start with disabling the account. Would give them space/time
| to investigate, and wouldn't be a huge pain in the ass when
| the inevitable false-positives happen, like in this case.
| pflenker wrote:
| All this costs money for little return of invest. As long
| as the collateral damage is below a threshold that causes
| reputational damage, there is no business incentive to
| solve this.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yes, I agree, the companies don't actually care about
| consumers, only what's cheaper for them. But this is a
| choice companies do, not because laws somehow require
| them to block the entire account vs individual features.
| I was just adding that because the original comment made
| it seem like the companies are somehow forced to act like
| they do because of laws, but it isn't, it's an
| intentional cost-measured choice they make by themselves.
| mcherm wrote:
| > I don't think the laws are dictating Apple to completely
| turn off the accounts, but instead dictate that Apple
| should take measures against it.
|
| You misunderstand the nature of financial regulation. The
| laws on things like money laundering are intentionally
| vague, they say things like "Apple should take measures
| against it". And financial regulators will not come out and
| say (especially in writing) that you MUST do any particular
| thing (like ban customers entirely on suspicion).
|
| What they WILL do is ask probing questions, frown a lot,
| and make suggestions. Which the company had better take
| seriously. Because the financial regulators have the
| ability to simply close down your business, and if you
| cross enough of the unclear lines they will do so.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| This is also one of the reasons the government is fond of
| gag orders. If companies could tell you "sorry we closed
| your account because of government pressure" then at
| least you would know why, but then you would _know why_.
| Which could give you standing to challenge it or create
| bad PR for the government and generate public outrage
| sufficient to make them stop doing that.
|
| So instead they censor the company from telling you the
| reason, because everyone whose account is locked is
| guilty of Terrorism, obviously, and the people actually
| committing fraud would be unable to discern that they've
| tripped the detection system from the fact that their
| account is locked unless you told them that was why.
| Certainly not because it would make people unsympathetic
| to what the government is doing.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Because the financial regulators have the ability to
| simply close down your business
|
| You misunderstand how business regulation works in free
| countries. Financial regulators can't just "simply close
| down your business" however they want, unless you live in
| a country that is primarily authoritarian.
|
| Again, I'm not saying closing down accounts isn't easier
| than turning of functionality, but companies could chose
| the "harder route" if they did care about the users
| themselves. Alas, most companies priority remains "make
| more money above all".
| queenkjuul wrote:
| Every company's priority has always been "make more money
| above all," it's just that once upon a time some of them
| beloved that treating their workers and customers well
| was a part of that goal. History has shown them that
| wasn't really necessary.
|
| And don't think for a second the US federal government
| couldn't do a huge amount of damage to anyone it feels
| like by way of its financial regulators. In general it's
| better for the US government if Apple continues to exist,
| though.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Every company's priority has always been "make more
| money above all,"
|
| Maybe that's true where you live, but it's definitely not
| true all over the world, many economies have a free
| economy yet companies exist for public benefit, not
| shareholder value generation. It's out there, wouldn't be
| impossible to implement where you live either.
|
| > And don't think for a second the US federal government
| couldn't do a huge amount of damage to anyone it feels
| like by way of its financial regulators
|
| Right, I agree. But I also qualified my statement to not
| be valid in authoritarian countries, so maybe not the
| greatest example to use.
| rvnx wrote:
| A bit like OpenAI (non-profit) or Anthropic (public-
| benefit-corporation). Based on their business model it is
| clear that profitability is not their goal, and in their
| own statements: greater good for the humanity
| queenkjuul wrote:
| Lmao and you believe them?
| queenkjuul wrote:
| > many economies have a free economy yet companies exist
| for public benefit,
|
| I really don't believe you, honestly, unless you're
| talking only about little mom and pop shops. and what
| other country would have more regulatory influence on
| Apple than the US?
| nullfield wrote:
| I don't know. You can't buy the kind of loyalty that
| treating your customer well earns you (nor buy revocation
| of the spite that treating them poorly does).
|
| Particular airline like United makes your life hell, or
| even behaves sloppily and heavily inconvenienced you? You
| not only hate them, you actively go out of your way to
| tell your friends, family, and anyone who asks your
| opinion that you hate them. And why you hate them. (Lost
| one/only bag, for longer than an entire trip, over ten
| years ago.) And go out of your way, even at higher cost,
| to avoid them. (Have never flown United afterwards.)
|
| Aside: We know this can be done competently; see Japan.
| They'll even fail sometimes, but I suspect that nearly-
| always, someone from the airline would be delivering the
| bag personally after they obsessively located it, as
| opposed to the "meh" attitude US carriers take.
|
| On the _other_ hand, some company like Valve: for an
| _out-of-warranty_ product (just time, current-model Steam
| Deck) that was _purchased outside the country_ and gray-
| market imported (consumer level, just carried out to
| another country)... and which they don't sell in your
| country... they demurred a bit then agreed to ship a
| replacement part to the original purchaser. At zero cost.
| Dealing with product issues isn't fun, but we all know
| issues arise sometimes, and they killed the "delight the
| customer" goal.
|
| Some companies still care, and I'd argue that treating
| your customers like crap while attempting to extract
| maximum "short term value" doesn't actually work. Not in
| the long term, and in the short term, well... it depends
| on your definition of "short term". One bad incident can
| go viral and wreck your quarterly earnings.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| The problem is that you and me and every person we've
| ever met could stop flying United today and they'll keep
| making billions of dollars for the rest of our lives.
| Clearly they can horribly mistreat huge numbers of people
| before it actually risks their business. Same with Apple,
| Google, Facebook, Microsoft... In fact it's easier with
| tech companies.
| ben_w wrote:
| Ironically, I had Amazon flag and undo some gift card
| purchases (of cards, not with cards) that I made for
| Christmas, while myself thinking about this category of
| problem, about why cards are a mechanism for scams rather
| than specifically money laundering.
|
| The cards were to family members that I normally send gift
| cards to at Christmas, and the activity was counted as "sus"
| _even though_ I was asked to validate my card number and
| expiration date before being allowed to make the purchase.
| pacifika wrote:
| I agree. The way they make sending parcels internationally
| more difficult through custom declarations and taxes and
| fines for smaller occasions it's more practical to send a
| gift card from the destination country.
| gpvos wrote:
| AML = ?
|
| (edit) Ah, right, anti-money-laundering, found it in your
| last sentence.
| mkl wrote:
| Anti-money laundering.
| monerozcash wrote:
| >At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded
| black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding
| out why is pretty difficult.
|
| For a good reason! You, as a rule, really don't want to tell
| the customer why you're blocking them. What will happen in
| the end is that you will be facing federal charges for
| assisting the money launderers because you kept telling them
| what they're doing wrong.
| dnet wrote:
| See https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-
| infosec-307f87004563
|
| > This is the same failure mode of all security-through-
| obscurity. Secrecy means that bad guys are privy to defects
| in systems, while the people who those systems are supposed
| to defend are in the dark, and can have their defenses
| weaponized against them.
| stephen_g wrote:
| That's a great article - explains what I haven't fully
| thought through or quite been able to put into words but
| what I've always felt, because the "you can't tell people
| the secret rules" with things like money laundering is
| treated by many as obvious, but has never sat right with
| me.
| macNchz wrote:
| I disagree with this article--its premise relies too
| heavily on the oft repeated, oft misunderstood line
| "there is no security in obscurity."
|
| This concept is used to argue that obscurity _shouldn't
| be used at all_ as a defense mechanism, when really all
| it means is it _shouldn't be your only line of defense_.
|
| Obscuring aspects of a system can contribute to its
| overall functioning: it's a filter for the laziest of
| adversaries, and it creates an imperative for more
| motivated ones to probe and explore to understand the
| obfuscation, creating signal and therefore opportunities
| to notice their behavior and intervene.
|
| I think for anyone who has dealt firsthand with
| mitigating online fraud, hackers, spam, trolls, cheating
| etc, the idea of having completely transparent defense
| mechanisms is pretty much ludicrous.
| monerozcash wrote:
| Also, to be fair, for money laundering it does raise the
| barrier to entry quite a bit. Doesn't matter if you have
| billions of dollars to launder, could already make quite
| a bit of a difference if you only have millions of
| dollars to launder.
| monerozcash wrote:
| I don't disagree, but still think it's better to do as
| the lawyers tell you to.
| jasode wrote:
| _> It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger
| this. _
|
| It's also the _buying_ of gift cards that can get Apple
| accounts locked:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/r8b1lu/apple_will_pe...
|
| If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will
| learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real
| possibility of account bans.
|
| - Don't give Apple gift cards to family and friends: You're
| potentially ruining the recipient's digital life if they redeem
| it.
|
| - Don't buy Apple gift cards: You risk ruining your own digital
| life.
|
| If you've been given an Apple gc for Christmas -- and you have
| paranoia of the risks -- don't buy anything online that's tied
| to your Apple ID. Instead, go to the physical Apple store to
| redeem it. And don't buy an iPhone with it because that will
| eventually get assigned to an Apple ID. Instead, get a non-
| AppleID item such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock.
|
| I have thousands of credit-card reward points that could be
| traded in for Apple gift cards but I don't do it because
| Apple's over-aggressive fraud tracking means Apple's store
| currency is too dangerous to use.
| generic92034 wrote:
| > If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people
| will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of
| the real possibility of account bans.
|
| If you are trying to be a bad person you could weaponize that
| approach. You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift
| cards... :o
| szundi wrote:
| In this case buy the gift card from some shady retailer
| with a one-time-use virtual card, and give this shady code
| to your friend. Or buy a physical card from aliexpress, the
| cheapest one with bad reviews.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift
| cards... :o
|
| 99.999% chance they happily redeem them and go about their
| lives.
|
| These stories, while frustrating, are clearly edge cases.
| Yes I know you can find more if you search social media,
| but I don't think a lot of these HN commenters realize the
| volume of gift cards Apple sells and redeems without
| problem every day.
| immibis wrote:
| - Don't use Apple. Or Google.
| stanac wrote:
| If it was be that simple. In that case I would have to go
| to the bank for every transaction/payment I want to
| initiate online. Banking app doesn't work for jailbroken
| devices. Using PC to access banks website works, but
| transactions still require 2FA and they don't support any
| other 2FA flow except the one in the app.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You don't have to go to the bank for every transaction,
| you can just go there once to close out your account and
| open one somewhere that doesn't require that.
| duskdozer wrote:
| I'm surprised, most banks I've come across force sms or
| phone-call 2fa only. A rare few allow generic TOTP
| authenticators, and maybe one or two has an app as an
| option. And I've only come across one bank that detects
| and warns for root access. Is there no "jailbreak hide"
| on ios?
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| This heavily depends on the country.
| 71bw wrote:
| In Poland it's SMS OTPs, bank app (heavily recommended
| and in some cases enforced by the bank) or additionally
| paid physical TOTP token devices. And almost all banks
| throw a hissy fit once you have some sort of vector of
| root detection left open.
| franga2000 wrote:
| There's always a workaround. There are banks with far
| less annoying root checking and you can just switch. Many
| banks allow SMS or a physical authenticator for web
| banking or 3DS 2FA. There are also many was to bypass
| root detection. If your main problem is 3DS 2FA for
| online card payments, get a proxy card.
| 71bw wrote:
| "you can just switch" and yet then you have to contact X
| people and change Y contracts that are related to your
| prior bank account. It is not that simple.
|
| Plus nothing ensures the bank you switch to won't up
| their "defenses" in a week.
| franga2000 wrote:
| I never said it was trivial, I said it was possible. In
| many places, it's actually very easy. In others it takes
| some work, but we're talking about de-googling your life,
| having to put in some work is already implied.
|
| At least around here, I can walk into a bank, sign a few
| papers, then that bank coordinates with my old bank to
| transfer all my direct debits, move all my money and
| notify all my periodic creditors (employer, social
| security, tax office...). Peer-to-peer payments (like
| splitting bills with friends) are usually done by alias
| (phone number or email) on our instant payment scheme,
| not by IBAN, and my new bank will take care of rerouting
| that too. And if for whatever reason someone has my old
| IBAN and tries to send me money in the future, they'll
| get a rejection and will just have to ask me for my new
| one, no big deal.
|
| As for "in a week", come on, you're just being
| intentionally annoying. Obviously there's no guarantee.
| If they don't have root detection now, after everyone has
| had it for a decade, there's probably a reason and they
| won't implement it any time soon. And if you're just
| supremely unlucky and they actually do it right after you
| switch, oh well, you wasted and afternoon. Definitely
| less time wasted than trying all the million different
| root hiding techniques that probably don't work anymore.
| rvnx wrote:
| But you don't mind paying more and having a worse service
| IRL when you could just buy a cheap Pixel phone with
| GrapheneOS on the side ?
|
| Think of it like a car key. You wouldn't have a crusade
| against car keys right ?
| franga2000 wrote:
| Wait what? Who is paying what? What service is worse? Car
| keys?? I genuinely, honestly, have no idea what you're
| talking about.
| immibis wrote:
| Some cars don't come with keys any more - you have to use
| your phone and the cloud.
|
| Which is good, right? One less thing to lose.
| franga2000 wrote:
| /s I hope
| rvnx wrote:
| Soon the cars are going to drive away on their own, so
| what's with the keys anyway ?
| majorchord wrote:
| > Some cars don't come with keys any more
|
| Can you name one?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > There's always a workaround.
|
| And the workaround is always far more work than I want to
| do, for virtually no upside for me.
| igor47 wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons in a nutshell.
| vladms wrote:
| Depends though what you mean by "do not use Google".
| Having an Android phone with a Google account logged in
| will not affect you much. If they would block one account
| you just create another.
|
| Having all your emails on Gmail and used for external
| services (bank, insurances, etc) is a different story
| though. I prefer to pay my email provider, at least they
| will care a bit more than they do for a free account...
| anildash wrote:
| People love to smugly suggest this useless advice like
| there aren't literal public services from governments
| around the world that are being tied to these platforms,
| let alone the many private companies which gate access to
| their goods and services behind apps on proprietary
| devices.
|
| To say nothing of the fact that well-adjusted humans need
| to communicate with friends and family, and many times that
| also practically requires being on these platforms as well.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Someone has to be the stick in the mud, right? I
| personally enjoy being that guy that doesn't have a
| smartphone and causing problems in every government
| office / institution that assumes everyone has a
| smartphone, it's like I'm a pioneer on the frontier :)
|
| E-stim addicts will rationalize their slavery to a small
| rock in their pocket and sing grand songs about how it's
| a curse but they need it. Like all addicts, they are not
| capable of rationally assessing the utility of the
| dependence object, and they'll start carting out all
| sorts of silly things and gesturing vaguely "See this
| washing machine? Yep, it needs the rock, that's why I
| keep my rock on me and charged at all times"
| rvnx wrote:
| Reality is that you are the one paying the price, you
| will spend 45 minutes extra at the office when you could
| have spent it with your family or friends or playing
| soccer.
|
| Time is the most precious thing in life, you'll never be
| able to buy it back so you may want to reconsider long-
| term.
| franga2000 wrote:
| This also applies to protesting, activism, politics...
| It's not that you're wrong, it is in fact time that you
| could've spent playing soccer. But if everyone just
| turned their back and played soccer, the world would be a
| much darker place
| immibis wrote:
| That did happen and the world is a much darker place.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Pretty sure I'm getting >10x returns on my time for the
| minor inconveniences I suffer, most people sacrifice a
| double digit percent of their time on Earth to the device
| in their pocket.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| I think it's because they're usually _not_ well-adjusted
| humans, they live in a fantasy (basement) world that is
| not realistic.
| igor47 wrote:
| Rude, not to mention this reads as "resistance is futile,
| just obey in advance".
| ranger_danger wrote:
| You don't have to obey, but not doing so I think
| definitely puts you into most people's "not well-
| adjusted" camp... whether you think that's a good thing
| or not is a different issue I suppose. Lots of people in
| history who ended up being right were treated
| similarly...
|
| And I really meant to write "not _seen_ as well-adjusted
| " above... wasn't trying to say that anyone actually is
| or not.
|
| I know you think it's rude, my apologies and I wasn't
| trying to be... just pointing out that people are still
| going to think it's weird and "not normal" to go to such
| "extremes" that most people don't, no matter how right
| they are.
| ho_schi wrote:
| Or Microsoft.
|
| Stay as far away from BigIT as you can. Linux or BSD are
| there for many good reasons. This is another one.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Other than Android, what viable Linux options exist for
| mobile devices?
| viraptor wrote:
| > If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people
| will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards
|
| You'd think so. Yet, the stories of PayPal locking up payouts
| to surprised people keep coming every year - and people still
| use them.
| wink wrote:
| That's so much not a fitting comparison.
|
| The most money I have ever had on my PayPal account was 100
| bucks from a reversed transaction (like, double booking of
| a hotel room or wrong item sent), otherwise it's just a
| gateway. It would be annoying if my PayPal account was
| locked, because I use it a lot to order pizza online and a
| few small purchases. I could just use my credit card or
| something else but it's more clicks. And I know a lot of
| people who do it like this. The only thing lost is
| convenience. No past purchases, no digital identities.
|
| Maybe you meant the merchants who really amass thousands
| but I suppose they are a small minority of active users.
| franga2000 wrote:
| There are a good number of freelancers of various sorts
| that get paid via PayPal and only occasionally pull that
| money to their bank accounts to avoid the fixed fee, or
| even prefer to spend much of it straight from PayPal to
| avoid the percent fee. People also use it to send money
| between family members in different countries because
| it's often cheaper than an international wire.
|
| It's quite easy to build up a few hundred or thousand USD
| worth. It feels just enough like a bank account that you
| think you're safe. Then...well, the internet is full of
| PayPal horror stories, I won't bore you with my own.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > and only occasionally pull that money to their bank
| accounts to avoid the fixed fee
|
| You have a fee for transferring from PayPal to your bank
| account?
|
| It's always been free for me, as long as I don't opt for
| the instant transfer option.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Last time I had to deal with that was 8-ish years ago and
| there was definitely a fee. Can't check now because they
| blocked my account due to a failed Spotify payment and I
| don't care enough to deal with their phone support again
| to get it unblocked
| queenkjuul wrote:
| That you don't keep a PayPal balance and i don't buy
| Apple gift cards is irrelevant to the people that do keep
| a PayPal balance and do use Apple gift cards
| bdangubic wrote:
| I wish there are more comments like this on HN - well
| done :)
|
| the number of people commenting like "well I don't
| do/use/..." is mind-boggling
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Maybe they're one of today's lucky 10000, learning that
| other people are different.
| bmacho wrote:
| I think the point was that PayPal and Apple are different
| since PayPal is easy to mitigate, and Apple not so much.
| tekchip wrote:
| For every purchase you make as a gateway there's a vendor
| account on the other end receiving that money and
| required to do accounting with it (like issuing refunds)
| which requires keeping a balance. These are the people
| having big problems when their account gets locked and
| their funds are no longer available. The blow back does
| potentially effect you if you return an item and then the
| vendor can't issue the refund because the account is
| locked.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > You'd think so. Yet, the stories of PayPal locking up
| payouts to surprised people keep coming every year - and
| people still use them.
|
| At least in Europe, PayPal is a regulated bank which means
| you can hand the case over to the authorities and they can
| and will help you out.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| They aren't regulated as a bank in the US, where they
| have a much lighter-touch type of licensing.
|
| Do the bank regulators in Europe typically help
| effectively when PayPal freezes an account?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yes they do. Someone got banned for Cuba sanctions [1],
| others I don't know the context [2], and for others media
| attention is enough [3].
|
| [1] https://www.onlinehaendler-news.de/recht/urteile-
| entscheidun...
|
| [2] https://www.sbs-legal.de/blog/update-sbs-legal-
| erwirkt-zwei-...
|
| [3] https://www.test.de/Leserfall-Wenn-Paypal-ein-
| Kundenkonto-ei...
| baq wrote:
| 'Member States shall ensure that, in the cases referred
| to in paragraph 4 ..., after taking its decision, the
| credit institution immediately informs the consumer of
| the refusal and of the specific reason for that refusal,
| in writing and free of charge, unless such disclosure
| would be contrary to objectives of national security,
| public policy or Directive [2005/60]. [...]' https://eur-
| lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
| chongli wrote:
| This is a problem with modern life in general. Computing
| and the internet have exploded the complexity of society.
| Regular people have so much on their plate as it is
| (school, work, family, mortgage, etc) that they simply
| cannot keep up with all of the privacy and security risks
| of a digital life. They also can't keep up with the
| complexity of politics and civic life, but that's another
| discussion entirely!
| crtasm wrote:
| I thought I'd buy Cory Doctrow's Enshittification ebook
| direct from his website. Surprised to be redirected to
| Paypal with no other option.
| chihuahua wrote:
| Doctorow has enshittified himself.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| I remember when Cory would let you download any of his
| books for free and even said you were allowed to email
| him and call him a sucker for doing this.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I think tech people who read a lot of news headlines have a
| hard time grasping the scale of these services.
|
| Commenters here talk about PayPal account closures as if
| everyone who uses the service will eventually lose their
| money. Now we're talking about gift cards as if everyone
| using gift cards will have their account locked.
|
| These stories, while frustrating and sad, are rare
| occurrences. The majority of people who use these services
| will not have any experience like these stories you read.
|
| To be honest, I think the average person is probably better
| at estimating their risk of using these services than a lot
| of these HN commenters.
| zerr wrote:
| Why does Apple sell giftcards?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| For the similar reasons Apple sells socks.. maybe?
| akho wrote:
| Some cultures stigmatize gifting money, yet gifting
| corporate scrip is fine.
| abenga wrote:
| Then why do they ban accounts for using them? Is it some
| sort of honeypot?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| > such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock
|
| I mean that is a problem in itself :D
| freeopinion wrote:
| It seems you haven't learned the whole lesson. You're close,
| though. If you're going to be skittish, there's a better and
| easier set of rules. Don't use anything that involves an
| Apple ID.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The newer iPhones have such great cameras, I have have been
| considering an iPhone for my next phone. The only thing
| holding me back is the lack of built-in stylus.
|
| Does the iPhone require an Apple ID? I don't even log into
| my Google account with my Android device. If the phone
| requires an Apple ID, then obviously I'm not buying one.
| nullfield wrote:
| No, it doesn't _require_ one... but you won't be
| downloading anything from their App Store without one,
| leaving your only option for getting software onto it
| "Xcode after you build it yourself" since there's no side
| loading. Xcode's ability to do that may require an Apple
| ID or developer account; I'm unsure.
|
| In the EU, the requirement to support alternative app
| stores would probably mostly fix that, but those of you
| in the US are kinda...
| dotancohen wrote:
| Thank you. I'm in neither the EU nor US. I'll have to
| check this.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| An even better advice: Don't buy Apple.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| BSD, Linux or TempleOS would never lock you out.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Nor provide much utility to the average person.
| kragen wrote:
| BSD and Linux seem to be fine for the average person. I
| wouldn't recommend TempleOS.
| Nevermark wrote:
| This isn't a solution for many people.
|
| And in fact, a prohibition is never a solution, it is a
| reduction in solution options
|
| And this advice takes into account exactly zero aspects of
| the particular problems a given person may have to solve,
| besides "problems with Apple", in a world where most people
| have "problems with X" for each of the few large
| ecosystems.
|
| Freedom of choice would mean for N choices, being able to
| make, well, N indepointed choices. N may be a very large
| number given how many things people do.
|
| For an ideal world of compatible modular technologies, N
| choices is easy.
|
| But our technology world is highly non-modular, centralized
| at many levels, and full of incompatibilities and
| dependencies of various kinds and costs. Including
| important dependencies involving the choices of other
| people we interact with, or very specific tools or
| resources.
|
| So no, "Don't buy Apple" is not better advice, it is just
| bad random generic advice, without knowing a lot more about
| any particular situation.
|
| Like what someone writes books about.
| windexh8er wrote:
| But it is a solution. Apple being a poor stuard of their
| customers is indicative that people buying their hardware
| and software are not their priority. Apple support _used_
| to be stellar, they used to care about customers, they no
| longer do.
|
| Apple's ToS should be readily indicative of anyone using
| any of their products that Apple's perspective is that
| you don't own anything and they can do whatever they want
| with anything you do with their products. As the author
| points out you clearly don't own free access to what
| you've purchased.
|
| The last thing I'll say is that it is _fantastic_ advice
| to not purchase Apple in 2025. You can only be certain
| that this won 't happen if you avoid them. I actually own
| a MPB, with receipts from purchase, that I had to
| purchase a bypass for when the device was enrolled in MDM
| by a family member that Apple has MDM locked and refuses
| to remove from iCloud.
|
| Avoid Apple, that's the best advice. If you can't avoid
| Apple, minimize your footprint and make sure you're a
| good boy or girl else Tim Cook will steal from you and
| hide behind some bullshit first line support tar pit and
| an army of lawyers if you do happen to decide to threaten
| them.
| spunker540 wrote:
| Does Google have a better track record when it comes to
| arbitrarily locking people out of their digital lives?
| windexh8er wrote:
| No.
|
| But, at least with Google you can use hardware without
| the binding software requirement. You can use an Android
| device with GrapheneOS and have the phone entirely de-
| Googled, yet still use Android apps.
|
| If the implication was that there's no other option
| outside of Apple and Google then that is unfortunate.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| Does your bank let you use such a device? Does any big
| bank where you live?
|
| If I want to participate it modern life, where I live, I
| need an Android (Google blessed) or Apple device.
| greentea23 wrote:
| The bank thing is a much rarer problem than people make
| it out to be. We should challenge and boycott any
| problematic banks as much as we can
| https://community.e.foundation/t/list-banking-apps-on-e-
| os/3...
| mistercheph wrote:
| LOL it's not some sisyphean task to not use big tech
| products, its slightly inconvenient and takes some time
| to adjust, don't talk about it as though it were
| something that only the great men of the ancient times
| could do, take your iPhone and throw it as hard as you
| can against the concrete, you will be fine.
| kmbfjr wrote:
| Great advice if you don't need a smartphone. Many do,
| they are now an identity tool.
|
| The alternative to Apple is...Google? How is that in any
| way better other than not being Apple? Sure, there are
| de-Googlefied versions of Android and today they work .
| But Google is actively working on ending the ability of
| those alternative operating systems to work.
| mistercheph wrote:
| just curious, where do you have to use a smartphone?
| rvnx wrote:
| Banks 2FA are not SMS anymore, so no banking, and because
| no 2FA no online card payments and no limit adjustment.
|
| Some banks are even app-only.
|
| IRL events where you have to open the app at the gate.
|
| Probably no charging for your EV.
|
| No bus tickets. No Uber. No scooters. No food delivery.
| More tedious flying / immigration. No Tinder (requires
| live face verification on your phone) Some modern cars
| you are going to have troubles.
|
| Impossible to setup a lot of smart appliances (like home
| WiFi routers). Many examples.
|
| It's like: can you live without a bank card ? Probably
| but not everywhere and you will not be able to go to all
| shops.
|
| Essentially it's great if you plan to stay at home.
| Becomes a great problem once you want to interact with
| anyone further than 1 meter from you.
| smakt wrote:
| None of those require smartphones if you live in a free
| country (1) (2).
|
| (1) Unbanked population in Uganda or india don't have
| options. Funnily, it's become the same with everyone,
| banked or unbanked, in the USA. The USA a third world
| dictatorship now, so expect that and more. Please vote
| for the orange buffoon a third time! He will most surely
| try to get on a third term.
|
| (2) No bank in the EU requires a smartphone; it's banned
| by law (you know, law that protects people, the type you
| lost). "Banks" that are app-only are not banks but
| financial casinos. No bus driver in the EU can refuse
| small coins. In some countries they cannot refuse that
| you get on the bus without paying. No shop in the EU can
| refuse cash. No EV charging requires any app; you can pay
| right at the charging station with a credit card. Uber is
| not a universal right but a trinket. Same with
| tinder/food delivery and all the impoverishing tech for
| the disowned.
|
| Enjoy the USA.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > No bank in the EU requires a smartphone
|
| They may not require one, but good luck getting
| transactions done without one. My EU bank branches are
| now only open 3 hours a day, and to approve an online
| transaction without the app means phoning the bank during
| business hours...
| rvnx wrote:
| Sounds like we don't live in the same EU. Banks are
| required to use Strong Customer Authentication, and they
| consider apps to be safer alternative than SMS. Revolut,
| N26 and co, are real banks, like any bank in the EU. In
| many countries, you cannot pay with small coins the bus
| driver. Shops can refuse cash.
| https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-
| legal... etc
|
| If you want to use the Tesla supercharger network (one
| of, if not, the largest in Europe, so rather useful), you
| need the app. https://www.reddit.com/r/Polestar/comments/
| 1hrzidy/do_i_need...
|
| In Northern Europe it's very common not to have cash at
| all or to have it rejected. In Estonia, you can choose to
| login to services using... your mobile phone OR (if you
| are lucky and this is supported) a physical ID card
| reader, so realistically you want to have a mobile phone.
| Some services don't even have alternative. It's more like
| a German / Swiss thing to have cash everywhere.
| baq wrote:
| > Some banks are even app-only.
|
| Expect this to be the norm going forward due to hardware
| attestation being normalized on phones.
| nullfield wrote:
| The US has just proposed making the ESTA application
| process mobile-only.
|
| As an example of one.
|
| Banks requiring device attestation may be a pain in the
| ass, but it's not a "requirement"; they (for now) still
| have websites and, usually, a physical branch.
|
| Other examples probably exist.
| dotancohen wrote:
| In my country we have a large religious population that
| eschews smartphones. Thanks to this, all services - bank,
| government, etc - are available without requiring apps or
| even internet access.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > LOL it's not some sisyphean task to not use big tech
| products, its slightly inconvenient and takes some time
| to adjust,
|
| Many of us have expensive professional software tools
| that require Mac or Windows.
|
| So it wouldn't be "slightly inconvenient". It would be
| the end of our professional work in those domains.
| yunwal wrote:
| In phones you have a choice of iOS (Apple) or Android
| (Google). Sure, maybe some people can go back to flip
| phones, but I can't without finding a new job.
|
| This is the first I've heard of Apple locking someone out
| of their account for no reason. Google does it all the
| time. So, yeah, can't leave Apple over this.
| superkuh wrote:
| So keep your crappy crap phone for a job and use a real
| computer for your personal life.
| alper wrote:
| It's against money laundering. Onerous regulations being
| interpreted highly defensively create these kind outcomes.
|
| Neither the people creating the legislations nor the people
| at Apple responsible for these flows care very much about
| collateral damage.
| cameldrv wrote:
| I think it's a combination of money laundering and phone
| scams where people are told they owe money to the IRS or
| something and are tricked into buying a bunch of gift
| cards.
|
| That said, if buying and redeeming gift cards are such an
| indicator of fraud that people are legitimately afraid of
| getting their accounts permanently locked, why doesn't
| Apple just stop selling them?
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Apple keeps money from the gift card after banning you.
| Just business, nothing personal.
| type0 wrote:
| Digital feudalism
| quinncom wrote:
| I'm the author of that Reddit post. I should probably update
| it to clarify that I didn't just purchase the gift cards, but
| also redeemed them. I don't think it was purchasing them that
| triggered the lock on my Apple account. I mean, after all,
| how would they know what my Apple account is until they're
| redeemed?
| jasode wrote:
| _> , how would they know what my Apple account is until
| they're redeemed?_
|
| To add context, your reddit post also mentioned: _> , I
| purchased eleven Apple Gift cards from [...], and
| apple.com, and added the amounts to my Apple account._
|
| I'm not saying the following applies to you but one can buy
| Apple Gift Cards using their Apple ID. After adding gift
| cards to the ecommerce shopping bag on Apple.com, it offers
| the option : _" Check out with your Apple Account"_
|
| So Apple would know the exact AppleID at the time-of-sale
| instead of waiting until redemption. If for some reason
| Apple's fraud detection system doesn't like the transaction
| (e.g. unusual ip address from Mexico instead of USA, or too
| many high-value cards in a certain time period, or other
| black-box opaque heuristic) ... then the buyer puts their
| Apple account at risk.
|
| Fraud prevention heuristics are insanely aggresive these
| days...
|
| Last week, I bought a Netflix subscription and 5 days
| later, Netflix cancelled the membership for no apparent
| reason. I got on a customer support chat with Netflix and
| the agent said it was cancelled because of the credit-card
| #. It didn't pass their fraud prevention system and to try
| using another card. At least Netflix automatically refunded
| the entire amount back to me -- whereas Apple keeps the
| gift card balance for itself after locking accounts.
|
| In another incident, I used a Chase credit-card at a
| physical Apple store to buy 2 iPhones on 2 separate
| receipts. The first iPhone sale was a success. The 2nd
| iPhone transaction just 1 minute later was denied and Chase
| locked the entire account. I had to call Chase customer
| service and recite the make & model of a car I had 20 years
| ago to prove my identity for them to re-activate the credit
| card!
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I'm not trying to be rude, but what is the point of buying
| and then redeeming gift cards yourself?
|
| I just pay Apple with my credit card when I want to buy
| something. Is this some kind of weird credit card rewards
| churning thing? Are you unbanked? I don't understand why
| you'd voluntarily add unnecessary extra steps.
|
| A credit card offers far more protections to consumers than
| a gift card.
|
| Given the amount of false positives, Apple should have an
| appeal process for innocent users to regain access to their
| accounts. It would be nice if this applied to all big tech
| companies, losing an email address can make other accounts
| difficult or impossible to access.
| wpm wrote:
| Lots of stores offer deals on gift cards, essentially
| giving g you a discount at the cards' store. $100 Apple
| gift card for $80 means you can buy something at Apple
| for $20 off if it is less than $100.
| floam wrote:
| I buy gift cards often - if I know I'm going to spend
| money on Uber, why not give myself 25% off $100 before
| even any actual promotions are applied?
| narmiouh wrote:
| News for you, apparently Uber realizes that you have a
| gift card payment and jacks up your rates
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/CreditCards/comments/1hb6rnj/rum
| ors...
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| If you want to trade in an old phone _without_ doing it
| at the time you purchase a new one, the only way to
| receive the trade in value is via an Apple gift card.
|
| I was looking forward to getting $160 gift card for my
| old iPhone 11 but after reading all this I think I'll
| just leave it in a drawer.
| nullfield wrote:
| Not so. I just traded in/upgraded (on a Verizon contract,
| but AT the Apple Store; maybe that affects this... but
| still paying Apple directly) and they handed me the new
| phone and had FedEx send a trade-in mailer that I had a
| while to send back with my trade-in.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Ah but you told them at the time of purchase that you
| were going to do the trade-in. As I said. It's different
| if you want to do the trade in later, which at that point
| looks more like "sell an old random phone back to Apple
| for some credits"
| dbtc wrote:
| If you sell it directly to another human, or even use
| something like ebay, you'll get more and they'll pay
| less.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Thanks, I'll look into doing that :)
| Aurornis wrote:
| I always buy Apple gift cards when there's a deal on
| them. A few weeks ago you could buy an Apple gift card
| and get $10-15 of Amazon credit, so I bought the gift
| card and loaded it into my account.
|
| I do this all the time and I've done it for years.
|
| I once bought thousands of dollars of Apple gift cards,
| $500 at a time, by redeeming credit card reward points
| that could be spent like cash at a couple of select
| retail stores for 2X their points value.
|
| It's a common practice. The edge cases are scary when you
| see them reported on Reddit, but they really are rare and
| generally get resolved after follow up (however
| inconvenient).
|
| Some people go to extremes to do things like buy Apple
| gift cards at stores that give them a small discount on
| gas purchases or something. I'm not nearly extreme enough
| to do that entire process, though. Having the money
| loaded on to a Gift Card is inherently risky and I need
| some significant upside before I'll do it.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| My recommendation is to completely drop the Apple
| ecosystem, however painful it is. I do use an iPhone but I
| treat it as just a phone. If Apple locks me out I dgaf.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Comments like this remind me of my distant relatives who
| proudly live out in the countryside and avoid traveling
| to big cities for any reason. They see a lot of Fox News
| headlines about bad things happening in big cities and
| they've concluded those bad things are happening all the
| time.
|
| So they constantly congratulate themselves for not going
| to the nearest city, look down upon people who spend time
| in cities, warn us that we're at risk of the bad things
| happening, and never miss an opportunity to talk about
| how bad cities are in conversations.
|
| Now replace big cities with big tech and that's exactly
| how a lot of these Hacker News comments read.
| igor47 wrote:
| Huh you got me with this analogy. On the other hand,
| can't this be said about any bad thing? Few bad things
| are _always_ bad. A few examples:
|
| * My liberal relatives won't own guns because they keep
| hearing stories about how guns are deadly, even though I
| own guns and nobody's died yet
|
| * My friend's kid won't pet puppies because he heard they
| bite sometimes
|
| * My aunt in Moscow didn't want to vote for Putin because
| he's "authoritarian", but my life is going great
|
| How do you distinguish between things that are actually
| bad vs overreactions? Maybe it's just based on individual
| risk tolerance? I don't see the need to put my digital
| life in the hands of some unresponsive corporation, but
| the risk is worth it to you and we just have to agree to
| disagree?
| Aurornis wrote:
| I skimmed some of the comments from that giant Reddit thread.
| A lot of people responded that they've been buying even more
| Apple gift cards without problem.
|
| One commonality among the stories in that thread from people
| who had problems was either switching their App Store country
| or using their App Store account primarily from a different
| country than the setting.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The "gift card" in general is an anachronism whose time has
| passed. They have got to go. If companies are going to
| consider use of gift cards as red flags (as they often are,
| due to their being key components in money laundering and
| scams), then society should just abandon them. They are worse
| in every way than a prepaid credit cards, and in most cases
| where you want to give someone a gift card, you should
| probably just give them cash.
| nullfield wrote:
| The only "use cases" I've seen are discount or niche. For
| example, Target and Bass Pro Shops/Cabelas in the US both
| offered some kind of 5 or 10 percent back/discount around
| Black Friday on gift cards. Niche would fall into,
| generally, some small enough business that these messes
| aren't likely to happen, where the point of the gift is
| specifically later-consumption, like a local coffee place
| that you know someone loves, or say a specialty herbs and
| spices place for a cook (where you wouldn't know exactly
| what they want from there, but that they WOULD be delighted
| to get something from the place).
|
| Otherwise? Yeah. Gift / prepaid credit cards are a horrible
| scam, because they tend to have a percentage or, worse,
| flat fee to activate. $4 extra on a $50 card as a gift
| means you just paid 8 percent just to GET the card.
| pests wrote:
| I used to buy a gift card every ~week at a local sandwich
| place near where I worked and ate at every day. Their
| deal was a free meal (sandwich, chips, drink) with a $50
| gift card purchase. Then I'd just pay with the card until
| it ran out.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| It's company scrip for Boomers.
| pxx wrote:
| You can give your postal carrier a gift card but they're
| not allowed to accept cash or a prepaid card.
| https://about.usps.com/postal-
| bulletin/2012/pb22349/html/cov...
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _they 're not allowed to accept cash_
|
| my sweet summer child, neither rain nor sleet nor cash
| nor dark of night will stay your postal carrier from
| zer's appointed rounds, but winter is coming... do you
| want to still receive your mail?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Not only local copies but also at least own and use one device
| where you have your important data that is not on the same OS
| ecosystem as the other device(s) - also helps with things like
| 2FA, password manager, etc., if shit has hit the ceiling fan on
| the other device.
|
| In addition, I always suggest people to:
|
| - Not use big tech's cloud services - ever
|
| - But if you must, do not use many cloud services from just one
| provider (i.e no Google everything, no iCloud everything) i.e
| stop using "one account gateways".
|
| - Needless to say, it's time you had a domain and start paying
| for mail hosting (at least for critical stuff - you can
| actually buy a very cheap plan; and use that gmail/live-
| hotmail/yahoo/iCloud/whatever everywhere else) [0]
|
| - Keep an offline (but safe) copy of your "most" important data
| [1] and ways to remember (i.e cryptic hints) for your "most"
| important passwords
|
| - Gain some experience in fighting in consumer courts/forums
| (depending upon your country) - start early, start with e-com
| companies. A lot many times we don't put up a fight because we
| have never done it before and we give up always because every
| time it's a first time. Apple and Google make a mockery of
| consumers everywhere because we have allowed them to. In fact
| sometimes when we talk of lack of accessible support at Google
| and Apple (yes, Apple) we speak in a disdainful appreciation or
| awe :)
|
| [0] Some might disagree but disabling (or dev/nulling in a way)
| mail@, hi@, contact@, sales@ etc on your domain (esp. if you
| have catch-all enabled) goes a long way in terms of avoiding
| spam
|
| [1] It's also very important to have a tiered approach to data
| storage and backup strategies. There should be a very, very,
| very small subset of your personal data, including some of your
| photos and videos, that is really, really small in storage
| footprint that you can back up/sync to multiple locations and
| actually pay the full price for it at storage costs via your
| own setup, preferably using FOSS tools (which are becoming too
| good these days) out there.
| dansmith1919 wrote:
| How much free time do you think the average person has to
| learn and set all this up?
|
| "You're giving these companies your data and then dare to be
| angry when you lose it? Just get a degree in computer science
| and host it yourself!!1! I am very smart"
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I think you're taking the message the wrong way.
|
| Those are the steps the commenter suggests you take to use
| these services safely.
|
| It's not that these steps are reasonable.
| avazhi wrote:
| So if they aren't reasonable what's the point of typing
| them out in a list exhorting others to implement them?
| wannadingo wrote:
| Because showing that the mitigation is unreasonable
| highlights how unreasonable the problem is.
| avazhi wrote:
| The original commenter said he always suggests people do
| these things.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Yes, this is what they think is required to be safe. It's
| up to you what you do. But what's better having
| information or not having information?
|
| At the very least "civilians" need to be informed, and
| warned.
| fn-mote wrote:
| Nobody believes this is right.
|
| The question is: will you roll over and die without a fight
| for your rights?
|
| At least you have time you are spending on HN that could be
| devoted to learning to fight. The fewer people that fight,
| the faster your rights disappear.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Yours is an absurd response. Rage-bait? Still, I will bite
| - kind of.
|
| 1. You don't need too much time to set this up.
|
| 2. All this doesn't have to be in one sitting - with meds
| and coffee that keeps you awake through the sleeping hours
|
| 3. In fact it's better if you do this over the weeks,
| months, years. For me it took years and I am still kind of
| doing it. Once in a while, here and there.
|
| 4. I am not very smart. If I was I'd have just ignored your
| comment.
| basch wrote:
| At this point, are we relaying all emails to three or four
| locations for access to auth codes?
| wildpeaks wrote:
| Cryptic hints only work while your memories remain intact,
| unexpected health issues can render them useless
| ocrow wrote:
| I had a family member who had sudden onset of massive
| seizures. He could not remember any of his passwords or
| hints at all. It was a real challenge getting into any of
| his accounts to figure out what needed doing.
| vladms wrote:
| The list is a bit overkill for the normal person. I would
| suggest just:
|
| - Have a local backup (simple giving the storage prices)
|
| - Pay for one email provider (less chance to ignore you)
|
| - For important services (bank, etc.) always register also a
| telephone number / second email if possible (there is a low
| chance that both primary and secondary thing will be blocked
| at the same time)
| nullfield wrote:
| I'll extend this, seriously, to the 3-2-1 model. It's all
| fun and games, rhetorically, until someplace burns down.
| duskdozer wrote:
| It genuinely makes me a little anxious whenever I come across
| people whose entire digital lives are dependent on a
| google/apple account. Just one misstep and it's all gone
| expedition32 wrote:
| The real problem is that all these big tech companies have a
| callcenter in India with agents who cannot do anything to
| actually fix problems.
|
| And some of them don't even have that!
| maccard wrote:
| > what's the rationale
|
| Their mega high risk - high value gift cards are effective for
| laundering stolen/fraudulent credit cards. Buy a $500 gift card
| with a stolen CC and sell it on FB marketplace for $400 -
| you're up $400, the buyer saves $100, Apple get paid by the
| retailer and the CC company are (likely) on the hook.
|
| Of course the actual solution here is _don't sell high value
| gift cards_, or require the Apple ID email at time of
| purchase/activation of the card
| harshbutfair wrote:
| I created a Google developer account with a separate email due
| to warnings like this. Then Google closed it because I left it
| idle too long and I didn't get the warning email. Sometimes you
| can't win.
| andai wrote:
| > It's definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp
| mindset.
|
| I've been reading about Lovecraft's Old Ones. Apparently they
| have no ill will towards humans. They just sometimes cause harm
| without realizing it, while going about their business.
| abustamam wrote:
| I watched an interview with Elon Musk a few years ago (circa
| 2018?). I'm no fan of him but he was asked about AGI and he
| kinda just said matter of factly, AI can view humanity as we
| view anthills. We don't really care about anthills, but if
| they're in the way of us building a neighborhood in an area
| then goodbye anthill.
|
| I'm not sure if I like that take because of how horrifying it
| is, but I found it very interesting that harm can be caused
| so nonchalantly by more powerful entities, since humans
| already view themselves as the most powerful entity.
| airstrike wrote:
| People have been saying that for literal decades before
| Elon Musk said it.
| baq wrote:
| That doesn't make it untrue. Welcome to the today's
| (whenever today was) lucky 10000, GP.
| airstrike wrote:
| It doesn't make it untrue, it just sorta misattributes
| it. Or gives him undue credit as if he were some
| visionary, perpetuating that myth.
| abustamam wrote:
| My intention wasn't to misattribute it. The fact is that
| I heard it first from Elon. I'm not sure what more you'd
| expect me to say.
| the_af wrote:
| I had similar trouble redeeming a gift card on Amazon. Twice.
| (thankfully they got resolved upon appeal).
|
| Enough that I am very wary of buying or redeeming gift cards
| now, especially more than one in a row.
|
| Apparently there's some sort of scam with gift cards, which
| must affect any platform which allows them, and legit uses
| often get flagged by automated systems.
|
| If they are so much trouble for Amazon/Apple I wonder why not
| disallow gift cards, instead of randomly banning users?
| zx85wes wrote:
| Going through this at the moment. Was it a physical card?
| What evidence of purchase did they ask you to provide?
| the_af wrote:
| It was a couple of years ago, it was virtual cards (I think
| one was a card given as reward by one of those _legit_
| review sites - edit: Gartner or one like those - which will
| reward you for providing reviews, and the other was money I
| had elsewhere that I converted to an Amazon card).
|
| I remember I went through some automated process which
| asked me for some account details, and after a few hours
| (fewer than one day, I remember as much) my account was
| unlocked. It was scary!
|
| What I remember puzzled me is that it was only two low-
| value cards. I would have understood the system being
| triggered by a lot of low value transactions, or a few
| large ones... but these were few and low value! Go figure.
|
| Sorry I don't remember more details. All I know is it made
| me scared of gift cards.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I mean it gets triggered every time I download a new app. This
| has been bugged for years.
| cedws wrote:
| Apple is perfectly happy to take money from criminals though.
| My grandmother bought some Apple gift cards from a supermarket
| which turned out to be fake. The cards on display had been
| replaced/modified in a way that upon purchasing them it
| activated another card held by the criminals. Apple refused to
| take responsibility and so did the supermarket. Gift cards are
| loved by scammers as a way to receive and launder money, they
| should be subject to much more scrutiny and have stronger AML
| mechanisms.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Shouldn't these huge platform guys be mandated to offer data
| transfer-out service?
| elondaits wrote:
| My thought. There should be a mandate to allow downloading all
| data on account closure from any service.
| userbinator wrote:
| To paraphrase an old saying: Live by Big Tech, die by Big Tech.
|
| _After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer_
|
| I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows
| for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do
| not care. You are merely a single user out of _several billion_.
|
| _Many of the reps I've spoken to have suggested strange things_
|
| That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human. But if I
| were in your situation I'd be inclined to print out that response
| as evidence, and then actually go there physically to see what
| happens.
| kingleopold wrote:
| with this same logic, you don't want to know how much your
| government and your country cares about you. odds are even a
| lot lower for them.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| oh, no, they will do a lot to make you pay taxes
| kingleopold wrote:
| they can always print the difference, lol.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| Why would my government care less about me than a
| multinational corporation with billions of customers that
| isn't headquartered or listed where I live?
|
| My Member of Parliament represents about 130,000 people, does
| regular door knocking to talk to people, and has a staffed
| office a few km away the I can walk into anytime I want.
|
| None of that applies to a multinational corporation.
| naian wrote:
| Because you can't get rid of your government, whilst you
| can easily stop buying apple crap.
| kingleopold wrote:
| Exactly. Corp. at least have some expectation about
| revenue and reputation etc. Certain % of people only cost
| government, literally.
| trinix912 wrote:
| People can vote the government out on the next election
| but they can't vote Tim Cook and other executives out of
| Apple unless they're shareholders with significant voting
| powers.
|
| And don't tell me to "vote with my wallet". We're talking
| about Big Tech, not your next door kebab shop.
| naian wrote:
| You can vote out the government, you can't vote out the
| state.
|
| And yes. Don't give them money. Buy something else. We
| are not short on phone or laptop brands.
| subscribed wrote:
| You're lucky and this is not a representative of the
| politicians at all.
|
| In my Parliament MPs seem to represent primarily the
| interests of their donors, not those of their country, not
| even constituents. It still better than it used to be, the
| corr...., er lobbying is not as blatant, but its still
| obvious.
|
| Seeing the MP? Yeah. Maybe if someone lives in the "unsafe
| seat" area and the MP is trying to get reelected:)
| trinsic2 wrote:
| This is why I don't use an os that depends on cloud
| functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality.
| It's really stupid IMHO to depend on a closed system like this
| to store data.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > This is why I don't use an os that depends on cloud
| functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality.
|
| macOS doesn't require this. My Apple account has a handful of
| apps purchased over the years, and that's it. I could've
| bought them directly from the vendors, but the store makes it
| easier to update.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Does iOS?
| lapcat wrote:
| The operating system does not. The App Store does, and
| unfortunately on iOS the App Store is the only way to
| download apps not included with the OS.
| bragr wrote:
| >macOS doesn't require this
|
| Technically true but I tried using a mac without creating
| an Apple ID and gave up. You can't access the store without
| it so you are locked out of Mac apps that aren't installed
| by default, and all apps that only distribute through the
| store now.
| treesknees wrote:
| Perhaps that's not a loss, because why would you want to
| depend on apps that you essentially need an Apple account
| to use? I've had great luck with finding apps with
| Homebrew.
| bragr wrote:
| Well I just stopped using a Mac. It's not worth jumping
| through hoops.
| hamdingers wrote:
| I've used macbooks for 15 years and have never felt the
| need to create an Apple ID. Maybe I've just been lucky
| but I have never even encountered a piece of software
| that didn't offer a direct download or brew installation.
| IndianShitbombs wrote:
| And even if, there are torrents and sites. Same for Steam
| games. Fuck the cloud.
| nullfield wrote:
| You don't need the App Store to install most apps, and
| can just download .dmg or even .zip files with them; I
| feel like only a handful of developers go full-App Store-
| only (with good reason; it not only imposes extra
| restrictions on certain functionality but also takes a
| big cut of your sale).
| 14 wrote:
| I don't think it is stupid but the golden rule is multiple
| backups. I personally believe 3 backups is the minimum. A
| physical one and 2 others. Either another physical copy
| stored at another location to protect against things like
| fire or 2 cloud backups to prevent situations like this. But
| I have only ever met one person who did this. His house
| burned to the ground and lost all data at his house but had
| back ups at his brother and on some cloud service and lost
| nothing. I was impressed as most people I know have zero back
| ups.
| left-struck wrote:
| It's pretty silly to rely an OS that you don't own. Though
| one can be forgiven if you have basically no other
| reasonable choice such as on mobile phones.
| amelius wrote:
| I don't think the customer should be required to implement
| their own redundancy on top of the services they subscribe
| to.
| 14 wrote:
| I don't think so either in the sense we are seeing in
| this case. As in there should be some legal protections
| like sure Apple can choose to close his accounts but
| should allow him a reasonable amount of time to export
| his data. But one should in best practice always have
| their own redundancies as too many times we have seen
| companies lose data for various reasons.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, therefore it is better to stick with services that
| have open protocols, so you can rely on FOSS tools to
| handle redundancy for you.
| swat535 wrote:
| Using FOSS solutions and setting redundancy is not going
| to work for average users.
|
| I think you're missing the point here, which is we need
| regulations to protect consumers against big tech.
| amelius wrote:
| Sure, but until then FOSS solutions are the way to go.
|
| Of course this is not for average people, but neither is
| making backups.
| christoph wrote:
| I think we must have passed peak Apple this week or
| something...
|
| I've had Clone Hero running badly on an ancient MacBook for my
| drums, so I decided to swap it out for an M1 Mini that was
| collecting dust on a shelf. I did a full erase, but I couldn't
| get past its activation lock. At all.
|
| This is a piece of hardware I purchased on my credit card, for
| my company, (luckily) linked to a phone number I control and an
| email address on a domain I can control, but Apple in their
| infinite wisdom are still locking me out of my own hardware
| because I don't know the password the last employee used on the
| computer! I don't want any data off it, thats gone, I just want
| the computer I spent money on to actually be usable!
|
| I initiated a "recovery" process to unlock it (at Apples
| discretion?) and they've sent me an automated email saying the
| initial checks are passed and they will contact me again in 7
| calendar days. Kafka-esque doesnt even begin to describe it. So
| for the next week I have to whistle Dixie!
|
| I've been a massive Apple fanboy since I swore off Windows a
| couple of decades ago, giving them a decent high 6 figure spend
| over that time and influencing countless others to buy Apple
| devices. Well that very much ended this week & going forwards
| without Apple will be painful, but the message they sent me
| couldn't have been any louder & clearer. The writing has been
| slowly creeping on to the wall for the last few years, between
| buckling to UK government pressure, the CSAM photo scanning
| nonsense, the absolute UI abomination of this new glass crap,
| this was my final straw.
|
| I'm also going to be relaying their "message" very clearly and
| loudly now to any friend or family member considering another
| Apple device.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This happened to me[1] a decade ago, now. Left Apple hardware
| on shelf for a year or two, Apple in the mean time did their
| iCloud migration or something, and my login account could no
| longer unlock the device. It's been effectively bricked
| since.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26482635
| vasac wrote:
| A similar thing happened to me - I lent a phone to my
| mother-in-law and created an account for her. She returned
| the phone once her own phone was fixed.
|
| A few years passed, and a couple of weeks ago my phone
| broke, so I wanted to use that one until I bought a new
| one. It turned out that Apple had permanently deactivated
| the iCloud account on that phone. I could make calls, but I
| couldn't install or update any apps, even though I still
| controlled the email address that was used to create the
| Apple account. Not that 5S is very useful these days but
| still.
| userbinator wrote:
| Not sure if the Chinese have figured out a way for the newer
| ARM-based ones yet (I realise it's already been several years
| since the M1 was released...) but I believe most of the older
| x86 ones have been cracked.
|
| I've unlocked some old Thinkpads that were similarly left
| locked with a BIOS password by departed employees, officially
| not possible, but actually possible if you reflash the BIOS
| and EC ROMs.
| subscribed wrote:
| Thanks, that gives me hope - my SO bricked their Thinkpad
| by forcibly powering it off in the midst of the firmware
| upgrade of all things. Don't ask.
|
| I was looking for the flashing hardware around here, but i
| should probably peek on AliExpress :)
| userbinator wrote:
| A CH341A-based programmer with the accessories ("chip
| clip" cables and adapters) is available on AE for cheap
| (~$10) and will work to read/write the main BIOS.
|
| If you need to recover the EC, then I believe anything
| that can work as a generic JTAG device, like an FX2LP
| dongle (~$5 or less, and useful for other things like a
| logic analyser) will also be needed.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of
| Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they
| simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several
| billion.
|
| What changed your outlook? Did you get burned by Microsoft?
| cerved wrote:
| Probably they tried a real operating system.
| userbinator wrote:
| Linux and the other unices are great for their CLI, but
| GUIs seem more like an afterthought on that side.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| I find KDE Plasma to be much better than Windows and
| MacOS.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| While Plasma is among the better desktop options, it's
| still something of an acquired taste, being a
| significantly different flavor from either mainstream
| commercial OS (and particularly un-Mac-like). I know some
| like it, but having used it on various single-purpose
| machines of my own I don't think I could make it the
| desktop of my daily driver or work machines.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Windows is very similar to Plasma and copies it
| sometimes, but is much worse.
| cwnyth wrote:
| Hard disagree. I find that Linux (particularly but not
| exclusively Gnome) is actually even better than Windows
| or Mac OS. I hate having to use Windows or Mac again for
| how clumsy and poorly thought out they are. It took how
| long before they finally got Window snapping? And file
| search is still atrocious on both, and getting worse on
| Windows.
|
| It always seemed to me the people who deride Linux's
| desktop GUI are those who actually never bothered to use
| it, especially not seriously in the past decade.
| xigoi wrote:
| I've been using COSMIC for the past month and it
| definitely doesn't feel like an afterthought. Unlike
| Windows, it has window tiling, for one.
| userbinator wrote:
| The gradual decline of quality, and increasing hostility
| towards the user once they went from software to services.
| afandian wrote:
| I've talked to apple support reps in the past. It's absolutely
| not surprising to hear that there's confusion. ISTR some aren't
| actually direct Apple employees, so they don't have access to
| certain information.
| maccard wrote:
| > That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human
|
| It's almost certainly not, it's just humans being human and
| going off script. I worked in a place where we dealt with an
| enormous number of customer service requests, and one of our
| measured support metrics was "how often do the agents deviate
| from what they're allowed to offer".
| davidhs wrote:
| > It's almost certainly not
|
| AIs are RLHF'd to have a corporate-pleasing interface w.r.t.
| metrics.
| marcalc wrote:
| Seems like we need to popularise proper guides on how to convert
| our iCloud storage using self-hosted solutions. It's a shame
| though.
| manav wrote:
| Last time I had this problem, I got it fixed after applying for
| and accepting a job at Apple.
| compounding_it wrote:
| My 2 cents:
|
| There was a time when I accidentally deleted some photos of which
| I had only one copy. I blamed myself for being stupid not having
| a copy but also money was tight for additional drives.
|
| Then there is this: depending on a service provider and then
| blaming them for something like this. The problem is that now you
| are losing trust in service providers (of which there should be
| little to begin with) and on top of that you are also blaming
| yourself for depending on them. However you have to create a
| trust model where your fault allows you to have a service helping
| you with it while a fault at the service provider will allow you
| to restore data from your end too, getting the best of both
| worlds.
|
| MacOS and Windows / Google with always logged in systems that
| lock you out completely at their will is an example of how your
| devices are not owned by you to begin with and then trusting them
| with your data as well means your digital life is basically owned
| by them completely.
|
| Now imagine that there are no humans to solve this but endless
| LLM bots that respond with generic responses because the LLM has
| never seen a problem like this. I want to point out that owning
| your data and hardware is really important if you depend on it
| and your business especially does.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| I think this argument conflates "what's possible" with "what's
| reasonable".
|
| In a complex modern society, we can't all be expected to have
| backup plans to the Nth degree.
|
| Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install
| solar+inverter/battery backup for electricity, get a medical
| degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it's not
| reasonable.
|
| It's why we have regulations and ombudsmans for healthcare,
| transport, finance, water provider, electricity providers,
| communications providers etc.
|
| Oddly missing from that list is critical technical
| infrastructure providers like Microsoft, Apple and Google.
| compounding_it wrote:
| > However you have to create a trust model where your fault
| allows you to have a service helping you with it while a
| fault at the service provider will allow you to restore data
| from your end too, getting the best of both worlds.
|
| This is why I suggested to have a dual model. Leveraging the
| cloud and services is really a good choice as long as you
| have backup systems running independently as well. Your
| backups may not be as powerful and full fledged as the main
| provider but in case of emergencies like these, you still own
| your data and hardware and don't panic.
|
| In this example a weekly backup of iCloud to a drive
| connected to a pi with rsync could be a simple solution. 6tb
| is not even that much given that 500$ gift cards are being
| used by the author. The backup is not great but it is easy to
| see why it's also necessary to own your data.
| snowe2010 wrote:
| That is in no way a reasonable suggestion. You're
| suggesting a raspberry pi (first red flag) along with a
| command line program. This is not reasonable in any sense
| of the word. Imagine me suggesting that everyone should be
| set up their own unraid server to make sure they can still
| stream movies and videos if Netflix goes down. Imagine me
| telling you you should set up a foundry to build your own
| engines because you can't trust big car manufacturers. This
| is the case with everything in your life
|
| Regulations exist because it's impossible for any one
| person to handle everything that needs to be handled.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| >That is in no way a reasonable suggestion. You're
| suggesting a raspberry pi (first red flag) along with a
| command line program. This is not reasonable in any sense
| of the word.
|
| Uh, the guy writes programming books for a living.
|
| But since he's all-in Apple he could just use Time
| Machine to some sort of NAS and get a more streamlined
| version of the above.
| snowe2010 wrote:
| It's not reasonable because you're assuming that 1) they
| have the time to set up that network infrastructure 2)
| their skills align with that 3) they have the knowledge
| to do so 4) they live in a country without strong
| regulations that would make such a thing unnecessary.
|
| Just because you know objective-c doesn't mean you know a
| damn thing about raspberry pis, backup programs, NASes,
| or anything else. It doesn't mean you know or want to
| manage your own network infrastructure. They're a Mac app
| programmer, not a Linux professional, not a micro-
| computer professional, not a network engineer, not a sys
| admin.
|
| Time Machine wouldn't work here, because it needs the
| files locally and he's already stated he doesn't have a
| 6tb drive.
| graemep wrote:
| 1. I am pretty sure OP could manage to plug in an
| ethernet cable. 2. Again, he should be able to manage to
| set up a computer and plug in a USB drive, even if not
| familiar with the particular OS. People are not that
| narrow 3. I am pretty sure he could manage to install and
| run some backup software on his devices 4. I assuming you
| are missing a not there, but regulations have clearly not
| solved the problem, in fact its likely AML regulations
| caused it.
|
| > he's already stated he doesn't have a 6tb drive
|
| Someone who uses a $500 gift card to renew subscriptions
| could afford one
| trinix912 wrote:
| So that solves it for OP, but not for every single other
| person out there who's not as tech proficient and relies
| on iCloud for backups.
|
| Which is not an unreasonable thing at all considering
| it's literally marketed as a storage solution for your
| photos, and a top of that even encourages users to store
| originals only in the cloud.
| Twisell wrote:
| It won't solve for people that only own an iOS device but
| setting up a Time Machine backup is aggressively
| recommended by OS level notifications for every macOS
| users.
|
| A simple usb hard drive will actually do, no need for a
| NAS. The only action required to implement proposed
| solution is to check "Keep all data on this Mac" in both
| photos and iCloud Drive settings. And to be extra
| cautious add a second backup drive from another vendor
| (to be extra extra cautious don't use Time Machine for
| the second drive).
|
| For the specific case of thoses that don't have a big
| enough internal drive they might need to store data on an
| external drive. But if you do have 6TB of pictures you
| normally should ask yourself if a RAID1 or RAID6 is not
| warranted at this stage.
|
| In conclusion it's not a binary decision there is lot of
| room between "I solely rely on the cloud" and "never
| trust the cloud".
| acron0 wrote:
| I actually really like the idea of a Digital Services
| Provider Ombudsman, who you can go to if you feel like you've
| been wronged by a big tech corp. They have a "way in" that
| consumers potentially don't, and they have the capacity to
| levy fines in certain circumstances. I love this! What's
| preventing this from happening, other than no governmental
| pressure to make it happen? I might write to my MP...
| graemep wrote:
| > Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install
| solar+inverter/battery backup for electricity, get a medical
| degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it's
| not reasonable.
|
| Bad analogy. A better one would be having a torch in case of
| power cuts (done that) having some extra food in the house in
| case the grocery delivery fails, having some basic medical
| supplies in the house, having mobile internet connection in
| case your broadband fails etc.
|
| Having backups of your stuff is an emergency fallback
| f33d5173 wrote:
| Ordinary backups don't aim to replace the full service.
| When you have a stock of food, you don't have enough to
| last you a lifetime. You have enough to weather a storm.
| The equivalent for tech would probably be having an offline
| copy of your "essential" data, but not of every photo you
| ever took. It would protect you from temporary internet
| disruption, or if a provider suspended you for a few days,
| but not if they banned you completely with no recourse.
| rrrix1 wrote:
| > Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install
| solar+inverter/battery backup for electricity, get a medical
| degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it's
| not reasonable.
|
| I'm feeling attacked. Here I was thinking my lifelong work of
| self sufficiency for my family was completely reasonable
| until you came along. Thanks a lot!
| SiteRelEnby wrote:
| Has it been 12 months again already? That's about how often one
| of these stories come up. I guess some people don't learn.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Apple has over a billion users. Do you expect every single one
| of them to learn how to do backups, protect their purchase on
| iOS, etc.?
| snowe2010 wrote:
| Yeah literally the exact same thing can happen on android and
| windows. The solution is regulation, not ridiculous solutions
| like telling billions of people to back up their own stuff.
| akho wrote:
| What's your proposed regulation?
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| I've shared your post with a friend at Apple.
|
| In the past people have emailed Tim Cook directly - his email id
| is fairly easy to find.
|
| Edit: "I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and
| SRE at Apple, with no success."
|
| This doesn't bode well.
| crena wrote:
| This comment should be among the top voted contributions to
| this submission for everyone to see.
|
| WWDR stands for World-Wide Developer Relations and SRE stands
| for Site Reliability Engineering.
| n2h4 wrote:
| parisidau, I hope you get your account back.
|
| you can in the meantime, and for the future, try
| compartmentalizing services you use. the old saying of "all eggs
| in one basket" applies here as well.
|
| VPS, hard drives, etc. are cheap and keep you more in control of
| your own data than you're with big tech.
| gorbachev wrote:
| How do you that with Apple hardware that requires an AppleID to
| operate?
|
| Is your advise to avoid all Apple hardware?
|
| Or buy backup hardware none of which will run MacOS / iOS, so
| you still couldn't access things like your Apple Developer
| account, or any shared documents?
| duskdozer wrote:
| Are you not able to use them at all without an apple id? I
| have some older apple devices which I guess predate that
| hnthrowawy477 wrote:
| This happened to me really early on when my original Apple ID had
| an invalid format, as it was an ID made prior to the current
| version of Apple ID everyone uses, and Apple refused to port what
| I owned to the ID that I was forced to generate to sign into my
| newer device. My old ID had software no longer available in App
| Store, so this wasn't just a matter of needing to repurchase
| apps- they were taking away my ability to use applications I
| bought from them. Since then, I've been incredibly wary of losing
| my Apple ID. I have a lot of respect for Apple, but I would bet
| that it's easier to deal with ID related problems for someone
| with Q level clearance in the U.S. government or even a non-
| existent Men In Black ID problem than to resolve a problem with
| an Apple ID. They probably would tell the almighty to get a new
| ID.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Far too late, but the solution was to change the identifier on
| your Apple ID from a username to an email address.
|
| Mine was the same, and that's all it took. Nothing was lost, as
| the account itself remained the same.
| td540 wrote:
| Now that this is on the Hacker News front page, surely Apple will
| be escalating this and provide a general solution, no?
| parisidau wrote:
| Let's hope so...
| sohrob wrote:
| If Apple doesn't have the sense to reply to this in a sensible
| manner then that company is in far worse shape than I thought.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| lol prepare to be disappointed
| commandersaki wrote:
| Take it to your state or territory tribunal ASAP. You might be
| able to take it to the courts and get temporary injunctive
| relief.
| acqbu wrote:
| This kind of thing happens more often than people think. You
| trade convenience for blind trust and sometimes that trust gets
| revoked without warning. Whether it's Apple, Google or whoever's
| "ecosystem" you live in if you don't own your keys and data,
| you're just a tenant who forgot the landlord doesn't take calls.
| tiku wrote:
| I went back to an MacBook pro M5, after being away from Apple for
| a year or 5 (Lenovo etc). I tried to re-enable my apple account
| but I had to wait 5(!) days to change the password. I ended up
| making another account.
| viktorcode wrote:
| It's a defence mechanism against account hijacking if someone
| has access to your phone number, linked to your account. Went
| through the same procedure to recover an account I haven't been
| using for a few years.
| TekMol wrote:
| As someone using Linux to build web applications, I wonder what
| about the Apple ecosystem could make it worth to have such a
| Damocles' sword hanging over me my whole life.
|
| Am I missing something? My current perspective is that not only
| am I free of all the hassle that comes with building for a closed
| ecosystem, such as managing a developer account and using
| proprietary tools, it also comes with much harder distribution. I
| can put up a website with no wait time and everybody on planet
| earth can use it right away. So much nicer than having to go
| through all the hoops and limitations of an app store.
|
| Honest question: Am I missing something? What would I get in
| return if I invested all the work to build for iOS or Mac?
| snowe2010 wrote:
| And that website is hosted somewhere, you're using several
| layers of network providers, the registrar has control over
| your domain, the copper in the ground most likely has an
| easement controlling access to it so your internet provider
| literally can just cut off access to you whenever they want, if
| you publish your apps to a registry the registry controls your
| apps as well.
|
| There are so many companies that control access to every part
| of your life. Your argument is meaningless because it applies
| to _everything_.
|
| A trustless society is not one that anyone should want to be a
| part of. Regulations exist for a reason.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Not wanting _centralization_ under one company does not equal
| advocating for "trustless society".
|
| All the things you mentioned (registrars, ISPs, registries,
| etc) have multiple alternative providers you can choose from.
| Get cut off from GCP, move to AWS. Get banned in Germany, VPS
| in Sweden. Domain registration revoked, get another domain.
|
| Lose your Apple ID, and you're locked out of the entire Apple
| ecosystem, permanently, period.
|
| Even if a US federal court ordered that you could never again
| legally access the internet, that would only be valid within
| the US, and you could legally and freely access it by going
| to any other country.
|
| So in fact, rather than _everything_ being equivalent to
| Apple 's singular control, almost _nothing_ is equivalent
| (really, only another company with a similarly closed
| ecosystem).
| snowe2010 wrote:
| If aws decided to block your access to their ecosystem you
| would lose so so so much more than Apple blocking your
| access to theirs. If the US decided what you said, t1
| networks would restrict your access across much of the
| planet.
|
| Your logic makes no sense since you can easily switch to
| Google or whatever other smartphone providers there are
| (China has a bunch).
|
| But of course those providers can also cut you off, so what
| I said still applies.
| jemmyw wrote:
| Plenty of things do work better as a native application.
| Packaging is a pain across the board nowadays. Apple is pretty
| good, you pay a yearly fee if you want your executable signed
| and notorized, but they make it very hard to run without that
| (for the lay person). Windows can run apps without them being
| signed but it gives you hell and the signing process is awful
| and expensive. Linux can be a packaging nightmare.
| TekMol wrote:
| What works better as a native application?
| wiseowise wrote:
| If you're full in Apple ecosystem, like my GF, you get:
|
| - Shared clipboard across devices - Shared documents - Shared
| browser - Shared passwords - Free, quality office suite -
| Interoperable devices (use iPhone as camera on Mac, for
| example) - Payments across different devices (use clock to pay,
| for example, shared with your iPhone)
|
| All of this with just one account without any third-party
| service.
|
| And billion of things more, probably, I'm not a full Apple
| head.
| TekMol wrote:
| Strange, I don't need any of that.
|
| And when I hang out with people who ARE in Apple's ecosystem,
| to me it seems they struggle more to get things done than me.
|
| Why would I want a shared clipboard across multiple devices?
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Why would I want a shared clipboard across multiple
| devices?_
|
| I guess you've never had to type something first on your
| laptop to paste in a phone app, or vice versa.
|
| Or open a link from a phone messaging app in your laptop
| browser.
| TekMol wrote:
| In the rare case (maybe once per month or so) where that
| happens, I start a script on my laptop that starts a
| webapp both the phone and the laptop can open in their
| browser and send text to each other.
|
| The overhead of starting it and typing "laptop.tekmol"
| into the browser on both machines is only a few seconds.
|
| That seems mich saner to me than to constantly have some
| interaction between the two devices going on.
| akho wrote:
| > That seems mich saner
|
| Normal people just message themselves on tg or wherever
| you send and receive messages.
|
| Geeks use KDE Connect.
|
| Whatt you do is weird.
| larodi wrote:
| If this person with all his Apple-centric work cannot get
| personal support from Apple, well then perhaps no one does get it
| anyway.
| deaux wrote:
| No way, if you have close ties to the Party, you'll get it,
| guaranteed.
| 14 wrote:
| I hope you get it back. I always had the mindset that if I am a
| paying customer that this type of situation is very unlikely. But
| you are literally a massive paying customer and you got hit. The
| truth is you are just a nobody even as a customer who has dumped
| thousands of dollars as a loyal supporter. Showing up on
| HackerNews is a positive thing as the only way to get any
| traction in these situations is either be famous and complain or
| your story going viral and someone with power seeing your plea. I
| worried about only having a physical copy of my family photos so
| started paying apple for some storage. This type of event worries
| me. Good reminder to have multiple backup solutions.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Oh yeah and it absolutely does away with bullshit of "If you're
| not paying you're the product" I'm sorry it doesn't work when
| these services, even free, are monopolies
|
| You can have free services, you can have paid services but they
| ALL absolutely have to be answerable to the consumer
| kstenerud wrote:
| These online storage services like iCloud and Google Drive are,
| and always have been, a trap.
|
| They feel convenient, but they will keep changing their TOS to
| disadvantage you further and further as time goes on.
|
| Everything you upload is scanned into their AI to create a
| profile about you that they can then exploit (once again, to your
| disadvantage). They do it despite regulations against it (Who's
| to say what they're complying with, deep in their complex data
| centers? Who's gonna even check? And how?) This is why online
| services that take control of your data are such gold mines
| (subscription fees, analytics, profiling, etc). They get you
| coming and going.
|
| And of course, the account terminations: The earthquakes and
| "natural disasters" of the online world that destroy lives with
| no consequence or care.
|
| When your data is not in your sole possession, you own nothing.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Come on Apple do the right thing here. Surely there are some
| people from Apple reading this in the comments
| alex1138 wrote:
| I always knew Google and Facebook did this (let's make Oculus a
| Facebook requirement! oops now you're banned - genius, brilliant,
| all the people working there have an IQ of 600) but now the
| trifecta is complete
|
| Seriously can we fucking have any products that work, in the 21st
| century
|
| Or is the answer just "lol automation is cheaper"
| lobito25 wrote:
| They'll probably reverse this soon, but it's an eye-opener for
| people who store their entire existence on 3rd party clouds.
| Nextcloud is your friend.
| otterley wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why did you buy and redeem such a large gift
| card instead of paying directly? And was this a form of payment
| that was unusual in light of your account history?
| parisidau wrote:
| I prefer to keep it topped up like that. It's been the same for
| 20 years.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| These retailers have a problem with gift card fraud.
| otterley wrote:
| What's the basis for your preference?
| matwood wrote:
| I have similar questions. At the scale Apple operates I'm sure
| mistakes are made all the time, but often it feels like there
| is something missing when these types of stories pop up. I have
| had support from Apple before and they went out of their way to
| help me, supervisors doing research and calling me back for
| example. How Apple stonewalled here makes it seem like it was
| more than a single large gift card that caused the issue.
| elondaits wrote:
| Back in 2015, I traveled to the US and wanted to buy a Macbook
| Pro at the Apple Store. The configuration I wanted wasn't
| available in Apple Stores, and I couldn't buy it online because
| at that point there was some limitation in the online store
| like they only took US credit cards, or something.
|
| At the Apple Store, the employees suggestion (a more senior
| one, who was consulted) was to buy a gift card for the
| computer's cost (~$1500) and pay at the online store with that.
| I didn't do it because buying "virtual stuff" for that amount
| seemed crazy (this was a huge amount of money for me, at the
| time).
| leoxiong wrote:
| It's common in Australia for retailers to offer discounts or
| reward points for gift cards.
|
| https://www.ozbargain.com.au/product/apple-gift-card
| Marsymars wrote:
| FWIW, in my country credit cards make up about a third of
| payment volume - gift cards let people fund their Apple Account
| without a credit card.
| ValentineC wrote:
| It's trivial in some countries to get a 10-30% discount on gift
| cards.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Richard Stallman warned us about this.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| those who laughed at him are waxing poetic about local backups
| at the moment
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Well, there are funny things about the guy, such as the video
| where he eats something from his foot.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
| elric wrote:
| This seems to happen quite often. Not just with Apple, but also
| with Google. In spite of this obviously insane behaviour, EU
| governments want to rely on Apple and Google for smartphone-based
| electronic government IDs.
| sangeeth96 wrote:
| This just makes me extremely concerned for the iCloud transition
| I've been making. It shouldn't be this easy to perform a user-
| disruptive action from the support/ops side. I would think they'd
| have visibility to some sort of "reputation" metric, given the
| age/purchase history etc even if anonymized.
|
| I can understand this happening if it was a freshly created
| account topped up with a sus gift card but it's unacceptable that
| the first action is to completely block an account with history.
|
| Even more concerning is the nonchalant support response to "go
| create a new one" with emojis. C'mon Apple -- this is just a
| terrible way to respond to this situation.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| A lot of fraud bans are just automated in my company. Apple
| probably outsources Customer service to the lowest salary
| places they could dump it to, and call it a day.
| willaaam wrote:
| I'm not the biggest advocate of the EU DMA, but account and
| device access is one item we should actually be regulating very
| heavily, where potential penalties for (suspected) abuse or
| incompliance must be much more granular than full-on account
| bans.
|
| It's hard to believe EU governments are actually considering
| mandating iOS and Android as gateways to access government
| services. It's a level of ignorance that's unfathomable.
|
| This story is also exactly why I invest precious time running a
| Linux machine in the basement that rclones my cloud drives
| locally, as well as having full local copies of my webmail
| contents.
| Rikudou wrote:
| "I'm not a fan of regulating extremely huge companies, except
| for the way I'd regulate them."
| nehal3m wrote:
| People make exceptions sometimes, what's your point?
| willaaam wrote:
| We must have regulation, and I support that fully. It also
| seems healthy to me to have an independent view on the
| specifics of said regulations. I mostly agree with the vision
| and direction of the DMA, but in my opinion it lacks
| specificity and clear unacceptable boundaries.
|
| That lack of specificity, to me, is why Apple has been able
| to implement malicious compliance. At the same time the lack
| of specifics risks companies leaving the EU market in its
| entirety due to regulatory unclarity with high fines.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| There's a difference between malicious compliance and
| noncompliance. The EU has generally ruled that the lack of
| specificity you allude to does not exist; Apple has
| misinterpreted things that provide specific requirements to
| mean something other than what they legally mean. Fines
| have been levied and it seems that the situation has not
| yet been resolved; the fines will likely grow if Apple
| doesn't comply.
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24
| _...
| wiseowise wrote:
| Wow, imagine living in a world not being black and white.
| Crazy!
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > It's hard to believe EU governments are actually considering
| mandating iOS and Android as gateways to access government
| services. It's a level of ignorance that's unfathomable.
|
| There's a good reason behind this approach, even though I don't
| think the benefits outweigh the downsides. These apps are
| supposed to be the phone equivalent of the NFC chips inside of
| passports and ID cards, which have all kinds of encryption and
| verification inside of them. They have to be protected against
| malicious data extraction, manipulation, and other fakery.
|
| Phones do have the ability to do that, even free ones, and even
| regular desktops and laptops. How they do it kind of depends on
| the implementation (whether you call it a "secure element", a
| "TPM", or a "trusted execution environment"), but they all come
| down to "hardware proof shows that this digital signature is
| not extractable or alterable". The data isn't supposed to be
| something you can access, like a password, but something you
| can only do signed reads from, like the physical ID chips.
|
| In iOS, that part runs entirely on dedicated hardware which
| will refuse to run non-Apple code, which is probably the best
| approach. On Android, there are more options and many phones
| run a software version of that concept in a dedicated separate
| virtual machine to save cost on physical hardware. The security
| of that virtual mechanism relies squarely on the early boot
| process having been verified not to be altered by malware.
| That's what the Google verification library is for in this
| case.
|
| This approach can work just as well on other hardware with
| dedicated TPMs (although a lot of free software enthusiasts
| will tell you those are evil contraptions designed by Microsoft
| to turn your unborn children into little versions of Clippy) or
| dedicated encryption modules. However, you'd need a common
| enough, accessible API for those to function. That's actually
| quite easy on Windows and macOS, but Linux TPM support is
| rather woeful at the moment, especially with how uncommon
| things like secure boot (even self-signed secure boot) are.
|
| In practice, nobody is going to buy a special sort of yubikey
| to log into their government's tax portal. Dragging people into
| basic multi-factor security has been a challenge that lasted
| decades.
|
| However, pretty much all citizens already have phones capable
| of top-of-the-line security verification. Developing a free app
| is a lot easier than implementing cross-platform HSM support
| for a novel authentication mechanism.
|
| All of this comes at the cost of having to run vendor-approved
| software. That's a huge problem for a lot of HN visitors, but
| those people form a sliver of a fraction of the population. I'm
| willing to bet the EU's digital access is inhibited more by the
| amount of old people without cell phones than the number of
| people who care about free software.
|
| I personally feel like outsourcing this kind of trust to closed
| source implementations of vendor blobs is a terrible idea, but
| it's hard to find an accessible alternative that provides even
| the lax security properties those blobs provide.
|
| Something I do find lacking in discussions about these
| technologies is how much the EU is relying specifically on
| American vendors here. America has been shown to be an
| unreliable ally that will gladly force the EU's hand with
| whatever mechanism comes to mind for extremely arbitrary
| reasons. There is a distinct lack of European alternatives when
| it comes to accessible secure computing, and I'd rather see the
| EU invest in local alternatives than go all-in on the security
| promises from Apple and Google.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| > It's hard to believe EU governments are actually considering
| mandating iOS and Android as gateways to access government
| services. It's a level of ignorance that's unfathomable.
|
| While I agree in principle, it's not so bad. If you get hit
| with an account ban, you just get another device to work with
| the government.
| znpy wrote:
| "After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer"
|
| I know this might sound cynical... But the author should really
| understand that Apple gives less than zero fcks about them. Apple
| is known (and, weirdly, loved) for being tyrannical in this
| sense. Apple is known for their "my way or the highway" approach
| to anything, without much explanation and with self-attributed
| "we're always right" attitude.
|
| > The Damage: I effectively have over $30,000 worth of
| previously-active "bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and
| Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost
| access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media.
|
| And that's why people complain about Apple's walled garden. Given
| the size of the damage I'd look into getting a lawyer involved,
| and possibly try and get Apple to court (in coerce them into
| being reasonable).
|
| Frankly, I'm taking note of the archived page
| (https://archive.is/jrsLV) that I will reference to anybody that
| will ask why not to trust Apple in the future. Note that Google
| is also known for having a similar approach (there is no way to
| get support if something like this happens UNLESS you happen to
| know somebody inside google). Amazon on the other hand has made
| customer support one of its defining traits.
|
| Btw if you are doing any decent amount of tech stuff, you should
| REALLY get off walled gardens and at the very least have an on-
| premise backup solution (an off-the-shelf nas with spinning disks
| could be a good starter solution).
| GaryBluto wrote:
| This kind of Kafkaesque behaviour is what I've come to expect
| from any kind of online services. It's also why I won't use
| anything that cannot be setup offline.
| RASBR89 wrote:
| Email Tim Cook (serious)
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| The emojis in the support chat are insane.
| wiether wrote:
| Why in the hell were they using "relieved face" after telling
| OP to say goodbye to their 20yo account and create a new one to
| "solve" the issue?
|
| It makes me so mad, that's insane!
|
| https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f60c
| wiseowise wrote:
| "I've lost 25k+, my account and my documents"
|
| "I understand, relieved face"
|
| Literal psychopath reply.
| kevin061 wrote:
| This is why I self host my blog. My email. This is why i try to
| stay away from the convenience of big tech. It is not the first
| time this happens and it will not be the last.
| concinds wrote:
| Apple clearly has a problem. In recent months there have been a
| number of reports online of people getting locked out of their
| Apple ID/iCloud, the appeal getting denied, and Apple refusing to
| disclose why or reverse it. Generally those reports don't relate
| to gift cards or developer accounts.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| My father passed many moons ago, and the family wanted access
| to his icloud account and they did not have the password. This
| was a huge struggle. Finally, after weeks, we were able to
| reset the password, but only because we had access to the email
| he used. In retrospect, perhaps it is a good thing that Apple
| restricts access like this for privacy and security. But in
| this digital age there should be other mechanisms in scenarios
| like this. What if i wake up from a coma, and forgot all my
| passwords and have not recorded them physically anywhere ?
| kuon wrote:
| I treat apple ID and google ID like throwaway accounts. I would
| never trust anything valuable to either. The problem is that it
| is very hard for "usual people" to do that.
|
| I will also never have an electronic ID. We (Switzerland) were
| dumb enough to vote yes for it but we are giving away our
| freedoms eventually.
|
| We need regulations to ensure vendor cannot lock in users and
| cannot threaten them. Everything should work like if you have
| your own domain and use email. If your provider go nuts, move
| your hosting and change your MX and point your local copy to it.
|
| This should not be reserved to some nerd like me, it should be an
| universal right.
|
| It is already late, but it can be reversed. We need for more
| sotires like this one to errupt, so people understand.
| seszett wrote:
| > _I will also never have an electronic ID. We (Switzerland)
| were dumb enough to vote yes for it but we are giving away our
| freedoms eventually._
|
| What's the link with the rest though? Your government already
| knows you, whether your id has your information printed with
| ink or stored on a chip.
|
| Belgium has had electronic id for decades now and I fail to see
| how it has taken away any freedom, but it has enabled people to
| get their official documents online without having to make
| appointments in person in most cases.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I think the fear many people have is that digital ID will be
| required for non-government services as well. I can easily
| see that happen in the USA and Switzerland is the kind of
| weird that may also let that sort of thing happen.
|
| With things like age verification becoming mandatory just
| about everywhere and actual privacy-conscious digital age
| verification being very difficult, there's definitely a risk
| towards abuse and badly designed authorization mechanisms
| (although the EU's open source backend and frontends should
| make it easy for other countries if they do actually care
| about privacy).
| nullfield wrote:
| The kinds of things you want here, and that I think we all
| do, are hard.
|
| Yes, ideally a trusted intermediary would do something
| like... read your digital ID (which stiLL doesn't guarantee
| it's you providing it, up to a point), examine a birthdate,
| and sign an attestation to a liquor store that "this user
| is 21 or older" without you ever having to fork over your
| name, address, or biometric details.
|
| The will to enforce such measures, at least in the US,
| seems low.
| kuon wrote:
| Because it will be used by other services. Like google
| requiring one for you to use their services. That's the
| problem.
| seszett wrote:
| It seems to me as if it would get used by the same services
| that already require an id, except they would now not
| require a physical check of the id anymore.
| 9dev wrote:
| I don't see that happening in Belgium, though?
| duskdozer wrote:
| You don't? Google already requires ID for developers in
| Belgium [0], and it's complying with regional laws for
| age verification [1]. The EU is also starting to look at
| age verification [2]. I don't see how it's such a stretch
| that Google may want to expand this further even in the
| absence of government demands, considering the huge
| ad/data incentive for them to directly link accounts to
| IRL identities.
|
| [0]https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-
| developer/answ...
|
| [1]https://www.digitaltrends.com/phones/google-play-
| store-wants...
|
| [2]https://digital-
| strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/factpages/blueprint...
| seszett wrote:
| > _Google already requires ID for developers in Belgium_
|
| But it also requires id in France, even for people who
| don't have an eid. Or in the US, and most likely just
| about everywhere in the world.
|
| I don't see how this is related in any way to having a
| chip on an id document.
| cube00 wrote:
| > The problem is that it is very hard for "usual people" to do
| that.
|
| Exactly, for all the victim blaming in other comments, try to
| explain 3-2-1 backup to non-technical people and you'll be met
| with glazed eyes.
|
| Sadly I think it's going to take more people losing their
| irreplaceable data and for the network effect of having it
| happen to someone close to actually see any change.
|
| There's a surge of people losing their Google accounts with
| hackers abusing parental controls at the moment, although I
| suspect a lot of those people will just move to Microsoft or
| Apple thinking they're safer until they get burnt there too.
|
| As more non-deterministic AI is built into abuse systems it's
| inevitable that there'll be more false positives, couple that
| with impossible to access human support to override the
| decisions, it's a risky time to trust your irreplaceable data
| with anyone but yourself.
|
| You could do everything right and still get locked out.
| lwkl wrote:
| The digital ID in Switzerland [1] is literally the best case
| scenario from a privacy standpoint. It is basically an ID that
| is stored on your phone that can send a signed copy of your
| data to someone verifying it. But instead of sharing all your
| data everytime it can also only share part of your data or only
| verify that you are above a certain age.
|
| I personally prefer this to sending a copy of your ID and a
| video with my face to someone verifying service provider that
| verifies my identity for a bank or some website.
|
| [1] https://www.eid.admin.ch/en/technology
| notthetup wrote:
| Sounds like something triggered a suspicious activity report. Not
| sure if it also applies to the likes of Apple but they're
| forbidden from revealing any information about what caused it,
| etc with the customer or anyone.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| While I can't help with extricating your data from the fruit
| factory's claws I do have a suggestion what to do next: get a
| 10-foot or 3 m pole and use it to distance yourself from them in
| the future. Self-host your data if possible, find a friend you
| trust who already self-hosts and see if you can hitch a ride, use
| some commercial service if necessary but don't allow yourself to
| get trapped within an 'ecosystem' again. If a company makes it
| extra hard to use things outside of their own control you should
| understand that they're not doing this for their users but to
| remain in control and maximise their chances of extracting as
| much from their captives as possible.
|
| Don't check in to Hotel Cupertino or soon you'll be singing
| along: Mirrors on the ceiling The pink
| champagne on ice, and she said "We are all just prisoners
| here Of our own device" And in the master's
| chambers They gathered for the feast They stab it
| with their steely knives But they just can't kill the
| beast Last thing I remember, I was Running for
| the door I had to find the passage back To the
| place I was before "Relax," said the night man "We
| are programmed to receive You can check out any time you
| like But you can never leave"
| ColinWright wrote:
| I used to have an eBay account, and at some point, despite not
| having used it for a year or so, I got an email saying I was
| permanently banned from eBay.
|
| No appeal, no reasons given, no possible way to create another
| account.
|
| Just. Banned.
|
| The companies need to be big enough to provide the amazing
| services they do, but once they are large enough they will
| _never_ care about individuals.
|
| My internal model of large companies is that they are
| intelligent, psychopathic aliens. The people in them are like
| cells in our body, important for the function, but with no
| agency, and they are not who you are dealing with.
|
| You're dealing with the company, and it's an inhuman,
| psychopathic alien.
| halapro wrote:
| PayPal permanently blocked my account and all of its connected
| cards and bank accounts after I sent them my passport for some
| verification (I don't remember why). It was because a lifetime
| ago I had opened my PayPal account as a minor.
| digiconfucius wrote:
| This is a good post and I wish all the best to the author that
| someone from Apple can help resolve this. I will personally never
| use iCloud ever again because of this.
| celpgoescheeew wrote:
| I hope he learns, does backups and switches to hardware without
| walled garden baked in, without the company being the real owner
| of your belongings.
| jfoster wrote:
| It's really difficult to give up the convenience of cloud-based
| accounts. It would be nice for regulators to step up and
| protect consumers when it comes to this kind of thing.
| frigg wrote:
| What I've learned from all these disaster stories: have backups
| for everythig. I have an iCloud+ subscription but also a OneDrive
| subscription, photos are sync'ed to both storages. On gmail, I
| set up fwd for all emails to another email address (non-Google
| related) just in case. Of course you can't do this for every
| service but do it for the ones you can.
|
| On a meta note, Fuck Apple, I'm so glad I didn't pursue an iOS
| developer career 10 years ago.
| foobarkey wrote:
| Just talk to a lawyer, have the lawyer send a letter, there is no
| need to bang head against CS for escalation
| halapro wrote:
| That "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I'm not confident
| that this would prevent data loss and that it would act in a
| reasonable time scale.
| foobarkey wrote:
| Not necessarily, CS is just following some AML script here
| and will not deviate :)
| neop1x wrote:
| This happened to me as well with a secondary iCloud account, and
| I still have no idea what triggered the ban. Apple support said
| they couldn't reverse it. The account was on an old iPhone, and
| after the ban, it became impossible to log out, rendering the
| device e-waste overnight. I at least didn't have any valuable
| data in icloud. But that experience prompted me to stop using
| Apple products or any other device that requires an online
| account to function. Fortunately, since recent AMD APUs are quite
| capable, I sold my MacBook M2 Max and have happily returned to
| using x86_64 Linux. No more Apple in my life, ever.
| tamimio wrote:
| That emoji in the last pic felt like passive aggressiveness. I
| don't have anything to say but it's why I never put my eggs in
| one basket, and essential stuff are always backed up, but if your
| job is developing in an apple eco system and this scenario
| happens, it's basically like getting fired and banned from
| working ever again!
| fmajid wrote:
| Wen thinking about risks from depending on the cloud, people
| fixate on the risk of losing data, when this kind of denial of
| access is a much more likely occurrence.
|
| I've started on my de-appleification plan in earnest this year:
|
| https://blog.majid.info/quit-apple/
| bjt12345 wrote:
| The OP is Australian and I've been recently reading of this scam
| that they may have fell victim of:
| https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/937339
| fhub wrote:
| Here is how the gift card scam works (in Australia)
|
| [Quote]
|
| Yes they do still get activated at the checkout. But when you go
| to redeem, the code is missing the last digit or two so it
| doesn't work. People take the unactivated gift card, tamper with
| it to get inside carefully so it's not detectable, scratch and
| get the code, remove the last digit or two, replace the scratch
| off layer, put the unactivated gift card back on the shelf. Then
| after you activate the gift card at the checkout, they redeem it.
|
| [/Quote]
|
| From this discussion
|
| https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/937339
| bombcar wrote:
| This is why Target doesn't have the activation code on their
| gift cards anymore, you have to have it added with a sticker
| when it is being activated now, and then scratch it off.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| How does the scammer know when the card is activated? Do they
| just leave a script running, trying over and over to redeem the
| card until it works?
| RyanShook wrote:
| Yes, I think they just keep retrying the cards on a regular
| basis.
| xigoi wrote:
| Surely the company could trivially detect that?
| hugodan wrote:
| "I never thought leopards would eat my face,"
| amelius wrote:
| Apple is no better than other Big Corps out there.
| guayusa wrote:
| True nightmare :( hope to get resolved
| lsands wrote:
| I imagine that every "should have known better" respondent on
| this thread has internalized their abuse.
|
| Why in the world do we let tech companies adjudicate our service
| relations?
| duskdozer wrote:
| It's more of an 'is' thing rather than an 'ought'
| jmpman wrote:
| My son was just scammed out of $1000 using some gift card scam.
| Typically these gift cards cannot be revoked once issued and
| anyone using the gift cards (like the people who scammed my son)
| would be able to reap the rewards without any consequences. I'm
| hopeful that Apple has found a way to track fraudulent Apple Gift
| cards and are now locking people's Apple ID who use them. I
| suspect there's more to the story than is being shared. What's
| the provenance of the original gift card? Could it have been
| obtained through some not 100% above board means?
| donbox wrote:
| _The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer
| (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart
| scale)_
| stephen_g wrote:
| From other comments explaining the kind of scams running at the
| moment, one possible scenario is that the card may have been
| taken, tampered with by a scammer (and the code recorded), and
| then placed back in the supermarket, with the scammer waiting
| until the OP purchased it and it was activated at the checkout.
|
| Perhaps between the scammer redeeming it and the poster then
| trying to redeem by entering the same code, the scammer's
| account was flagged and then the OP's account terminated along
| with the scammer for using the same code (even though the OP
| had done nothing wrong).
| epolanski wrote:
| I've been locked from my apple id for two *months*.
|
| Even though I:
|
| - had my recovery password
|
| - re-confirmed the email
|
| - re-confirmed my phone
|
| They just kept telling me "we'll contact you in two weeks", and
| kept not following.
|
| Then after the 4th recovery they sent me my recovery link on
| email (in any case weeks later).
|
| Worst of all? Their privacy and security they keep repeating like
| propaganda are beyond bogus. Sure, they de-logged me from all of
| my accounts, that I appreciate, but I had 0 issues accessing all
| of the contents on my hard drive if I was a thief with a simple
| script in recovery mode I could still access everything. Where's
| the security? Propaganda only non-technical normies believe and
| then repeat.
|
| I'm never ever buying Apple products ever in my life, I've got
| MBPs that my clients send me, but that's it.
| Tiddles-the2nd wrote:
| This is disgusting and unconscionable conduct by Apple. Your
| whole life is locked into your account (digital data and physical
| devices), and they either don't care or don't have the processes
| in place to fix it.
|
| This is the kind of thing they need to be sued on a massive scale
| for to solve but it's too rare and too expensive for anything to
| ever happen to them for it.
| everyone wrote:
| Being a "loyal customer" to any giant corp is just making it
| extra convenient for them when they fuck you.. You need your
| stuff as files on a computer you actually control.
| akho wrote:
| It's hard to empathize with a technically-inclined person who
| uses cloud services for life-critical things.
|
| Let's just hope more people read the story.
| onehair wrote:
| > It's hard to empathize
|
| I will empathize with you then and with your inability to
| empathize with the fact that people are different. Some people
| don't want to admit to themselves that this world is a wolf eat
| sheep world, trust that if you're a law abiding citizen, you
| shouldn't expect to be unfairly treated. Some people have more
| priorities and no time to dwell on harshness. They also would
| love it if everything just worked and you didn't need to spend
| 2 months of your life to configure things and always have to
| DIY everything.
|
| They're not like me and I accept that. I will never use Apple &
| Google Cloud for my personal things. But I will empathize for
| those who get unfair treatement from these companies.
|
| The whole meaning of a society is that we look out for each
| other, these big corpos have lost the plot, but I will not.
|
| It is supposed to be : I buy a service from you, I did nothing
| wrong, please treat me fairly and do actually deliver on what I
| paid for.
|
| That we don't trust them isn't how it's supposed to be, I wish
| I didn't have to do all of these things I do to keep away from
| big corpos, but this isn't how it is supposed to be. We're
| supposed to have the ability to trust each other in a society.
| akho wrote:
| I qualified with "technically-inclined". You can't avoid
| seeing stories like this (about Apple and Google) on a
| monthly basis if you read tech websites. It is a known risk,
| which needs to be managed. Failing to manage it to this
| extent, while also writing tech books, is just baffling.
|
| Apple is clearly in the wrong, and I'm certain that there are
| thousands of similar cases that are less public. The author
| is one of the best-positioned people to know and understand
| that. I'm sure they'll also get their account back, unlike
| many others.
|
| (I can empathize with the difficult decision they'll face
| after that: do they continue to promote Apple, or try to
| reinvent their career somehow?)
|
| "Looking out for each other", in this case, implies telling
| the people you care about to have backups, and helping them
| set up. I do that, a lot. I'd try to also help with this
| plea, if I had any pull with Apple.
|
| I don't understand the sections of your comment with the word
| "supposed" in them. Supposed by who, and on what basis? What
| paid-for service are Apple not delivering? I assume they
| don't charge the author anymore.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Do you also find it hard to emphasize with any kind of victim
| or only when it confirms your tech identity war beliefs?
| akho wrote:
| You are so smart.
| hnarn wrote:
| While I understand the attraction of doing so, I'm not sure I
| like the implication in the post that the reason this needs to be
| reviewed is because of how loyal of a customer this person is, or
| the fact that they have written books on developing for Apple
| devices.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| This person has read literally dozens of stories just like theirs
| and just shrugged and said "couldn't be me".
|
| Well, it can always be you.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Definitely a problem with a lot of developers, though I'm not
| sure if it's only a matter of having higher than average SES.
| notemaker wrote:
| My condolences. I don't have any advice, but you may be able to
| learn something from my very similar experience.
|
| https://skogsbrus.xyz/dont-put-all-your-apples-in-one-basket...
| helloworld4728 wrote:
| If Apple has the ability to do this, why don't they just brick
| all devices in Russia?
| xigoi wrote:
| How would that help them make money?
| stogot wrote:
| I also got locked out of my Apple ID several years ago. I have
| the password but still can't access it. I had to make a new one
| xondono wrote:
| I'd expect this crap from Google, but not Apple.
|
| If this doesn't get fixed, I'm going to have to rethink a lot of
| my digital life, including my company's.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| Well, you keep literally selling your own life to one immense
| American corporation and that's how you are treated.
|
| Time to say bye to Apple and Google for good...
| jim180 wrote:
| I do have an Apple ID, which was banned due to fraud and customer
| support couldn't do anything about.
|
| The thing is, that account was just used for dev. things for the
| US company, which builds/sells software for the US federal
| government (among the other US entities).
|
| It would not be very wise to do fraud.
| soapdog wrote:
| Remember, companies get away with these over the top behaviours
| cause it costs them nothing to have one less customer.
|
| If this situation somehow escalates until they have to take
| action, they will already have made so much money that is not a
| blip.
|
| They don't care. You as an individual customer means absolutely
| nothing.
| mmcnl wrote:
| Exactly for this reason I bought a NAS where I can backup all my
| photos that are normally saved directly into iCloud.
| elestor wrote:
| The emojis are so passive-aggressive it's actually crazy.
| novoreorx wrote:
| If I were the person at Apple in charge of this kind of matter, I
| would ignore this case, just as I do for other regular people.
| Everyone should be equally not cared for by Apple. That's how
| Apple sucks in a way I can accept myself still using their
| product.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| If the only way to get your digital property back is a public
| plea to your Lord, that's called feudalism. Everyone should be
| treated fairly, not only those who can get their public pleas
| heard.
| novoreorx wrote:
| You just made it clear to me why I felt not resonated and a
| bit uncomfortable reading that article, despite I thought I
| should be. Because what I want to see is something straight
| like "fuck you Apple", not a begging and emphasis on how much
| the author has contributed to the megacorp.
| nabla9 wrote:
| "fuck you Apple" is not a correct response either. Bad
| Apple, good Apple, is just more of the same. Asking Lords
| to be benevolent is not what we should want.
|
| Just like landlord can't just lock you out of your house,
| with all your property inside, but has to go trough legal
| process, we need to have legislation and regulation for the
| same with digital property.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Feudalism never left. The only change is that the majority of
| the serfs don't work on land anymore, and we have the
| freedoms o switch lords easily.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| Nightmare.
|
| The stories of online-only service failures are legion. And yet
| if you can get face to face support, even one person can do so
| much. The gap is infuriating.
|
| I didn't notice, do you have a Brick and Mortar Apple Store you
| can visit? I can't help thinking this as I read the post.
|
| Of course this is not a physical hardware issue. Where a store
| employee could just hand you, say, a new phone. This is on the
| level of getting a slot on Tim Cook's day planner, though I
| imagine the person with the ability to fix this is an underling
| many levels down Cook on the org chart.
| darrmit wrote:
| This is horrible and a big reason why I refuse to go "all in" on
| Apple, Google, or Microsoft (among other reasons). Apple is the
| one I'm closest to given my hardware, though.
|
| Given how invested you are in the Apple ecosystem I can't fathom
| why you would go get an Apple Gift Card from a store to do this
| kind of transaction, though. It wouldn't even cross my mind to do
| it that way.
| ntoskrnl_exe wrote:
| I can't wrap my head around that as well. Given OP's expertise
| and experience with technology, how was this option better than
| using a credit card.
|
| Obviously I'm not claiming it was OP's mistake, that wouldn't
| make me any better than the guy who was telling people "you're
| holding it wrong(tm)".
| quitit wrote:
| Yeah it seems odd, and if Apple won't tell him or do anything,
| it might be because they can't: such as circumstances of an
| active police investigation.
|
| We are obviously not going to get a fuller idea about this
| situation from a blog post, and while I won't assume that the
| author has done anything wrong, there have been similar stories
| in the past where the affected individual was deliberately
| withholding the whole, much more illegal, story.
|
| Presuming his innocence: What could have happened here is that
| the gift card he's purchased has been marked as part of a scam
| operation. Apple gift cards are frequently used for "tax bill"
| and "police fine" scams in Australia (where they are sold there
| is often signage informing people of that.) So potentially this
| person is accidentally roped into that.
|
| Also it's not entirely unheard of to purchase gift cards for
| long-time users (who would normally just use their linked
| credit card), as the cards are often sold in the retail space
| with a 10% discount, or can be redeemed as rewards through
| points/loyalty schemes.
|
| With all that said, at this point if he's not getting anywhere,
| he should approach a lawyer, as they'd be able to petition on
| his behalf (whether that is to Apple or to the state of
| Tasmania.)
| someNameIG wrote:
| OP is in Australia. Most stores that sell gift cards have
| loyalty cards that give points for gift card purchases. And a
| few times a year they give bonus points (e.g. 10x) on gift
| cards, that can result in an equivilent 10-15% saving.
|
| You can even use this to get an effective discount on hardware,
| as you can use your Apple account balance to buy from Apple.
| iambateman wrote:
| My grandfather's Apple account was blacklisted too but I was less
| sympathetic to him because he genuinely sends spam email from his
| personal account (it's politically motivated).
|
| One day he was bricked from his accounts because he ran afoul of
| Apple's ToS. The problem then was I couldn't feel sure that he
| hadn't _actually_ done something which a reasonable person would
| say should result in account closure.
|
| Paris's case is much more strange, because it feels more likely
| to be a false-positive.
|
| There is no legal right to have an account with Apple or Google,
| and I'm not sure I want there to be. But so much of our lives are
| built on these services and these stories erode our trust that
| the services themselves can handle the responsibility of
| adjudicating acceptable use. We need our digital accounts to be
| robust in the very long-term, even when there are bad actors who
| want to do all manner of bad things. And we need to feel
| confident that a properly empowered human reviewed the case and
| can articulate the reasons for a ban. When we charge a person
| with a crime, we tell them what the crime was and give them due
| process to fight it. I'm not sure I want the courts to decide
| these questions but we need some more due process when it comes
| to account termination.
| tw04 wrote:
| > There is no legal right to have an account with Apple or
| Google, and I'm not sure I want there to be.
|
| There shouldn't be a legal right to an account, but there
| absolutely should be a legal right to sit down with someone
| from the company to plead your case, understand why the account
| was locked, and at least be given the opportunity to gather
| your things if they decide not give you a second chance.
|
| If you get evicted from an apartment they don't just change the
| locks and keep all your stuff...
| andy_ppp wrote:
| There should be a legal right to a clear explanation and a
| mechanism of appealing these decisions with an external
| organisation. I think it's unreasonable to expect that they
| should be able to delete users this casually with everything
| that is tied to your devices.
|
| You could make it so costs for arbitration could be paid up
| front by the person appealing and then if the account deletion
| was deemed wrong the company refunds said user. Could probably
| apply to monetisation on YouTube that I see withdrawn for very
| dubious reasons too.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| >arbitration could be paid up front by the person appealing
|
| We need a constitutional amendment that prevents _binding
| arbitration agreements_ , which removes judicial review from
| public accessibility.
|
| There absolutely should be a legal right to pursue this
| through the courts (which _require_ a response from the
| company, to avoid default judgment).
|
| ----
|
| My main PiHole blocks all of *.google.* & *.apple.* for many
| reasons. My exploration into PiHoles began a decade ago,
| after Google pulled a similar response-less account
| termination (without explanation). This left me unable to
| update a blog (with several million annual impressions), with
| no recourse [0].
|
| [0] Unlike OP's situation, I _was able_ to download most of
| my writing /photos, only because they were public-facing
| (website).
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| What sucks is that it's a group of probably like 2000 people
| who are causing all the insane bureaucracy around these digital
| accounts.
|
| People running scams that will shamelessly and relentlessly
| pull any string at their disposal to keep their account
| running.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on
| Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with
| Objective-C series, which Apple themselves used to write, for
| O'Reilly Media, and then 20+ books following that). I help run
| the longest-running Apple developer event not run by Apple
| themselves, /dev/world. I have effectively been an evangelist for
| this company's technology for my entire professional life. We had
| an app on the App Store on Day 1 in every sense of the world._
|
| I am surprised that with such a pedigree, the author doesn't
| already have contacts at Apple they could reach out to for that
| personal touch.
| amelius wrote:
| I am surprised that evangelists keep thinking they are safe
| from the evil of big corporations.
| yreg wrote:
| There's no reason to presume that the author 'thinks' that.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| "This isn't just an email address; it is my core digital
| identity"
|
| If he doesn't think like that, then why does he act like
| it?
| evanelias wrote:
| That sentence smells like AI writing, so who knows what
| the author actually thinks. (As usual, the other major
| "tell" is the superfluous section headers of the form
| "The [awkward noun phrase]"...) I mention this because it
| affects how trustworthy I find the article, combined with
| other aspects of this situation; and because it is very
| easy to ask an AI to generate this kind of post.
|
| I'm more curious how/why the author ended up with a $500
| gift card. That's a large amount, and the author never
| shares how this was obtained, which seems like a key
| missing detail. Did the author buy the gift card for
| himself (why?) or did someone give him a very large gift
| (why not mention that?)
| lapcat wrote:
| > That sentence smells like AI writing, so who knows what
| the author actually thinks.
|
| The author has been a professional writer since long
| before LLMs were invented: https://hey.paris/books-and-
| events/books/
|
| LLMs were trained on books like the ones written by the
| author, which is why AI writing "smells" like
| professional writing. The reason that AI is notorious for
| using em dashes, for example, is that professional
| authors use em dashes, whereas amateur writers tend not
| to use em dashes.
|
| It's becoming absurd that we're now accusing professional
| writers of being AI.
| evanelias wrote:
| I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment!
|
| If this isn't AI writing, why say "The "New Account"
| Trap" with then further sub-headers "The Legal Catch",
| "The Technical Trap", "The Developer Risk"... I have done
| a _lot_ of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn
| 't write this way prior to recent years.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment!
|
| I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but common
| reason why people unjustly accuse professional writers of
| being AI.
|
| > I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans
| simply didn't write this way prior to recent years.
|
| What would you have written instead?
| evanelias wrote:
| Most of those section headers and bolded bullet-point
| summary phrases should simply be removed. That's why I
| described them as superfluous.
|
| In cases where it makes sense to divide an article into
| sections, the phrasing should be varied so that they
| aren't mostly of the same format ("The Blahbity Blah", in
| the case of what AI commonly spews out).
|
| This is fairly basic writing advice!
|
| To be clear, I'm not accusing his _books_ as being
| written like this or using AI. I 'm simply responding to
| the writing style _of this article_. For me, it reduces
| the trustworthiness of the claims in the article,
| especially combined with the key missing detail of why
| /how exactly such a large gift card was being purchased.
| lapcat wrote:
| > To be clear, I'm not accusing his _books_ as being
| written like this or using AI. I 'm simply responding to
| the writing style _of this article_.
|
| It's unlikely that the article had the benefit of
| professional, external editing, unlike the books.
| Moreover, it's likely that this article was written in a
| relatively short amount of time, so maybe give the author
| a break that it's not formatted the way you would prefer
| if you were copyediting? I think you're just nitpicking
| here. It's a blog post, not a book.
|
| Look at the last line of the article: "No permission
| granted to any AI/LLM/ML-powered system (or similar)."
| The author has also written several previous articles
| that appear to be anti-AI: https://hey.paris/posts/govai/
| https://hey.paris/posts/cba/
| https://hey.paris/posts/genai/
|
| So again, I think it's ridiculous to claim that the
| article was written by AI.
| evanelias wrote:
| It's a difference of opinion and that's fine. But I'll
| just say, notice how those 3 previous articles you linked
| don't contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers
| throughout, while this article has _nine_ occurrences of
| them.
| lapcat wrote:
| > notice how those 3 previous articles you linked don't
| contain "The Blahbity Blah" style headers throughout,
| while this article has nine occurrences of them.
|
| The post https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ has five bold
| "And..." headers, which is even worse than "The..."
| headers.
|
| Would AI do that? The more plausible explanation is that
| the writer just has a somewhat annoying blogging style,
| or lack of style.
| evanelias wrote:
| To me those "And..." headers read as intentional
| repetition to drive home a point. That isn't bad writing
| in my opinion. Notice each header varies the
| syntax/phrasing there. They aren't like "And [adjective]
| [noun]".
|
| We're clearly not going to agree here, but I just ask
| that as you read various articles over the next few
| weeks, please pay attention to headers especially of the
| form "The ___ Trap", "The ___ Problem", "The ___
| Solution".
| lapcat wrote:
| > I just ask that as you read various articles over the
| next few weeks, please pay attention to headers
| especially of the form "The ___ Trap", "The ___ Problem",
| "The ___ Solution".
|
| No, I'm going to try very hard to forget that I ever
| engaged in this discussion. I think your evidence is
| minimal at best, your argument self-contradictory at
| worst. The issue is not even whether you and I agree but
| whether it's justifiable to make a public accusation of
| AI authorship. Unless there's an open-and-shut case--
| which is definitely not the case here--it's best to err
| on the side of not making such accusations, and I think
| this approach is recommended by the HN guidelines.
|
| I would also note that your empirical claim is
| inaccurate. A number of the headers are just "The
| [noun]". In fact, there's a correspondence between the
| headers and subheaders, where the subheaders follow the
| pattern of the main header:
|
| > The Situation * The Trigger * The Consequence * The
| Damage
|
| > The "New Account" Trap * The Legal Catch * The
| Technical Trap * The Developer Risk
|
| This correspondence could be considered evidence of
| intention, a human mind behind the words, perhaps even a
| clever mind.
|
| By the way, the liberal use of headers and subheaders may
| feel superfluous to you, but it's reminiscent of textbook
| writing, which is the author's specialty.
| evanelias wrote:
| My original comment wasn't just about AI, so please don't
| make it out like a throwaway "AI bad" argument.
|
| As for the section headers, my general point was that AI
| output includes an excessive number of these, and they
| are often generally of the form "The [noun phrase]". Many
| times there's an adjective in there, but not always. If
| you think this is good writing then you're welcome to
| your opinion, but most writing instructors feel
| otherwise.
|
| Textbooks don't contain section headers every few
| paragraphs.
| lapcat wrote:
| > please don't make it out like a throwaway "AI bad"
| argument.
|
| The issue isn't whether AI is good or bad or neither or
| both. The issue is whether the author used AI or not. And
| you were actually the one who suggested that the author's
| alleged use of AI made the article less trustworthy. The
| only reason you mentioned it was to malign the author;
| you would never say, for example, "The author obviously
| used a spellchecker, which affects how trustworthy I find
| the article."
|
| > If you think this is good writing then you're welcome
| to your opinion
|
| I didn't say it's good writing. To the contrary, I said,
| "the writer just has a somewhat annoying blogging style,
| or lack of style."
|
| The debate was never about the author's _style_ but
| rather about the author 's _identity_ , i.e., human or
| machine.
|
| > Textbooks don't contain section headers every few
| paragraphs.
|
| Of course they do. I just pulled some off my shelves to
| look.
|
| Not _all_ textbooks do, but some definitely do.
| evanelias wrote:
| I said it affects how trustworthy _I_ find the article,
| when considered _in combination_ with other aspects of
| this situation that don 't add up _to me_.
|
| After going through my technical bookshelf I can't find a
| single example that follows this header/bullet style. And
| meanwhile I have seen countless posts that are known to
| be AI-assisted which do.
|
| Apparently we exist in different realities, and are never
| going to agree on this, so there is no point in
| discussing further.
| dahart wrote:
| > Textbooks don't contain section headers every few
| paragraphs.
|
| Yes they absolutely do. What are you even talking about?
| evanelias wrote:
| OK, please provide a link to a pre-LLM-era technical book
| which has section headers matching the style and
| frequency of this blog post.
| xigoi wrote:
| > I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but
| common reason why people unjustly accuse professional
| writers of being AI.
|
| The difference is that using em dashes is good, whereas
| the cringe headings should die in a fire whether they're
| written by an LLM or a human.
| rafabulsing wrote:
| LLMs learned from human writing. They might amplify the
| frequency of some particular affectations, but they
| didn't come up with those affectations themselves. They
| write like that because some people write like that.
| evanelias wrote:
| Do image generation AI tools output people with the wrong
| number of fingers because people often have extra
| fingers?
| dahart wrote:
| That seems like straw man. Image generation matches style
| quite well. LLM hallucination conjures untrue statements
| while still matching the training data style and word
| choices.
| evanelias wrote:
| My point was that generative AI may output certain things
| at a vastly different rate than it appears in the
| training data. It's a different phenomenon than
| hallucination. In the case of this example: the training
| data has fingers, just not at the same exact frequency as
| the output.
| dahart wrote:
| > AI may output certain things at a vastly different rate
| than it appears in the training data
|
| That's a subjective statement, but generally speaking,
| not true. If it were, LLMs would produce unintelligible
| text & images. The way neural networks function is
| fundamentally to produce data that is statistically
| similar to the training data. Context, prompts, and
| training data are what drive the style. Whatever trends
| you believe you're seeing in AI can be explained by
| context, prompts, and training data, and isn't an
| inherent part of AI.
|
| Extra fingers are known as hallucination, so if it's a
| different phenomenon, then nobody knows what you're
| talking about, and you are saying your analogy to fingers
| doesn't work. In the case of images, the tokens are
| pixels, while in the case of LLMs, the tokens are
| approximately syllables. Finger hallucinations are lack
| of larger structural understanding, but they
| statistically mimic the inputs and are not examples of
| frequency differences.
| wpm wrote:
| This is a bad faith argument and you know it.
| evanelias wrote:
| It isn't a bad faith argument, you cannot read my mind to
| know my intentions, and you haven't responded to my point
| in any way.
| rafabulsing wrote:
| Those are different levels of abstraction. LLMs can say
| false things, but the overall structure and style is, at
| this point, generally correct (if repetitive/boring at
| times). Same with image gen. They can get the general
| structure and vibe pretty well, but inspecting the
| individual "facts" like number of fingers may reveal
| problems.
| the_af wrote:
| Heuristics are nice but must be reviewed when confronted
| with actual counterexamples.
|
| If this is a published author known to write books before
| LLMs, why automatically decide "humans don't write like
| this". He's human and he does write like this!
| amelius wrote:
| The author is reputable, just look at the rest of their
| website.
|
| Your accusation on the other hand is based on far-fetched
| speculation.
| cgriswald wrote:
| You're pointlessly derailing a conversation with a claim
| you can't support that isn't relevant even if true.
|
| Regardless of whether AI wrote that line _he published
| it_ and we can safely assume it is what he thinks.
| evanelias wrote:
| The relevance is that it affects whether or not the
| article's claims are trustworthy, when combined with some
| other details here. It is very easy to ask AI to generate
| a grievance post, for whatever motivation. This is why I
| mentioned it in combination with the question of how/why
| exactly the gift card was obtained.
|
| There's the further detail of multiple commenters here
| saying their various contacts at Apple all cannot solve
| this particular case, which seems odd.
|
| Now that said, given the OP is a published author, it's
| more likely he is trustworthy on that basis, but
| personally I still get a "something doesn't add up here"
| vibe from all this. Entirely likely I'm wrong though, who
| knows.
| cgriswald wrote:
| I don't think you even know what you're arguing about
| anymore. You claimed that what the author wrote wasn't
| what the author thinks. As evidence you provided weak
| arguments about other parts of it being AI written and
| made an appeal to your own authority. It _doesn't matter_
| if AI wrote that line, he wrote it, a ghost writer wrote
| it or a billion monkeys wrote it. He published it as his
| own work and you can act as if he thinks it even if you
| don't otherwise trust him or the article.
| evanelias wrote:
| Ah, I see the confusion, you're still focusing entirely
| on this one "this isn't just x; it's y" line. I was
| mostly talking about the piece as a whole, for pretty
| much everything other than the first sentence of my first
| comment above. Sincere apologies if I didn't state that
| clearly.
| dahart wrote:
| > humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent
| years.
|
| Aren't LLMs evidence that humans did write this way?
| They're literally trained to copy humans on vast swaths
| of human written content. What evidence do you have to
| back up your claim?
| evanelias wrote:
| Decades of reading experience of blog posts and newspaper
| articles. They simply never contained this many section
| headers or bolded phrases after bullet points, and
| especially not of the "The [awkward noun phrase]" format
| heavily favored by LLMs.
| dahart wrote:
| So what would explain why AI writes a certain way, when
| there is no mechanism for it, and when the way AI works
| is to favor what humans do? LLM training includes many
| more writing samples than you've ever seen. Maybe you
| have a biased sample, or maybe you're misremembering? The
| article's style is called an outline, we were taught in
| school to write the way the author did.
| evanelias wrote:
| Why did LLMs add tons of emoji to everything for a while,
| and then dial back on it more recently?
|
| The problem is they were trained on _everything_ , yet
| the common style for a blog post previously differed from
| the common style of a technical book, which differed from
| the common style of a throwaway Reddit post, etc.
|
| There's a weird baseline assumption of AI outputting
| "good" or "professional" style, but this simply isn't the
| case. Good writing doesn't repeat the same basic phrasing
| for every section header, and insert tons of unnecessary
| headers in the first place.
| dahart wrote:
| Yes, training data is a plausible answer to your own
| question there, as well as mine above. And that
| explanation does not support your claims that AI is
| writing differently than humans, it only suggests
| training sets vary.
|
| Repeating your thesis three times in slightly different
| words was taught in school. Using outline style and
| headings to make your points clear was taught in school.
| People have been writing like this for a long time.
|
| If your argument depends on your subjective idea of "good
| writing", that may explain why you think AI & blog styles
| are changing; they are changing. That still doesn't
| suggest that LLMs veer from what they see.
|
| All that aside, as other people have mentioned already,
| whether someone is using AI is irrelevant, and believing
| you can detect it and accusing people of using AI quickly
| becoming a lazy trope, and often incorrect to boot.
| flatter wrote:
| Did you even read the article? "The only recent activity
| on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple
| Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan" a 6TB
| plan is $29.99 monthly.. It's not farfetched to assume he
| purchased a $500 gift card so he could keep the
| subscription without worrying about it!
|
| "The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar
| retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans,
| think Walmart scale)" There's not much of a reason to
| assume someone else unaffiliated with the author bought
| this card, he mentions talking to the vendor and getting
| a replacement which means he has the receipt
| cwillu wrote:
| "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
| "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be
| shortened to "The article mentions that". "
| --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| hamdingers wrote:
| Did you read the comment you're responding to? Where in
| the article does it explain why an adult is buying a $500
| gift card to pay their apple subscription instead of just
| paying for it directly?
| evanelias wrote:
| Yes, I read the article and it simply does not directly
| address who purchased the card.
|
| It certainly _implies_ the author bought the card for
| himself, yes; but that seems rather unusual to me,
| especially in such a high amount.
|
| Why would you purchase a $500 gift card for yourself to
| "keep a subscription without worrying about it" as
| opposed to just paying the small monthly amount? Honest
| question, I literally don't understand that motivation at
| all. In my mind a gift card is _more_ problematic than a
| normal credit card in this scenario since it eventually
| runs out.
|
| Second question: why did you create an HN account just to
| write this comment?
| rvnx wrote:
| I wonder if you can prepay using a card ? But otherwise
| to answer your potential question, I understand OP as I
| like to prepay things like my phone operator. I put 500
| USD there, and come back one year later. This way it can
| free-up my limit of 10 virtual cards I have, and most of
| all, can keep their limits as close as possible to the
| minimum. If you have a mix of services on the same card
| it is much more difficult and more risky. If you have 100
| USD + 50 USD + 25 USD + 75 USD + 60 USD in monthly spend.
| Then you have 310 USD at risk, when your risk could be
| way lower.
| tguvot wrote:
| there are people who don't like to spread credit card
| numbers/their identity around.
|
| there is a number of services that I pay for with either
| their gift cards or generic gift cards
| Marsymars wrote:
| > Why would you purchase a $500 gift card for yourself to
| "keep a subscription without worrying about it" as
| opposed to just paying the small monthly amount? Honest
| question, I literally don't understand that motivation at
| all. In my mind a gift card is more problematic than a
| normal credit card in this scenario since it eventually
| runs out.
|
| Asides from the promotional bonuses that other users have
| mentioned, if you have an Apple Family Sharing group you
| can only use a single credit card tied to the main
| account for any payments to Apple, but individual
| accounts will draw down from their Apple Account balance
| before using that credit card - so gift cards let
| individuals pay for their own Apple things (subscriptions
| or otherwise).
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| > I'm more curious how/why the author ended up with a
| $500 gift card. That's a large amount, and the author
| never shares how this was obtained, which seems like a
| key missing detail. Did the author buy the gift card for
| himself (why?) or did someone give him a very large gift
| (why not mention that?)
|
| The author mentions a big store (names it similar to
| Walmart for US based readers).
|
| I would assume this was an accepted form of "return a
| product without a receipt" or "we want to accept your
| complain about this product we sold going crazy 1 day
| after it's warranty but we cannot give you cash back" etc
| evanelias wrote:
| I don't understand. Gift cards typically cannot be
| returned, at least in the US. And the author said the
| gift card was redeemed "to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage
| plan", which also cannot be returned I'd imagine.
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| But gift cards aren't supposed to work that, right? If it
| wasn't "legal" or "okay" to have a 500 dollar card, they
| shouldn't be sold. They are available, therefore they
| should be perfectly usable.
|
| I don't want to speculate more, but one of the use cases
| for them is for people that choose to not use cards
| online (or even don't have credit cards at all) to be
| able to buy digital goods with cash.
|
| Either way, if we're questioning buying/using the gift
| card, we're blaming the victim
| evanelias wrote:
| I'm not blaming anyone; I just find it surprising that
| this detail wasn't mentioned or explained. Its omission
| makes the article less trustworthy to me.
|
| People are fast to pull out pitchforks in response to
| outrage-bait posts like this, but (generally speaking) a
| nontrivial percentage of such posts are intentionally
| omitting details which can help explain the other side's
| actions.
|
| Also I genuinely wasn't familiar with this specific use-
| case for gift cards. At least in the US, you can buy
| general-purpose prepaid debit cards for this type of
| thing instead, or use various services which generate
| virtual cards e.g. privacy.com. To me that seems
| infinitely more normal than buying a large-value "gift
| card" for yourself, but I'm admittedly not familiar with
| the options in other countries.
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| 1. The prepaid Visa or Mastercard come with an extra fee
| (like 5-6 dollars per card if I recall correctly?)
|
| 2. I didn't see the prepaid cards in stores outside the
| US, so they are probably not that popular outside.
|
| Sometimes you also want to shift your spending, like if
| you spend 500 USD this month at this store, you'll get
| some good % cashback. So you end up buying a gift card
| that you know you'll definitely use next month.
|
| I think this is irrelevant, TBH.
| xuki wrote:
| The author lives in Australia. You get points from
| supermarket for purchasing some gift cards during some
| promotion, it's around 10% of the card value.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Gift cards are associated with money laundering and many
| online scams. I would guess any usage of them (especially
| in larger denominations) would attract increased
| attention and additional risk. That's nonsensical of
| course, why does Apple sell them if they are also
| suspicious of them, but I would guess if he had paid with
| a credit card there would have been no issue.
|
| If you receive them as a gift, use them only in a
| situation unconnected with your cloud ID, such as to pay
| for new hardware at an Apple store.
| nullfield wrote:
| Re: AI writing: AI tends to (and might be getting better)
| use commas for such claims, in the form of, "it's not
| just X, but [optional:also] Y".
|
| Even if it feels sus, remember that AI is trained on what
| it sees: even the posts here will make it more and more
| effective at "writing like a human".
|
| As for the OP, the claims to exist and have published
| books, etc. are relatively easily publicly verifiable.
|
| No, $500 isn't a large amount, doubly so anymore. I
| consistently have to try to re-anchor, but $100 is the
| new $20 (sadly).
| evanelias wrote:
| AI used em-dashes initially in that type of sentence
| structure, but more recently moved to a mix of semicolons
| and commas, at least from what I've been seeing.
|
| I never claimed the author doesn't exist.
|
| $500 is objectively a large amount for a gift card. Off-
| the-shelf gift cards with predetermined amounts are
| almost always substantially less than this.
| haspok wrote:
| Then why did he mention it (their credentials)? It has
| literally zero relevance in this case. Maybe they were
| trying to show off?
| jeromegv wrote:
| It's relevant because it shows they are not newbie on the
| platform and are unlikely to have misbehave in some
| capacity to warrant a full deactivation. It adds
| credibility to their story.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| There is if you want to blame the victim and/or work for
| Apple.
| kibwen wrote:
| If you don't have root access to your machine, it's not your
| machine.
|
| If you don't have root access to the machine your data is on,
| it's not your data.
| bobim wrote:
| Brillant, I'm stealing it.
| rvnx wrote:
| Even Meta approves. If it is not your data why should
| data protection laws apply ?
| ovi256 wrote:
| > I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE
| at Apple, with no success. Ouch. If he can't get it fixed, it's
| scary
| bragr wrote:
| From my experiences with people at Apple, everyone seems so
| siloed that it doesn't surprise me that they couldn't help
| him. It doesn't seem like they have the culture where you
| could just drop by the Apple fraud team and ask for help for
| a friend.
| e28eta wrote:
| Or, they hit the brick wall that is US anti-money
| laundering laws. It's illegal to "tip off" (warn) the
| person if they've tripped the AML checks.
|
| At that point, it doesn't matter how many friends you have
| on the inside, unless you've got one that's ignorant of the
| law or willing to risk the penalties.
| elphinstone wrote:
| Oh, yes, only "important" people deserve customer service. That
| is an appallingly elitist attitude.
| basisword wrote:
| Nobody said that.
| kombine wrote:
| This reminds of a joke we have in Russia which roughly
| translates into English as follows: "Comrade Stalin, it has
| been a terrible mistake!" The phrase could belong to one of
| Stalin's own sycophants who unluckily for themselves got
| imprisoned and executed during the big purge in the 1930s. They
| didn't understand why it happened to them.
|
| I have a feeling that this guy also doesn't get why this
| happened to him and that he himself contributed towards it with
| the work of his life.
| IndianShitbombs wrote:
| Indeed. The machine eating its enablers.
| vintagedave wrote:
| I went to Uni with this person (though I doubt they remember
| me.) They have a very high reputation. If anyone should be able
| to resolve this, it's them -- that they can't, and they have to
| go public, is absolutely terrifying and should make Apple execs
| pay attention.
|
| I mean that. Exec level. This story and that this specific
| person cannot get it fixed indicates absolute failure.
| avazhi wrote:
| I upvoted this for visibility but if you put your entire digital
| life in the hands of any of these tech companies and store all
| your shit in the cloud with no local backups, you are at least as
| blameworthy as they are. I'm less surprised that Apple would do
| this than I am that somebody who is clearly tech savvy could be
| this stupid about tech.
| num42 wrote:
| Off-topic and a stupid question: why does anything related to
| Apple attract so much attention on HN? As a newcomer, I assumed
| HN focused mostly on reverse engineering,retro computing, and
| deep technical topics.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Tech stopped being full of tech nerds when 10 weeks in a
| JavaScript boot camp and a few thousand lines of code in your
| personal GitHub would land you a $140k remote job.
|
| Maybe now we will start seeing a reversion to the people in it
| for the passion.
| sph wrote:
| Imagine what tech will look like when you don't even need the
| 10 weeks in a boot camp, just a subscription to Claude.
| markbnj wrote:
| I would not say your list is anything like complete, although
| those topics are often discussed here. Apple is a huge player
| in the general computing ecosystem, and probably a majority of
| front- and back-end developers these days work on macbooks, so
| it isn't surprising that the things they do resonate in this
| community.
| waz0wski wrote:
| HN hasn't focused on those topics in a long time, they rarely
| are on the front page. Skip the top 20 articles and you'll
| start to see some interesting content instead of all the VC &
| AI drivel.
|
| Hackaday is a content aggregator site that usually has more
| content on these topics - https://hackaday.com
|
| Or there are still some good old blogs out there with RSS feeds
| http://www.righto.com/ http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/
| https://blog.ret2.io/
| rjakobsson wrote:
| Apple offers the most convenient computing experience available
| to mankind as of right now. That's why I care, at least. I love
| their products and services, but not so much when it fails (as
| in the authors case). That shit is scary.
| haunter wrote:
| >I assumed
|
| You assumed wrong. Honestly that was never case, but maybe it
| was better 15 years ago
| drcongo wrote:
| No idea if this has ever been tried, but a GDPR "subject access
| request" requires a company to hand over all the data they hold
| on you, which technically should include all your photos, media,
| messages and everything.
| Eriks wrote:
| As of data (photos, contacts, files etc.), you should have rights
| to request all that for download. GDPR etc that grants you that.
| xigoi wrote:
| OP does not live in the EU.
| storus wrote:
| Disabling iCloud seems like a gift. I wish I could just get rid
| of it all without any subsequent nagging every time I
| update/upgrade macOS.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It's one thing to lock someone's account so they can't make
| payments or whatever. It's another altogether to lock them out of
| accessing their own documents / photos / etc. That's just 100%
| unacceptable regardless of what triggered it. And even if they
| did have a valid reason to lock your account, at the very least
| it should be, "you have 7 days to download / clear out your
| documents".
|
| Absolutely horrible black mark on Apple.
|
| I'll be buying an external HDD to download all my photos / iCloud
| docs to. I've been too trusting.
| kragen wrote:
| Probably worth reading Doctorow's "Scroogled":
| https://craphound.com/scroogled.html
|
| Centralization of power in unaccountable organizations has always
| been a recipe for disaster.
|
| I could suggest some slogans:
|
| "Apple. Not even once."
|
| "Friends don't let friends use Apple."
|
| But I think this is a problem that merits more than slogans.
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| Just curious if the account owner is still able to access their
| passkeys stored on their Apple device at the moment.
|
| Not too keen on passkeys without an easy way to backup.
|
| Same goes with sign in with Google and Apple.
| a012 wrote:
| Buy two Yubikeys and save your passkeys there if you would
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Do Yubikeys even work with iPhone? Besides, if the account is
| locked, how would that help? The issue isn't a forgotten
| passcode or passkey.
| arianvanp wrote:
| Yes they work with iPhone
| sergsoares wrote:
| Same doubt here, a disaster even bigger (Maybe in Mac ?)
|
| That is why I prefer OTP all the time, easier to backup and
| restore.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Perhaps the most annoying thing about this, certainly after
| getting traction on HN, is that his account will be
| reinstated....
|
| ...and then nothing. No sorry, no "here's what went wrong", no
| blog post to address the angry masses, no recognition,
| reconciliation, or reformation. Just things working again and
| silence.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| google locked my sister's account for some reason and we spent
| months trying to get it unlocked. no luck. fuckers.
| ezfe wrote:
| Most cases we see here do only lock the media side of accounts.
| It's concerning this blocked the entire account.
| quitit wrote:
| It sounds like the gift card # is included as part of a police
| investigation (as you already know scams often use gift cards as
| payment) - which would explain Apple's inability to help you or
| provide information (because they would be required by the state
| not to.)
|
| You should approach a lawyer to petition Apple and the Tasmanian
| police on your behalf.
| njarboe wrote:
| "Many of the reps I've spoken to have suggested strange things,
| one of the strangest was telling me that I could physically go to
| Apple's Australian HQ at Level 3, 20 Martin Place, Sydney, and
| plead my case."
|
| This does not seem strange to me and could be a course of action.
| When I moved my domains off Google because of this type of
| "banned without recourse" possibility, I found a registrar that
| had a physical address, small office, and people listed on the
| company website (porkbun) so in the worse case I could fly to the
| office and straighten things out.
|
| No mention of even going to an Apple store. Maybe the nearest one
| is very far away from him?
| bonnaud_dowell wrote:
| A painful reminder that Apple's service is subject to terms.
|
| Speaking of which, the guy's .paris domain name may be next
| unless he is a resident of Ile-de-France etc.......
| bonnaud_dowell wrote:
| A painful reminder that Apple's service is subject to terms.
|
| Incidentally, the guy's .paris domain name may be next unless you
| are a resident or have a business related to the region of of
| Ile-de-France
| tonymet wrote:
| I back up regularly using Google Takeout and similar tools, but I
| don't think it's fair to shame this author . Even if you have
| backups , your recent and essential content and credentials will
| be locked out . 1% of your content is the most important
|
| We all depend heavily on cloud storage and sso . Everything works
| fine until you are locked out .
|
| And using them isn't fully voluntary. They are necessary for
| collaboration . You end up using what your team uses .
|
| You can try to be that "own cloud" snob but it only works if you
| live in a basement
|
| Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive ,
| Dropbox and maybe more. That's 4+ single points of failure
|
| You're just not imaginative enough if you think you're safe .
|
| OPs only recourse is an insider or a lawyer
| rvnx wrote:
| Lot of arrogant people here who think they are safe and better
| than anybody and blame OP.
|
| It is totally normal in today's world to depend on cloud
| services and reasonably difficult to do without it. In China:
| no WeChat you are practically dead. Here try to join meetings
| without account, try to send a message on WhatsApp without
| account, etc... a lot can go wrong very fast. What if you used
| your Apple account as SSO to other services ?
| tonymet wrote:
| Very true. And account integrity check pointing is stochastic
| and more aggressive so at any time there are people being
| locked out .
|
| One of 20 of your services could lock you out tomorrow and
| that means you're blocked from coworkers and family
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The root issue/risk is from cascading service dependencies,
| and I'm 99% sure this is done unintentionally at Apple et
| al.
|
| Team builds service. Service depends on first party
| identity/authentication because it's easier.
|
| ... Fast forward 20 years, and no one at platform company
| even understands the dependency graph from a customer
| perspective anymore. _Especially in the case of rare
| events_ like account locks.
|
| Consequently, those customers face a sudden Kafkaesque maze
| of edge cases that don't line up, as the customer service
| processes people are funneled through are _literally_
| incapable of solving the problem.
|
| Which means the entire "normal" customer support apparatus
| is unavailable to them. (The same apparatus companies
| aggressive shove all support through)
|
| This is why there should be regulatory requirements for
| identity platforms mandating the ability to speak to a
| human who's empowered to fix your issue + an option for
| customer-choice decision arbitration + continuous random
| sample audits with penalties for falling below KPIs
| (timeliness, correctness, etc).
|
| It should literally be illegal for a company to have their
| banning system 'oops' and then pretend they don't know you.
|
| Because it's only going to get worse as more AI / probably
| correct methods infuse account security functions.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Honestly it seems like nobody under this entire post has
| actually fully read the TOS for any Apple service.
|
| I have once for iCloud... and the impression I got was
| that they must think close to 100% of the population on
| Earth are potential scoundrels for them to put in so many
| clauses and escape hatches.
|
| I don't think it's possible to fully read any modern TOS
| from a bigco and not get an inkling of that.
|
| The real issue is why are people signing up to TOS they
| haven't fully read, and if they have... why are they
| signing up for something that directly spells out they
| are possible scoundrels who need to be dominated.
|
| It's like some kind of mass self humilitation ritual.
| totallymike wrote:
| At Apple's scale, the likelihood of someone pulling any
| weird or shady nonsense that can be imagined is not
| potential, it's eventual.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Even so, on the record subordinating yourself to a
| superior entity by definition... must turn the end user
| into an inferior.
|
| A direct, on the record, formal agreement to be an
| inferior.
|
| And then people wonder why they get humilitated and
| mistreated in complex edge cases.
| nullfield wrote:
| Wasn't them finally implementing competent (if overly
| annoying) iCloud MFA the result of this kind of thing,
| with social engineering/photo leaks from celebrities or
| something?
|
| It takes a public scandal, and all.
| IndianShitbombs wrote:
| > t. What if you used your Apple account as SSO to other
| services ?
|
| Your own wrongdoing. Always use a site-specific auth method,
| i.e. by email. And a separate email for each site.
| rationalist wrote:
| Using a separate email address for each site is smart, but
| creating a separate email account for each site is going to
| be very tedious, and I imagine Google, Yahoo, etc are going
| to stop you very quickly after you've opened 20+ accounts
| with the same phone number.
|
| (Use a catch-all to have different email addresses for
| different sites, because when one gets hacked, then the
| damage is limited.)
| a2fz wrote:
| https://sidebox.net is a nice way to do this as long as
| the site doesn't restrict to mainstream email domains
| zygentoma wrote:
| Google allows email suffices a la my
| account+anything@gmail.com.
|
| So you can use different email addresses for different
| accounts while having only one Gmail account.
| rvnx wrote:
| Little trick: You can also randomly insert dots in your
| email address, a bit more stealth and compatible with
| more sites :)
| tomrod wrote:
| This can become unmanageable if you sign up for more than
| a few things.
| rationalist wrote:
| 2^(username characters - 1) possibilities, but I would
| hate to try and keep track of which combinations I've
| used, or what binary sequence I'm up to.
|
| I like using company initials & random numbers @ my
| domain .tld
| pirates wrote:
| This has worked for me for nearly 20 years (when I made
| the account I didn't know that the dots are ignored). The
| only time it's been a problem was with one company whose
| system stripped the dots out.
|
| You need to send them an email to cancel. When I tried
| they said "you need to cancel from the same email you
| signed up with." :/
| sirmarksalot wrote:
| I tried this for a little while but quickly stopped as a
| critical mass of websites broke when I tried using it to
| sign in. Special characters in your email address is an
| edge case that produces inconsistent results even within
| a single product
| Nab443 wrote:
| YMMV, I think I only tried to sign up on 3 websites where
| it was not working. You can fallback to the original
| email address in those case.
|
| The funniest part was that for one it work great for the
| signup part, but they used a third party tool for
| licences that broke because of my e-mail. For another,
| only the js code was verifying the e-mail, and I could
| push it by removing the validation. When the owner had to
| validate my account, they got a message that the e-mail
| was incorrect when they tried to submit the form. They
| called me and had a great discussion about web apps
| security. We had a good time.
|
| I would point out that it kind of prevents you from
| checking if your email is in a leak database as you need
| to test each aliases you used.
| tomrod wrote:
| Proton allows you to alias. But a lot of places prevent
| aliases, which is silly. I shouldn't have to give an
| email to demo your chatbot.
| chias wrote:
| Then proton becomes your single point of failure.
|
| "But I use my addresses on my own domain" ok your domain
| registrar, then.
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| Using your own domain that you control for emails also
| comes with the advantage of easily moving providers,
| should there be any issues.
|
| Hopefully, domain registrars are less prone to locking
| people out compared to Apple, given cause of the lockout
| is caused by Apple itself.
|
| Reminds me of the time Namecheap stopped doing business
| with Russian accounts, even then they still gave some
| time for them to transfer their domains.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Only if you are not locked out of the registrar. Then
| your only hope is what nobody would squat your domain
| when it lapses.
|
| Eg: Dynadot decided what my birthdate is a secure pin two
| years ago. No combination of it works and I'm not even
| sure if I'm not shadowbanned for the attempts.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I've interpreted it as a sort of head-in-sand coping
| mechanism for those low-likelihood, high-consequence events
| people feel powerless over. It's less distressing to be
| powerless if you decide that the real issue was a fault by
| the victim and not a powerlessness you have in common with
| the victim.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Surprised at the downvotes to your excellent comment.
|
| Good insight - that people dunk on the author as a cope to
| help the dunker feel less powerless
| tonymet wrote:
| Meta-critical or self-critical comments on hackernews get
| downvoted . It's about 1.5 deg above Reddit
| Noaidi wrote:
| I love your comment and I could not just upvote it because
| it is true with so many things. The technocracy/corpocracy
| is trying to sell you things that mnake you believe you can
| have power over everything, even your life. Anyone who
| "fails" at anything, it is all your fault. I have literally
| been told my mental illness, and my current homelessness,
| is my fault because I did not do the right thing. The power
| and control people think they have over their lives is a
| paper thin delusion.
|
| Our shared powerlessness should bring us in communion with
| others, but the technocracy/corpocracy wants to rip that
| apart and make us dependent on them for profit.
| tonymet wrote:
| You're right that nearly all responses are emotional , to
| maintain internal consistency. Even purchasing large gift
| cards is a common discounting approach when paying for
| cloud .
|
| The sad news is when important people get locked out they
| can call dedicated support . This case was of someone who
| wasn't celebrity enough to have that access
| BikiniPrince wrote:
| Oh I doubt it was his fault. I had something similar happen
| setting up a phone for a neighbor. Apple decided it was
| fraudulent after I added her address to the account. It was
| now dead with no recourse. At least I didn't spend much on
| a used phone. Picked up an android and said it's time to
| adapt.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Commentators here presumably work in the industry, possibly
| even for 'the big companies' (I'd say FAANG but any big,
| life-depending, big-architecture corp, but you know what I
| mean, basically)
|
| They should be tripping over themselves of "How can we fix
| our corporate incentives to actually deal with customer
| problems". Not "lol OP, sux"
| tonymet wrote:
| Crazy how the industry with the biggest margins has the
| worst contempt for their customers
| nickpeterson wrote:
| That's part of where the margins come from.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It is possible to suggest preventative/corrective action
| without blaming OP. I find it kind of sad that you can't make
| helpful suggestions (to future potential victims) without
| someone saying you're "victim blaming."
| tonymet wrote:
| you're right there's a fine line. I interpreted the tone of
| most as judgmental / critical.
|
| saying "get a lawyer" or "file a complaint" is
| constructive. saying " it's your fault for not backing up"
| or "that's what you get by using cloud" is just judgmental.
| Neither are practical solutions, regardless. Even with
| perfect backups it would have happened. And for 99% of
| social people, it's impossible not to cloud.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > Lot of arrogant people here who think they are safe and
| better than anybody and blame OP.
|
| You see this a lot in the Apple "community". Apple can
| _never_ do wrong. Apple can _never_ make a mistake. Apple's
| choices are _always_ the best choices.
|
| I don't understand why people put corporations on pedestals.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| Corporations play the role of gods in our society.
|
| edit: about the same role as Greek or Roman gods.
| ljlolel wrote:
| Equal chance of them replying to your prayers and
| offerings
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| miracles happen
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Because their TC is $400,000 and they need it to justify
| their Bay Area mortgage. Come on, folks, follow the money.
| nialv7 wrote:
| it's not just about cloud service dependency, or his loyalty
| to Apple, or things like that. for important data you _have_
| to have backups, 3-2-1 rule and all that. the fact he put all
| the eggs in Apple's bucket is beyond me.
|
| sure i am dependent to cloud services as much as he is, much
| to my own chagrin, but at least i have all my data backed
| up??
| pitaj wrote:
| Off topic, but I'm curious. Why are you typing spaces before
| every period and comma?
| tonymet wrote:
| Maybe iPhone is adding those ?
| rvnx wrote:
| For what it's worth, I remember having this issue with
| Samsung OneUI keyboard when it was in French. In French
| there is this rule there that you should put a space before
| "?" and "!", so perhaps their developers understood "all
| punctuation" or something.
|
| I wonder what is his case.
| tonymet wrote:
| i'll try that or resetting my keyboard. thanks for the
| tip
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| First of all, you don't have to care about this, unless you
| are wanting something from others and you depend on others
| and their opinion about your writing significantly.
|
| That said, it does make your writing seem very odd. A
| little bit like the people, who apparently don't know what
| the shift key does, or how to trigger capital letters on
| their phones or something, and write only in lowercase
| letters.
|
| Just because your phone does something silly, and it is not
| you doing it intentionally, that doesn't mean, that other
| people will not get a weird impression from you writing
| like that. In a way, you are letting your phone change the
| impression others are getting from your writing. And that
| impression is for many people that they wonder, whether you
| know the conventions of writing.
|
| Now, like I said, you don't have to care about this. But if
| you want your texts to not come across like teenager
| written texts or low effort texts, it would be a good idea
| to fix your phone's silly settings, so that it doesn't do
| that to your writing.
| rambojohnson wrote:
| bunch of chatgpt trolls on hackernews.
| rvnx wrote:
| I wonder how many users are bots farming for karma
| nowadays.
|
| If you are launching a startup, it's very worthy to push
| your product on the HN homepage.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Responses claiming that a post is AI are often more
| visible and annoying than the possibly-but-probably-not-
| AI posts they are complaining about.
| lloeki wrote:
| In French there is a thin space (and failing support for
| thin space, a NBSP) before `?` and `!`. Not before `.`
| though.
|
| If missing, these spaces _are_ automatically added which
| various autocorrect features of localised OSes or
| otherwise.
| tonymet wrote:
| So we agree it's petty.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I am not depending on cloud storage at all. What do I need to
| upload onto some cloud? And when I need to sync between
| devices, or rather want to sync, then I have a Syncthing setup
| on my server running. No cloud. And copies on participating
| devices.
|
| Sure, it is not directly their fault, when they are treated
| badly by big tech. Though of course they could have been more
| careful, and rely less on big tech and cloud. We can all learn
| from this example, like many others before this one.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Presumably, as the GP said, you're not a normal person and
| you live in a basement. >sigh< (I'm with a lot of what the GP
| said but they didn't need to be insulting.)
|
| The solutions self-hosting storage for non-technical people
| are terrible. Presumably there's no market for selling a
| solution that gives individuals data sovereignty. I would
| guess the margin isn't there and a recurring subscription for
| something you own is probably unpalatable to a lot of
| consumers. So this is what we get.
| rvnx wrote:
| The main side-effect is the lack of trust and integration.
| For example, if you self-host your email (or more
| realistically push it on a VPS), then the moment you want
| to send an e-mail you are going to be marked as spam.
|
| To register on some websites you may sometimes receive:
| "please use real email from gmail/outlook/etc".
|
| When you have a business meeting with a customer: "oh just
| install Jitsi on your mobile phone" is the best way to lose
| a sale.
|
| Or no way to pay train tickets because you cannot install
| the app because your Apple / Play Store account is locked.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I get what you are saying, but the examples are not
| great:
|
| I've rarely seen (if ever?) a website so stupid and user
| hostile, to claim that there are no other "real" e-mail
| service providers out there, other than gmail, outlook,
| or a maybe a few others. There are services, which reject
| things like tempmail, that much I have seen, definitely.
|
| Jitsi Meet runs in the browser. Does it not on a mobile
| phone? Perhaps there is something to this one, if it is
| the case, that customers in some areas don't even own any
| working machines any longer and only have phones.
|
| Train tickets, at least where I am from and living, one
| can always buy, by going to a service center, or online
| via browser. I never had to use an app to buy train
| tickets. Even when traveling in China, which is arguably
| much further in terms of digitization than Germany, I was
| able to buy train tickets via a website comfortably, upon
| which the ticket was registered to my passport.
|
| But I get it, there can be such examples.
|
| Though I don't think this really matches the "depend on
| the cloud" thing. It's more like depending on services,
| that make use of "the cloud", and not directly using
| cloud services oneself.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Concert and theatre venues in the US, mostly locked into
| exclusive agreements with Ticketmaster, practically
| require a smartphone running the Ticketmaster app. You
| can load the tickets into the Apple and Google "wallet"
| apps but you have to have the Ticketmaster app to do
| that. In the past year I've had to pretend to be a
| confused elderly person and beg box offices to get me
| printed tickets because I don't want to load the
| Ticketmaster app. Eventually I'll have to buy a burner
| device, assuming I still want to attend live events.
| rvnx wrote:
| Ah, perfect! One question: is Ticketmaster rejecting
| non-"Big email providers" ? I suspect they do, due to
| bots (wouldn't it be the same with Tinder, etc ?)
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I don't know. My Ticketmaster account was created in
| August, 2005, and is a one-off email address at my
| personal domain. I have no idea if I could create an
| account like that today (and I'd be afraid to try).
| rvnx wrote:
| I agree with you, and I think your reasoning is totally
| understandable. Just that I see additional friction, and
| friction in a business world is risk :/
|
| (side-note, with Jitsi, it feels like I have a fireplace
| log in the hands when I use it)
|
| I think Samsung rejected non-"Big Emails", but pretty
| sure we can find exceptions both ways.
|
| Fun stuff I found while searching: >
| https://transportation.ucsc.edu/buses-shuttles/dvs/ > >
| The Disability Van Service (DVS) is a shared-ride service
| that provides on-campus wheelchair ramp-equipped
| transportation for those unable to use the regular Campus
| Transit system due to disability > > If you are a
| visitor, please use a Gmail address to complete the form
| or email dvs@ucsc.edu if that is not possible
|
| and then, the form is behind... a Google login wall
| vachina wrote:
| > there's no market for selling a solution that gives
| individuals data sovereignty
|
| Theres no turnkey solution (of course not, it is
| prohibitively complex to architect one), but the bits and
| pieces are there, built on tried and tested software. For
| example, SMB and rsync and their clients, are practically
| enough to do backups.
| crapple8430 wrote:
| Sovereignty also means responsibility. Either you have to
| keep your network secure, or you pay someone else do it
| (not always very well), otherwise you get security
| problems. Same goes for redundants backups, hardware
| maintenance, etc.
| tonymet wrote:
| How do you collaborate ? Do you have friends ? A job ? I'm
| not being rhetorical --- it's very rare to have friends or a
| job and not have some ties to the cloud. Even my tiny HOA
| manages its record in the cloud
| IndianShitbombs wrote:
| > Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive
| , Dropbox and maybe more. That's 4+ single points of failure.
|
| Well, i don't. I have my local file storage. Contacts and
| Calendar get synched, thats it. These get lcal backups, but
| aren't important so or so.
| slumberlust wrote:
| Want to bet we can find holes in your solution too?
| g947o wrote:
| Not saying this in a derogatory way, but that pretty much
| means you are not a "normal" user but someone who is tech
| savvy enough to not rely on someone else's cloud.
| leptons wrote:
| And yet all it takes is buying a piece of hardware and
| installing an app, something that plenty of "normal" people
| do every day.
| Fogest wrote:
| "all it takes" is a very naive simplification of how to
| accomplish this solution and is much more complicated for
| a non tech savvy person than just hitting "yes" on a
| backup option their phone prompts them for.
| leptons wrote:
| Nonsense. Many hard drive manufacurers make products
| specifically designed for "normal" people to easily
| backup their data. If you can't be bothered with that
| then I'd say you aren't "normal" either, and likely
| developmentally challenged.
| Fogest wrote:
| I feel like you must be in a social bubble if you think
| this is a task the average Walmart American views as
| easy. These devices also are typically marketed for PC
| backup and don't usually make backing up their phones
| "easy". It also is something they'd have to regularly
| remember to do. It's substantially easier for a user to
| have their photos immediately and automatically backed up
| to icloud or Google Photos, and you're being
| intentionally obtuse if you're suggesting otherwise.
|
| It's also not at all appropriate to claim people are
| "developmentally challenged" simply because they don't
| feel comfortable backing up their own data regularly to
| an external device. As such I have also flagged your
| comment.
| xigoi wrote:
| I wish I could "just" buy a computer and keep it
| permanently powered and connected.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| Right, they said _normal_ person.
| tonymet wrote:
| How do you collaborate with your coworkers , customers and
| friends ? What industry are you in ?
| singleshot_ wrote:
| How precisely do you reckon a lawyer would help?
| tonymet wrote:
| The legal Deparment runs most companies . They are the only
| way to get something bespoke done (like unlocking an account
| ). And companies are terrified of discovery.
|
| Any lawyer can file a complaint in small claims . OP has paid
| for a service and has a contract
|
| TOS is binding to both parties .
| codedokode wrote:
| > Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive
| , Dropbox and maybe more. That's 4+ single points of failure
|
| It only means that the content is not valuable for them. I know
| people who created Google Account only because the phone
| required them to and they do not even remember the password or
| username, and do not use Gmail (why use email when there is
| Telegram). If they lose the phone, they would just probably
| make a new account.
|
| If you were an investor or trader, managing millions of
| dollars, would you keep the only copy of critical information
| in a cloud? I don't think so if you are a reasonable person.
| Would you keep the only copy of a cryptowallet key in a cloud?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > If you were an investor or trader, managing millions of
| dollars, would you keep the only copy of critical information
| in a cloud?
|
| I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their
| accounts occurs to most people. I've done enough business
| continuity and disaster recovery work with small business to
| be confident in saying it doesn't occur to small business
| owners. I'm not sure why individuals would be any different.
|
| It's very hard to put yourself in the mindset of a non-
| technical person.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| > I don't think the idea that they could lose access to
| their accounts occurs to most people.
|
| "It just works" was practically a mantra for Steve Jobs,
| now we turn around and blame users for thinking that it
| will work
| codedokode wrote:
| > I don't think the idea that they could lose access to
| their accounts occurs to most people
|
| Most people do not store anything valuable in the cloud
| anyway. The only problem is that they won't be able to
| login into Windows if MS bans the account, and they won't
| be able to install apps if Google bans their account along
| with phone serial number.
| hyperjeff wrote:
| Average users have no idea what of their information is in
| the cloud or not. Even if they did, they have no idea of the
| implications.
| tonymet wrote:
| Yes it happens constantly. I know many businesses who have
| their assets in the cloud .
|
| Backup sounds nice and is necessary but is always out of date
| and recovery is totally impractical .
|
| Many/most of the assets like indexes , references & creds
| can't be reasonably backed up and recovered .
| pjc50 wrote:
| Plenty of huge businesses keep all their critical data in the
| cloud. If they were banned from Microsoft 365 they would
| instantly go out of business.
| xigoi wrote:
| > If they were banned from Microsoft 365 they would
| instantly go out of business.
|
| Seeing how Microsoft is doing, they're going to learn this
| lesson sooner or later.
| t0astbread wrote:
| I get what you're saying but implying someone who doesn't use
| the cloud is not a "normal person" and lives in a basement is
| needlessly condescending.
|
| Not an average or "normal" computer user? Granted. Not a normal
| person? No.
| bambax wrote:
| I have content on Google and Dropbox but I have live backups.
| It would be very annoying to be locked out of Google, but I
| would not lose any data. Anyone can have a NAS, you don't need
| a while basement or to live inside of one (??!?)
|
| Yes, those companies should absolutely be forbidden to behave
| like this, and punished heavily when they do. But until it
| happens (which doesn't look like it will), your data is your
| responsibility.
| tonymet wrote:
| What tools are you performing live backups with ? I can think
| of rclone running , but gdrive/icloud doesn't send change
| lists
| crapple8430 wrote:
| You can run rclone every couple minutes on your NAS, it
| checks mtimes like rsync so it is reasonably efficient for
| most cases, though you may run into ratelimits with bigger
| data.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Yeah, the living in a basement comment was a strange
| rhetorical exaggeration, as if you have to be feeding and
| caring for your server 24/7, haha
| leptons wrote:
| >You can try to be that "own cloud" snob but it only works if
| you live in a basement
|
| WTF is this about? So you think anyone proficient in
| hardware/software lives in a basement? This kind of derogatory
| statement does not belong on HN.
| tonymet wrote:
| Own cloud is a fun hobby. Exclusively owncloud is entirely
| impractical.
|
| It's the snobby part that I'm critical of
| broken-kebab wrote:
| It could be a reasonable opinion, but unfortunate choice of
| words made it angry (and FWIW snobbish) towards wrong people.
| tonymet wrote:
| apparently those living in basements are a protected class?
| English depends on idioms, you know.
| oidar wrote:
| This sucks Paris. What hope does the normal joe have to get a
| fair shake if you can't even get this resolved? The layers of
| click through contracts, opaque terms, LLM customer service, un-
| empowered customer service, and arbitration agreements make this
| a crazy relationship we get into with big tech. If we have a
| problem like this, we should be able to talk to a person at the
| company that can resolve this right without threatening a
| lawsuit. It's nuts.
|
| I'm curious about the apple's passwords app. Where you able to
| use it? What about passkeys?
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| How utterly indifferent one needs to be to have no "VIP" support
| line for cases like this.
|
| On the other hand, great learning case on putting eggs in one
| basket and on "own nothing and be happy".
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Only depend on platforms as redundancy. Never as primary source.
|
| Break that discipline and you are exposing yourself to this
| danger.
| sammy2255 wrote:
| Wtf is this:
|
| >I live on the land of the muwinina people. Sovereignty was never
| ceded.
|
| Take this shit off your website.
| peesem wrote:
| you're mad that they're acknowledging stolen land?
| sammy2255 wrote:
| Every nation in the world is on stolen land by that logic.
| This is pathetic virtue signalling
| tanepiper wrote:
| Why? It's his website, he can put what he likes on it. Your
| rational is...?
| phyzome wrote:
| Pretty infuriating to see those chatbot responses. (The emoji --
| and the particular choice of emoji -- were a very clear tell.)
| kombine wrote:
| Maybe events like this will be a wake up call to our community.
| Virtually everyone around me uses Apple everything - colleagues,
| friends, family. And they find it weird when I say I don't use
| Apple out of principle and I even have to justify it.
| zahirbmirza wrote:
| If local backups were not so hard... It is sometimes impossible
| to back up an iPhone to a computer; yet seamless to backup to
| iCloud... Infer what you will. I am skeptical of over reliance
| and dependance on Apple more than ever. Unfortunately,
| interoperability is something we can wish for rather than expect.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I dump photos and videos I want to preserve into a
| WeChat/Whatsapp chat and use their desktop apps to download to
| an external HD. It's a bit of trouble but still easier than
| doing this natively in Android or Iphone.
| francasso wrote:
| Companies like apple should be liable to pay many millions in
| damages for this kind of shit. The people should make it hurt so
| much for them that they think twice before doing it without
| having a clear and working appeal process where you are clearly
| explained what happened and guided through it.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The untapped answer is litigation. Call a lawyer and file against
| Apple. It may take several business days, and cost $$$$ but it
| will absolutely light a fire at Apple and get the attention of
| many-a-human. And if they ignore it, well, maybe a class action
| lawsuit awaits.
| wpm wrote:
| My exact thoughts, if there is no number of email address you
| can call to get this sorted, that means the legal department's
| number is.
|
| Even if in the T&Cs say Apple can do this, which it probably
| does, now they would have to prove it in front of a judge.
| rvnx wrote:
| In... 5 years, and the prejudice won't accumulate because
| your claims will still be based on 5 years ago :/
| cyanmagenta wrote:
| Monetary damages generally accumulate during the pendency
| of litigation. Also, it seems unlikely that this would take
| 5 years to resolve--Apple would presumably just reactivate
| the account and argue the case is moot now. I mean, maybe
| they want to establish precedent here to avoid opening the
| floodgates to this type of litigation, but more likely
| they'd just settle this one out quickly and quietly and
| fight the issue when they had better facts. OP's story is
| pretty persuasive.
| nullfield wrote:
| Even a small claims filing in the US, which might have a
| $10k limit, does damage to Apple far enough above the
| effort it takes them to "just intelligently fix it" to
| make it worth their time.
|
| If Apple doesn't show up, they'll lose and the filer will
| get a default judgement, for which they hopefully
| asked/made the case for $10k. I'm sure they can arrange
| to have it enforced against a local Apple Store to seize
| not product, but operational working assets, if they're
| creative a bit. If Apple has anyone competent in Legal
| they won't let it get that far, though.
|
| Then again, if they do show up, they'll pay a lawyer well
| more than an hour of time, probably by a lot, and still
| have to argue against a likely well-prepared person, with
| proof of purchase, etc., (legitimate) sob story of lost
| time, digital assets, and the like, and likely won't
| endear themselves to the court.
|
| And of course for a business, an actual court filing (or
| arbitration if it gets forced on them, with competent
| counsel) could be even worse.
| colechristensen wrote:
| And, importantly, go through with the lawsuit. Figure out how
| to quantify damages to yourself by being deprived of access to
| your account so even if they restore access you can continue
| the suit.
| Jabrov wrote:
| Lmao this will not work
| duxup wrote:
| >go through with the lawsuit
|
| That's a big ask.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Well... who else is going to defend victims if they're not
| going to defend themselves? Particularly when the person is
| presumably rather well resourced.
|
| Justice is dead when nearly everybody just makes backroom
| deals with no admissions of guilt and nondisclosure of
| terms if they even defend themselves at all.
|
| A person who is capable of defending themselves owes it to
| those who aren't as able; if even the most resourced people
| won't defend themselves, what chance to the rest of us
| have?
| duxup wrote:
| I'm not sure even if someone goes through an excessive
| expense that anyone else is better off.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Waiting for all the weeping and gnashing of teeth because
| holding companies accountable might mean programmers have to
| actually care.
| donmcronald wrote:
| I considered this a month or two ago when Google safe browsing
| was erroneously putting domains self hosting Immich on the
| block list. My family domain got put on the block list and it
| took me a few hours to figure out that I needed to sign up for
| Google Search Console just to figure out what sub-domain got
| flagged.
|
| I thought about filing a claim for enough to cover my time in
| small claims court, but decided not to. I didn't track my time
| super well because initially I though it was my fault, but, by
| far, the huge deterrent is the "what if".
|
| What happens if I take Google to small claims court for damages
| to a domain I've been using for 20 years? I have that domain
| tied to a legacy Google Workspace account which was a huge
| mistake. It's been tied to my email for at least 15 years and,
| even worse, I've never owned an Android phone that hasn't been
| tied to that Workspace account.
|
| I don't depend on cloud services for much, but if I want to
| prepare for retaliation I'd have to migrate my email somewhere
| else and be ready to deal with family members that have their
| phones connected to the Workspace account. Who's been duped
| into photo "backup"? Who's been duped into using Google Docs?
| How many Play purchases do they have? And, the big one, who's
| been duped into using sign-in with Google?
|
| Google, Apple, Microsoft all make choosing what's best for the
| consumer very high friction compared to choices that trap users
| and give all the power to big tech. Even though I constantly
| help my family members try to understand why the don't want to
| get locked into those services they always get deceived into
| using them. The number of family members unwittingly duped into
| uploading all their data to OneDrive is in the range of 100%.
|
| Apple, Google, and Microsoft need to be broken into 10 or 20
| companies each. Excel should be it's own company. Phone OSes
| and app stores should be different companies. OneDrive should
| be it's own company and to compete with Dropbox with zero
| Windows integration. The web browsers should be separate
| companies. The AI divisions should be separate companies. Split
| them up with a wood chipper IMO.
|
| The safe browsing scam is the biggest fraud ever because
| providers can't opt out of it when it "accidentally" detriments
| independent or self-hosted solutions.
| nilus0sora wrote:
| There is part of me that sort of wishes this would happen to me.
| I wonder if getting locked out of my cloud identities + bricking
| all my devices would actually be a great blessing in disguise
| from the Machine?
| rsyring wrote:
| You may want to consider filling a small claims lawsuit against
| Apple for the maximum amount of damages your state permits in
| small claims.
|
| It's not really about winning the claim. It's about getting them
| to acknowledge you and hopefully resolve it before the court case
| comes up. That is, you want them to "settle" by restoring your
| account.
|
| IANAL and YMMV.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| The OP is in Australia, but I'd like to add some advice which
| would apply in the US: Apple is one of the few organizations
| which does not use an arbitration clause _, which means suing
| in court really is an option.
|
| (_With the exception of some services like their credit card,
| but you can opt out of that more easily than any other
| arbitration clause I've seen.)
| idiotsecant wrote:
| The real, foundational problem here is that we have abandoned the
| principles that _made_ the internet. We don 't care about open
| protocols, we accept walled gardens. Every day those walls get a
| little higher until eventually someone wins and the only thing
| that exists is the garden.
|
| I don't know what the solution is, but I think part of it is
| deliberately divorcing yourself from the big players as much as
| you can, which isn't much for some people, and encouraging
| government efforts to break them up and pull down garden walls
| whenever the opportunity arises.
|
| This is what government is _for_ even if we 've forgotten it in
| some places.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| One lesson I'm taking away from this is never to buy or use Apple
| gift cards
| throwaway150 wrote:
| Big tech giants locking unsuspecting users out of their digital
| lives is nothing new. What would it take for our society to stop
| relying on these closed, walled gardens for critical stuff?
|
| How many account lockouts must occur before we accept that
| digital life built on permission rather than ownership is
| inherently fragile?
| awestrom wrote:
| I had this happen to me once while traveling, and then by random
| chance I ran into a former Apple Store employee at a hostel.
|
| She told me to email Tim Cook directly (his email is entirely
| guessable).
|
| I did this and within a day or two my access was restored.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| hopefully he'll get resolution by bringing his case to the
| "media". Still, for someone who heavily presents the argument
| that he's a professional writer and even says "I am asking for a
| human at Apple to review this case." , I find it odd that he
| tries to make his case via an obviously ai-written post.
|
| I mean, isn't writing what you said you do for a living?
| shelled wrote:
| This is really sad that some people are in ways blaming it on the
| author. While I do advocate zero to almost zero usage of services
| by these OEMs or big corps, in today's world everything, or
| almost everything, is linked to your email and/or phone number
| and in turn with a computing device, which, for me, makes these
| OEMs essentially public service providers for a cost. Locking a
| user out literally casts that person out of today's society --
| communication, dating, groceries, transport, hell, in some cases
| maybe even health care and emergency services -- you name it. So
| it's very ingenuous and unkind of us not to raise hell and shout
| for extreme accountability on these corps' part instead of
| reminding a victim of T&C and not having diversified the online
| services usage enough across providers.
|
| Any company or entity ought not to be allowed to wield power over
| our lives, like locking someone out arbitrarily, let alone via
| some asinine, half-baked algorithm.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| 1. This is a total nightmare, the author has my deepest sympathy.
|
| 2. Last time there was a post where this happened to someone, I
| looked into what you can do if you're locked out of your Apple ID
| or Google Account.
|
| I know people will say "just self host", but all of the self-
| hosting solutions are not friendly to families or non-tech
| people. Telling my extended family to tailscale into my server to
| look at family photos from vacation is a total non-starter. All
| of the self-hosted solutions are also just way less smooth to use
| than the built-in integration iCloud or Google Drive gives with
| devices.
|
| That said, there are straightforward options to deal with this
| (at least the data part), if you plan ahead. The high level
| strategy is to setup backups that let you get _a copy_ of your
| data not tied to any login you don't control. It's a bummer to
| have to go through these hoops, but again pragmatically, I'm
| stuck using these services to participate in modern life.
|
| For Google Drive, you can rclone your data to a computer of your
| choice to get a copy of your data not tied to Google Account. It
| will even convert G-Suite files to Microsoft Office format, so
| you have a copy of the data offline.
|
| For Google Photos, I'm not aware of a great way to get the data -
| rclone only gets low quality copies of photos. I'm an Apple user,
| so I didn't dive too deep here, perhaps the HN hivemind knows.
|
| For iCloud and Apple Photos, you have a lot of options. You can
| use Parachute backup or the PhotoSync App to get a copy of your
| data not tied to your Apple ID. If you have a mac, you can also
| setup your mac to download everything offline, and do time
| machine backups - they are not tied to your Apple ID.
|
| I will also add Synology NASes have a super, super easy to setup
| way to do all of this stuff (HyperBackup plus Synology Photos
| app) that's borderline worth the cost of admission on it's own,
| even with Synology's recent turn to the dark side. If you have
| non-technical family, you should strongly consider pointing them
| in this direction, if you can use a smartphone you can probably
| get this working.
| andreashaerter wrote:
| > All of the self-hosted solutions are also just way less
| smooth to use than the built-in integration iCloud or Google
| Drive gives with devices.
|
| The built-in integrations (iCloud, Google Drive) are smooth
| right up until you're locked out or forced into changes you
| can't control. Obviously.
|
| There _is_ a middle ground though: managed service providers
| (per-service). You don 't have to self-host everything in your
| basement, and you don't have to hand your entire digital life
| to Google or Apple either.
| gond wrote:
| Can you give an example? I am looking for a way out.
|
| I kind of self hosted for decades on a virtual server until I
| couldn't keep up with it. So much stuff broke something in
| the stack, bringing the server down. Often, I had to initiate
| a full lock down on everything before going up again,
| consuming a day's effort or two.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| Any particular examples you have in mind?
|
| All of the options outside of the big ones (iCloud, Google
| Drive, OneDrive) seem vastly more fiddly and difficult to
| share with non-technical people. e.x. sharing a budget
| spreadsheet with my wife, shared photo albums, and so on.
|
| If there are other options out there that work as well as
| iCloud or Google Drive, I'd love to learn about them.
|
| The best I've been able to land on is making a local copy of
| the data under my absolute control, while using one of the
| top tier providers for my "live" copy.
| hopelite wrote:
| Does anyone know if in the USA you could simply use small claims
| court on every individual device and service to get likely
| default judgements against Apple and then when they are unlikely
| to pay up, get a judgement against Apple and make a big deal
| about strolling into a store or even HQ to take Cook's own
| devices out of his office or maybe just seize his corporate jet
| and auction it off?
| cecek wrote:
| I never understand why people put all their important stuff in
| one company.
| ianberdin wrote:
| A while ago we fixed people by killing them. I see the same
| pattern with account banning.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Yup. They did the same thing to me a few years back. Not sure
| why. Had to re-apply as a developer with a different email
| address. I don't use Apple products anymore.
| fmx wrote:
| There have been so many cases of Apple, Google, etc. doing this
| that it's hard to have any sympathy for them at this point. If it
| was some grandma who didn't know better that would be another
| story, but the author was surely aware - that
| Apple *can* always *just* disable their account - that
| Apple regularly *does* do that - that Apple does not care
| about them at all
|
| and they chose to bet their entire digital life on Apple's
| benevolence anyway. They lost that bet.
|
| We need more stories like this hitting the mainstream news until
| even a non-technical person's reaction to this is "well, what did
| you expect?"
| QuiEgo wrote:
| Could you do something like self hosting a MDM (say Fleet?) so
| you can kick the tainted Apple ID off your devices and get them
| back if this happens?
| bambax wrote:
| > _It holds terabytes of family photos_
|
| Why do people still do this, why??!? This is not an ignorant
| user! The author (and victim) has written several books about
| Apple tech, how do they not know that these "platforms" cannot be
| trusted with anything -- especially data that isn't backed up
| somewhere else!
|
| Companies don't care about people, and the bigger they are the
| more evil they behave. They need to be treated like hostile
| business partners because that's what they are. They're only
| after money and absolutely nothing else.
|
| This is not some radical leftist manifesto, it's the plain
| reality. And it's not new either. It's always been like this.
| Havoc wrote:
| The modern trend of useless error messages, in cloud and no good
| way to talk to a human is really insidious
| danfunk wrote:
| Same experience with Google. I was setting up SSO for a new web
| application and set off some AI flag on a sub domain for our
| company website. For 2 weeks every visitor saw a warning that out
| site was a phishing scam. Nightmare. With no recourse. No number
| to call. No person to talk to. No actual explanation of the error
| (I still don't know exactly what I got wrong). I just took it
| down, waited, and prayed.
| ei8ths wrote:
| I hope OP can get his account unlocked. This is a good reminder
| for everyone else, backup your cloud data to a local drive. But
| thats just one part, the social / email OAUTH side of things,
| phone accounts etc..., terrible situation. It should be easy
| enough to walk in a HQ / office and show credible ID and get your
| account unlocked.
| koksik202 wrote:
| if you pay for service you should receive some guarantees it is
| your money, it is crazy that there is no cool-off period where
| you get banned like this even by mistake or by Apple deciding
| they do not want to offer a service anymore and allow you to take
| out your stuff before fully shutting down.
| andreashaerter wrote:
| I don't get the mostly black/white "Self-host" vs. "Mega-Corp"
| discussions as there is a middle ground: smaller managed service
| providers (even: per-service).
|
| You don't have to self-host everything in your basement, and you
| don't have to hand your entire digital life to Google or Apple
| either. Mail, CalDAV/CardDAV, Immich, Nextcloud, OpenCloud,
| OpenTalk, web hosting, Kubernetes, simple VMs.. whatever ...
| fully managed, run by local or independent providers or by the
| company behind projects, without Big Tech lock-in. If chosen
| wisely, you can migrate, take over, or bring it in-house when you
| want. Just spend a few bucks and do some company research. Same
| as you would when choosing craftsmen, lawyers or something else.
|
| For example, that's actually how we operate as a company for some
| of our customers and even a few single persons: we provide SaaS
| AND setup documentation. Customers can transparently take over at
| any time. We even help separate domains, credentials, and
| administration from us. Convenience without captivity. I am sure
| there are hundreds of shops like ours, providing comparable
| services for people in their wider neighborhood.
| aforty wrote:
| Has OP tried emailing Tim Cook directly and pleading his case?
| difosfor wrote:
| This should be illegal. What about normal people affected like
| this. He at least still stands a chance given his position.
| masonwan wrote:
| That's probably why people should not live in the gated garden.
| Once they made a mistake, you will feel alien in the free world
| outside.
| dtt101 wrote:
| My partner was locked out by Apple last year during a
| password/device change gone awry. Two weeks and we finally got
| through to someone competent who fixed it. At one point it looked
| as though we would lose many of the videos of our son growing up.
|
| Since then I have been removing myself from the ecosystem - my
| email is from hey, file sync on Dropbox, obsidian for notes,
| whatsapp for messages. Sometimes it doesn't feel as joined up,
| mostly it is way better.
|
| Moved to framework computers + omarchy last month and am not
| looking back.
| lrvick wrote:
| You do not own your apple account, and you never did. I would
| take this as a chance to learn about digital sovereignty and self
| hosting where you control your own data so this never happens
| again.
|
| Google and Apple can and will delete your content at any time for
| any reason and there is no appeals court.
| ss64 wrote:
| This is the same guy who had $60,000 permanently locked in his
| Wise account 6 months ago, that is quite a run of bad luck.
| https://cloudisland.nz/@parisba/114504600921948939
| nullfield wrote:
| And now some suspicion starts setting in. Granted, _someone_ is
| going to have multiple runs of "bad luck", statistically.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| This sucks, I hope you can somehow reach Apple and get them to
| unfuck your account.
|
| My own experience with big tech account bans was much milder, so
| I learned my lesson without much pain. I got a "free Azure credit
| to learn cloud computing" email from MS, redeemed the credit,
| created a VM, started clicking around the settings and got locked
| out. Raised a support ticket, asked what I did wrong, told my
| account was flagged for suspicious activity. I asked what I did
| wrong again and got a reply that my case had been reviewed by a
| human and that my Azure account wouldn't be reactivated.
| Thankfully, my primary MS account didn't get banned for that.
|
| Conclusion #1: it's frankly insane that a big tech company can
| fully terminate your account with no means of recourse. People
| like to mock the EU and its lawfare, but I think it is the best
| candidate to force the tech firms to implement some sort of
| firewall between their various services, so they can't terminate
| your access without prior notice or without compensation.
|
| Conclusion #2: those who are reading this, don't put all your
| eggs into one basket and teach your friends and relatives to do
| so as well. That is, if you have to use the services of various
| big tech companies, spread them around. Have a boring account
| with one company that you use for free stuff, a boring account
| with another company that you use for paid services (if you can
| purchase services X and Y from two different companies, do so), a
| boring account with a third company that you use for getting
| paid, a fourth account that you use for shitposting and getting
| into arguments with internet strangers.
| tlogan wrote:
| I just want to point that buying gift cards in order to
| participate in gift-card arbitrage violates both apple rules and
| payment provider rules.
|
| If you are buying large amounts of gift cards and then redeeming
| them, it is critical that your purchasing patterns do not look
| suspicious, such as buying more things that a normal user might
| need: multiple iphone wallets, multiple iPhones, or similar
| items.
| geor9e wrote:
| I wish people would understand how common this is. There's no
| customer service line you can call when some overseas moderation
| farm worker spends 0.8 seconds looking at something and taps the
| hotkey for one of the reasons in their terms of service that they
| deem an account should be permanently wiped for. Have some
| recourse. Buy a NAS that will do automatic backups of all your
| cloud accounts. Long ago I lost a decade of Gmail and GDrive
| because I posted a PNG file of a credit-card form that said "This
| post only viewable with Google+ Gold." You need to be treating
| these accounts as ephemeral.
| 0xCE0 wrote:
| These kinds of cases just triggers all the rage for me.
|
| I have fresh experience of setting up Azure/M365 and AppleDev for
| my startup. Those things are scary as f*uck, in many
| perspectives:
|
| (1) Dark patterns everywhere (check this, and we'll buy you a
| license, oops +xxxxx EUR/$ per year just came; get one-month
| trial for O365 to get bizaccount, select 1 license, see that
| there is 25 licenses (~ 4k EUR/$) to be renewed if I don't
| cancel).
|
| (2) Microtransactions everywhere (e.g. Azure VM SSD I/O: every
| read/write operations costs), DDOS and 10/100 kEUR bill coming.
|
| (3) Codesign with Microsoft: I have option to wait weeks for
| freight ship to ship USB cert token (if it ever survives past
| toll/postal service after that), or use AzureKeyVault, but that
| is officially only for companies that has taxes/accounting for 3
| years of operation. So no startup can use by this requirement to
| codesign?!
|
| (4) AppleDev (and kind of Azure/MS too) requires DUNS number,
| which takes 6 weeks to get in normal case. Apple's 5 bizday route
| doesn't exist anymore (at least not for non-US-based companies).
| Or just use D&B magic link from Grok and get it immediately in 5
| mins.
|
| (5) If you base your business to Azure/M365 and AppleDev and be
| obidient and compliant (as I am doing/being, because I'm building
| real legit and long-term company, not some hussle project), it
| still doesn't matter, because they can just can decide by
| human/ML to shut your company and means of living.
|
| These are the most disgusting things that I know of.
| krick wrote:
| I probably shouldn't be surprised, but... so, you are saying,
| Apple can remotely brick YOUR device? For any reason, let alone
| "because of a mistake"? Heh, and I was considering to buy my
| first iPhone. I mean, seriously, I can only shrug at the fact
| that anybody accepts these terms at all.
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