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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.

>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.

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.

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.

It is a way to extract money from the unlucky unbanked people, like the immigrants making your lunch or cleaning the streets. A part of systematic oppression of the outgroup.

There are people who don't own credit cards, and the app stores rarely offers any other "cash like" alternative other than gift cards.

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.

If you buy them in bulk for employees they get progressively cheaper. It also matters how many customers you can serve vs how many you have and what you spend to get one customer into your store. If you spend 500 per day to get 100 customers into your brick and mortar store you can also give/spend 500 in discounts to get 100 more. If only 60% redeems the card the other 40% is profit. ETC

Un-redeemed GC aren’t profit. You can’t book the revenue, rather the balances count as a liability (because you owe all the random cardholders valuable goods/services) and, at least in my state, after a certain period of inactivity, you’re obligated to give that money to the State as unclaimed property. Google “escheatment”

> you should probably just give them cash

I really wish this was more acceptable. Even I have this block in giving just plain cash as a gift.

Giving cash also only really makes sense for kids or other asymmetrical relationships where one gives more than the other. If you are just passing cash around then you may as well have everyone not gift anything. If you want to show someone that you appreciate them then spend some time making something yourself or just spend time with that person.

Gift cards are worse in every case though unless they come with a heavy discount - and even then it's a pretty shitty gift.

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...

>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?

It's company scrip for Boomers.

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?

>, 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!

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.

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.

It's maddening.

Currently having to migrate to Win11 and thinking I spent 3k on new hardware just to be able to run some absolute clusterfuck of an OS.

I regret not spending it on overpriced Apple hardware, at least it runs all my Adobe crap which I'm 100% dependent on. But then I read joyous stuff like this.

Oh but you say, ""just"" run it on a VM in Linux, like all us rural folk, because big tech evil. Yeah thanks pointdexter, like I didn't know that. And oh look it's running like a complete slideshow on my 4k color calibrated monitor because now you apparently need two fucking GPUs. One for the host and one for the guest just to have hardware acceleration and CUDA video encoding. And I only have room for one GPU so I sell my current CPU and buy a CPU with iGPU. And now apparently I have to run these 10 ducktaped together shell scripts and there's like three guides to achieving a clean passthrough and they're all 50 pages and each is completely different and omg I have other shit to do please kill me already.

Death by mutually incompatible walled gardens, welcome to our fully automated high tech utopia.

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?

Bad isn't a binary judgment you can place on something.

Everything has a level of risk and reward associated with it. It's up to everyone to judge the risk versus reward.

The flaw I see a lot in the HN comments trying to get people to abandon Big Tech is that they're coming from people who overestimate the risks while underestimating the benefits to other people.

Abandoning a lot of convenience for fear of some rare outcome might be a perfectly good choice for someone who doesn't use those conveniences (e.g. Linux user who doesn't want cloud storage for photos because they enjoy setting up their own elaborate backup schemes) but it's not a good tradeoff for the average person who just wants their photos backed up and either doesn't want to or doesn't trust themselves to set up a good backup solution.

My model for this is to have one nerd per group of people, who runs digital infra for the community. I'm that nerd for my friends, and run a bunch of self-hosted services that people I personally know use. Some of them even pitch in to help pay for the hosting costs (though not my time).

By using a service you also chose to support it.

This is how one should make the choices.

You are going to have false positives in fraud detection. You are going to have to investigate those or pay in reputation. Fail to fight fraud may also cost rep.

When you run out of reputation people should take their business elsewhere.

It's how we are suppose to keep people honest.

> By using a service you also chose to support it. > This is how one should make the choices.

Well yeah, but there're not the only choices. The full opportunity cost is finding and paying and learning alternatives when you have decades of vendor lock-in to overcome. Maybe "keeping people honest" is a bigger ask than you think while you're busy meeting all kinds of other requirements which take priority.

Why even bother with apple at that point. There are so many better and/or cheaper Android phones out there

things that work better for you, might not work better for someone else.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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/rumors...

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.

If you sell it directly to another human, or even use something like ebay, you'll get more and they'll pay less.

Thanks, I’ll look into doing that :)

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.

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”

> 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.

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!

> 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.

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?

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...

‘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...

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.

It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.

It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.

> It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.

This captures the Hacker News style misjudgment of risk very well.

First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on.

Second, eating M&Ms is a silly analogy because it's so easy to dismiss. Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid. Using a mainstream service keeps your overall conversion rate higher and prevents losing customers who don't want to sign up for something new.

Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted.

Finally, this is the key point that everyone misses when they say "Just don't use any Apple products" and other dismissive comments:

> It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.

It's very obviously not easier to build a life where you avoid anything that might have a small risk. Building your entire life around not taking very unlikely risks is irrational. I know it brings some people comfort to feel like they've avoided some risk they saw in headlines, but claiming that nothing is given up or that it's easier to choose an alternative is blatantly false.

> First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on.

If you're a business, yes, PayPal locking your account and freezing your funds forever, which is what they do, is tantamount to legal grievous injury or death. This happens with enough regularity that I know multiple people that this has happened to, and the risk is enough for me to never rely on PayPal or its partners for my income.

You seem to understand this with the following:

> Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid.

--

> Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted.

I used a variable X so you could make it sufficiently large enough that you don't have to rely on the multiplier to understand the analogy.

> It's very obviously not easier to build a life where you avoid anything that might have a small risk. Building your entire life around not taking very unlikely risks is irrational.

I've lived my entire life without relying on an Apple account, and the few instances that I used one, I hit that risk myself[1] and now have an expensive paper weight instead of a tablet, and a bunch of app purchases I can never use again.

This isn't some hypothetical, it's something that's literally happened to me and people I know. The lesson I learned is not to rely on Apple or PayPal, and believe it or not, that's really, really easy to do.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252971

To my knowledge, PayPal does not hold funds “forever”. They penalise the account holder by locking it away for 180 days. At that point, they can withdraw the balance to a bank account. I have multiple friends and clients who had this happen to them, but in all cases, they were exposed to higher risk by accepting payments through donation forms, or a marketplace where they sell directly to customers. (Despite what feels like an anecdotal high failure rate, somehow I’ve never had an issue running my own marketplace for the past decade.)

> If you're a business, yes, PayPal locking your account and freezing your funds forever, which is what they do, is tantamount to legal grievous injury or death.

Losing business funds is not equivalent to death, no.

> I used a variable X so you could make it sufficiently large enough that you don't have to rely on the multiplier to understand the analogy.

I was commenting on the "in 1000" part, not the X part.

Sorry, I just can't engage with this level of hyperbole and exaggeration. This isn't a life or death thing.

How about instead of cyanide, the M&M is made of feces.

Would you still risky eating from that jar?

Utterly perplexing you've backed off with a scathing 'Sorry, I can't engage' after literally contracting yourself plain as day a few comments up.

I think you can't understand his analogy no? Without taking it literally to the point of making it your entire life's purpose to counter the point?

How about this: You have a 1 in 100,000 chance of eating an M&M which literally drains your bank account and you have to eat hundreds or possibly thousands of M&M's per day.

(some of your dreaded hyperbole for transactions)

Would you dig in to that bowl? There's shouldn't be a miniscule percentage chance of your entire livelyhood being ripped away and locked forever without recourse simply by using a certain payment platform. Is that fair? Or are you still intent on stepping on the cosmic merrigoround of potential ruin without a care in the world?

The problem is not the risk itself but the inability to resolve the issue. This way, it's not just an "inconvenience" but sometimes a lifes work lost.

I thought I'd buy Cory Doctrow's Enshittification ebook direct from his website. Surprised to be redirected to Paypal with no other option.

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.

He still does offer them for free as far as I know. Perhaps not his most recent ones.

Doctorow has enshittified himself.

in the end, enshitification comes for us all

You either die a hero or become big tech.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

I've done probably hundreds of PayPal transfers to my bank account over a couple decades.

Never once encountered a fee.

Might be related to your country's local laws?

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

"It hurts whenever I hit myself"

"But you don't have to hit yourself"

"tHaT yOu DoN't hIt YoUrSeLF iS IrReLeVaNt To ThE pEoPlE tHaT dO"

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

Maybe they're one of today's lucky 10000, learning that other people are different.

I think the point was that PayPal and Apple are different since PayPal is easy to mitigate, and Apple not so much.

I would go even further and say for most PayPal users there never was anything to mitigate because they didn't keep a significant balance there in the first place. Which is a perfectly valid reply to someone not understanding why so many people would keep using PayPal.

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.

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.

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?

Apple keeps money from the gift card after banning you. Just business, nothing personal.

Digital feudalism

> 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

> 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.

Maybe that hypothetical, bad person needs to find out what is triggering the account locking, first. Many small sums per gift card? A sum over a certain threshold? The point is, in reality it will not be up to pure chance.

However, I personally would not do that anyway.

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.

[flagged]

> I'm a Zionist

I don't like you too.

Depends,

> Zion serves as a living space for humans who have chosen to be disconnected from the Matrix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zion_(The_Matrix)

Thank you. Awaiting the Apple gift cards.

I wrote "If you are trying to be a bad person [..]". I usually don't.

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.

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.

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…

Thank you. I'm in neither the EU nor US. I'll have to check this.

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.

Well-spotted.

That includes the original poster! "could have been because I purchased gift cards from the US (online) and added them to my account while I was in Mexico, or I was using a VPN while adding gift cards"

One of the other people was someone who "purchased $2k in apple gift cards from target during Black Friday deals... There was a limit of 1 but if you went in store and were friendly to the cashier a lot of people (myself included) had luck getting them to ring them up as separate transactions".

Pretty sure if the latter person had given those out as separate cards to other people it would have been fine but going from "limit of 1" to "all redeemed by same account" is unsurprising when it triggers a fraud flag.

The big problem in this story as in the past one is the apparent lack of sensible escalation.

I've heard horror stories from Google devs that it's even worse - such a situation follows you for life even if you try to setup new accounts.

"we sell gift cards :)"

"and we ban you for buying or redeeming them"

is just top tier comedy honestly.

As soon as I heard the first one of these stories about a guy getting google broad-spectrum banned because a junkbot AI thought his completely normal youtube comment was a nazi rant or whatever else it hallucinated - I bailed on the whole shebang. Hosting your own stuff is, if you're a reader of this site, easy enough and cheap enough there's little reason not to.

An even better advice: Don't buy Apple.

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.

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.

> 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.

There are always excuses. But in the end, they are just that.

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.

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.

just curious, where do you have to use a smartphone?

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.

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.

> Some banks are even app-only.

Expect this to be the norm going forward due to hardware attestation being normalized on phones.

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.

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.

>Banks are required to use Strong Customer Authentication

Not impressed by the pseudotechnical bullshit. The law provides several ways to authenticate. I tell my bank that I don't have a smartphone and they have to send me (at 0 extra cost) a code card: a piece of plastic with numbers on it that no one is ever going to hack. I routinely transfer tens of thousands of Eur between my accounts at real banks within the EU without a problem with my plastic card. When I have used up all the numbers on it they send me another one. I don't know in which EU you live in either.

>Revolut, N26 and co, are real banks

They are collectively known as "neobanks" for a reason. The official name is "e-money institution". Those are financial casinos, not real banks, operating with non-full banking licenses, peddling all the tech-bro bullshit: trading on memecoins, pulling out of countries when the regulations that real banks have to follow irks them, with a horrible track record of IT security: customer data leaks in the millions, horrible track record of staff abuse, unpaid hours, null customer support: exclusively in-app, where your customer support is "other customers that answer to your in-app post"; the staff shows up once in every 200 messages to write a one-liner and go into hiding again. I do not do business with bullshit "lean" business that operate at cost. Look at their wikipedia pages sometime.

>In many countries, you cannot pay with small coins the bus driver

Simply not true, not gonna argue this one.

>Shops can refuse cash

No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it. There are exceptions like you cannot buy a car with a truckload of coins, or give a 5000 Euro note to a taxi cab but those fall under "unreasonable" and it's a very high bar. Also, there is a long tradition of countries delaying implementing EU directives for many years, and then getting it wrong several times. The EU is very lenient, but accepting cash everywhere is EU policy. The fact that some wise-ass members drag their feet for decades is not news and doesn't prove your point. If you push back at the dentist, for example, they will send you an invoice with a surcharge, and you can pay that invoice with cash at your bank.

>If you want to use the Tesla supercharger

Lol no I don't finance retarded imbeciles - incidentally, all the other charging networks allow you to pay right there without subscription, smartphone or app. It's called "drop-in" payment, and it is there because the law says it must be an option.

>In Northern Europe...

No, you confuse the EU policy of allowing cash in transactions with money-laundering directives. Those prevent you from buying a house in cash, but you can buy anything, say, under 10000 Eur or equivalent NOK/SEK

>>Shops can refuse cash

>No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it.

Not true in the UK. The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee has been considering this issue (Apr 25): BBC News - Shops could be forced to accept cash in future,

MPs warn - BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjwvgqz3vxzo?app-referre...

> Those are financial casinos, not real banks, operating with non-full banking licenses, peddling all the tech-bro bullshit:

Revolut is a licensed bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolut

N26 also has a license as a bank: https://n26.com/en-de

One that is not a bank is Wise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_(company)

> > Shops can refuse cash > No, they cannot.

AFAIK, at least in Sweden, there is no law that obliges shops to accept cash. See this for example: https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/payments-in-swe...

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> 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…

many banks have alternative methods in addition to the app, typically hardware keys or OTP devices.

Also, many banks allow loading apps on non-Google Androids like in this list: https://community.e.foundation/t/list-banking-apps-on-e-os/3...

there is life outside Google/Apple, and we should support it.

>good luck getting transactions done without one

you mean like I do all the time with my high-tech plastic code card? At any time of day or night, workday or weekend? I must be lucky because I have been doing it for decades.

Your mistake was telling them you agree to use their app in your insecure smartphone. You were not obligated to do so.

> Your mistake was telling them you agree to use their app in your insecure smartphone. You were not obligated to do so.

Must be nice to have such choice. In rural areas you generally only have one bank in the local area, and unless you want to drive an hour to the city to do your banking, them's the breaks

>In rural areas you generally only have one bank in the local area

I agree to that but I don't follow. Are you a resident of a EU country? If yes, any bank operating in that country is obligated to let you open an account with them. Notice I say "resident", wich is a lower bar than "national". Banks operating in the boondocks and banks operating in the most expensive high street of the capital city, all must give you an account if you ask, so I don't follow unless they make you do banking in person only at one office, which I don't think is the case.

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.

Does Google have a better track record when it comes to arbitrarily locking people out of their digital lives?

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.

> But, at least with Google you can use hardware without the binding software requirement.

For now, but they are tightening things up.

And at least with Apple they provide convenient end-to-end cloud syncing. Google doesn't.

(And this back and forth can go on for a long time...)

You are just picking what is important to you and then ignoring other issues. That isn't how to craft advice that helps people you don't personally know, with needs you are completely unaware of, in a complex domain.

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.

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...

Ok so now we’re not only boycotting Apple, we’re boycotting banks as well! Seriously, Apple can and should fix this issue without having to retort to misery for everyone.

Apple could release a statement reassuring people that no one will be locked out of their account for redeeming any gift card going forward. We have collectively forgotten that companies have stopped talking this way. That’s what we need to change.

I mean, yes, absolutely. I don't have a count limit on my boycott list. I won't be holding my breath for empty promises from corporate. We need to build systems that assert user sovereignty and prevent abuse, not wait around for evil people to do good things.

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.

>> 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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1cem2jo/apple_u...

but evaluate your risk as you want.

The thing is, you don't need to avoid buying Apple completely, you just need to avoid giving Apple all of your life: your photos, documents, emails, backups, passwords, bills, ... basically you should avoid doing what the person in the OP did.

So keep your crappy crap phone for a job and use a real computer for your personal life.

If I get locked out of my job phone that is still devastating, but yes, that's what I do.

BSD, Linux or TempleOS would never lock you out.

Nor provide much utility to the average person.

BSD and Linux seem to be fine for the average person. I wouldn't recommend TempleOS.

> such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock

I mean that is a problem in itself :D

Why does Apple sell giftcards?

Some cultures stigmatize gifting money, yet gifting corporate scrip is fine.

Then why do they ban accounts for using them? Is it some sort of honeypot?

For the similar reasons Apple sells socks.. maybe?

- Don't use Apple. Or Google.

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.

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”

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.

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

That did happen and the world is a much darker place.

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.

I think it's because they're usually not well-adjusted humans, they live in a fantasy (basement) world that is not realistic.

Rude, not to mention this reads as "resistance is futile, just obey in advance".

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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 ?

Wait what? Who is paying what? What service is worse? Car keys?? I genuinely, honestly, have no idea what you're talking about.

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.

/s I hope

Soon the cars are going to drive away on their own, so what's with the keys anyway ?

> Some cars don't come with keys any more

Can you name one?

> There's always a workaround.

And the workaround is always far more work than I want to do, for virtually no upside for me.

Tragedy of the commons in a nutshell.

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.

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...

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?

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.

This heavily depends on the country.

Or Microsoft.

Stay as far away from BigIT as you can. Linux or BSD are there for many good reasons. This is another one.

Other than Android, what viable Linux options exist for mobile devices?

What is your definition of viable in this context?

Can run the Android or iOS apps people need for banking, shopping, flights, payment, parking, etc

What we want is probably platform agnostic PWAs that will run on any device with a browser.

We will never have freedom as long as were forced to choose between Google and Apple walled gardens.

The whole purpose of these apps is to only run on certain specified devices, so PWA won't work.

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.

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.

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.

When I get bogus products from online ordering I just assume I got ripped off and that's that. A majority of my orders come through though so its not all bad.

Does your country not have a small claims court or equivalent? This is literally what they are for: resolving obvious payment disputes with uncooperative corporations.

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.

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)

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.

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.

Why did you tell your bank it was delivered, if it was never delivered. Some other item you didn't order was delivered.

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.

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.

This also works for many other companies by the way - find or guess the email of someone high enough up the management chain and you have a much better chance of your issue ending up with someone who can actually do something about it than phone support following a fixed script. Bottom barrel support options are a choice the company is making and you do not have to play by their rules.

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.

It's unlikely to be Bezos himself handling those mails but it's still going to be some secretary with much more options than the cheapest phone support worker money can buy.

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

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.

This. 100%. Local shops are taking huge margins, have limited selection and are slow because they need to order from… central warehouse

Worse is that local shops also often have a bad customer experience when things go wrong - but now it's a new different flow for every store instead of a known quantity.

It's convenience. Two day shipping is irrelevant to me but there are no alternatives here even approaching the breadth of stock. So instead of dealing with one devil I know I would have to deal with several devils, some of which will be worse than Amazon.

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.

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.

I did have Prime for like 10 years, I just eventually realized that between the not-infrequent annoyances with shipping and the endless search results full of total junk and/or fake products it wasn’t as convenient as I’d thought, it more so just became my default.

There’s a corner store about a two minute walk from my front door, I’m certain their toilet paper is more expensive than Amazon’s, but I can have it right now if I want, and I’m not dealing with the stupid interface asking me if I want “18-count (345 sheet, 9 pack)” or the “XL 27 count (256 sheet, 5 pack)” version of the same product.

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.

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.

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

Honestly, good riddance. Just abandon that company and everything they touch.

If you can…

While you can…

And yet you keep paying money to this company. That is on you.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't disagree, but still think it's better to do as the lawyers tell you to.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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".

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.

> 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.

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

Lmao and you believe them?

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

An excellent blog. Their piece on credit card rewards programs is an excellent read as well.

AML = ?

(edit) Ah, right, anti-money-laundering, found it in your last sentence.

Anti-money laundering.

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.

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”

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.

So if they aren’t reasonable what’s the point of typing them out in a list exhorting others to implement them?

Because showing that the mitigation is unreasonable highlights how unreasonable the problem is.

The original commenter said he always suggests people do these things.

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.

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.

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.

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)

I’ll extend this, seriously, to the 3-2-1 model. It’s all fun and games, rhetorically, until someplace burns down.

Cryptic hints only work while your memories remain intact, unexpected health issues can render them useless

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.

At this point, are we relaying all emails to three or four locations for access to auth codes?

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".

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

> 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.

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.

People have been saying that for literal decades before Elon Musk said it.

That doesn’t make it untrue. Welcome to the today’s (whenever today was) lucky 10000, GP.

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.

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 rationale is that an egregore called Apple, inc. is blindly fumbling ahead, unable to see the lives it is trampling.

Note that this has nothing to do with the actual well meaning (mostly - see leadership emails leaks) people forming the egregore.

The purpose of the company structure is isolating it from liabilities, and as the regulation which would force it to recognize the damage it did is mostly missing, thus the outcome.

See also https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

> 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.

> It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account.

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.

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.

“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.

I guess the days of the scammer grunts are numbered. It is eventually going to be cheaper and more efficient to use a language model. Only the scammer architects who come up with the schemes will be able to extract value.

When that happens, there won't be much entertainment nor that much ethical value in scam-baiting. We need to enjoy it while we can.

Well on a similar topic, next step you could look at crypto’s and casinos. What are the biggest players doing there.

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

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

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..

> And with this there is lot of things coming, like AML and what not

Whats coming?

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.

Money laundering, I think.

AML = Anti Money Laundering

from the reddit story: "In the past two months, I purchased eleven Apple Gift cards from Amazon, Target, and apple.com, and added the amounts to my Apple account. The gift card amounts ranged from $25 to $150 each, totalling $905."

This is literally a money laundering pattern

The question will be why isn't this person just adding the money to their account directly, where is this money coming from, why are they structuring it like this

Whatever you’re quoting isn’t about me, the OP in this case…

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?

> 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.

What kinds of stacked cross-promotions like this exist, and even work out financially for everyone?

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.

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 £50, not cash or cash-equivalent). For owner-managed companies, directors have a £300 annual cap across such benefits. Cash or cash-redeemable vouchers don’t qualify and are taxed like salary.

Gift cards are huge in the B2B business as they are used a lot as gifts from companies to employees.

Which I find obnoxious - they're taxable benefits, so I'd really rather just have the cash.

Seems like restricting their purchase to companies would be an easy way to prevent fraud.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For some reason, many people think that gifting money is gauche, but gift cards are somehow okay.

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.

I don't understand, what's the benefit to the recipient if I limit their choice for them?

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)

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.

https://youtu.be/xj-7_YU-KIs

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.

I agree, but, still, it is what it is.

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.

It’s a financial gimmick. The company realizes the income immediately while service is rendered later. This has positive impact on the finances.

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.

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.

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?

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.

They actually do want you to use the cards though. The overspend is more valuable to them than the other disposition possibilities. Recognized revenue is always the best outcome. The interest/appreciation is the same for the merchant, whether on float or on revenue, but revenue is better for reports.

More broadly: All benefits of the cards definitely accrue to the merchant. There's absolutely nothing valuable to consumers about the deal!

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.

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.

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.

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

it's really hard not to have at least one single point of failure. there's a case to be made that a single cloud account actually reduces the ways things can go wrong to just one point of failure, instead of a handful.

e.g. email on a custom domain. your domain registrar is now a spof AND your email provider for your domain is a spof. and that's just email.

There's obviously a middle ground and ways to have a strictly better personal data posture than before, but it's a multi faceted problem balancing usability, security, and resilience

> 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

> 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.

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

No to excuse Apple but I think anti money laundering laws are at least partially to blame - they vary from country to country but typically impose penalties for not blocking suspicious activity at the same shielding from lawsuits for blocking innocent users. It's like lawmakers found a way to throw due process out of the window.

Gift cards carry a surprisingly high fraud/AML risk. If a code ends up being part of a stolen-card → resale → redemption chain (which is more common than people think), companies like Apple may actually have to lock the entire account. So the trigger might not be arbitrary—it may just be a side effect of how risky gift-card-based payments are.

I spent a long time working in finance one way or another, including as a founder/director of a small e-money issuer, and I have at least from this time ASSUMED that gift cards carry a very inflated AML risk.

Plus I have no desire to carry scrip when I could have fungible cash or equivalent, so I would not buy a gift card. I have received a few.

I think you’re operating with the right mindset.

Looking at the linked story, the trigger seems to have come from redeeming a gift card bought at a major retailer.

Even if the purchaser uses a legitimate store, the user can’t really know the full supply-chain history of a prepaid code, and that uncertainty alone creates room for unexpected flags.

For people who already have a credit card, gift cards are a fuzzy choice if the goal is simply to load balance onto an account.

Something somewhere in the chain probably tripped a rule — maybe fraud-related, maybe a processing anomaly — and from the outside it’s impossible for the user to see which.

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?

Going through this at the moment. Was it a physical card? What evidence of purchase did they ask you to provide?

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.

Selling gift cards is like borrowing money at 0% interest. And because some people forget and never use them, it's negative interest.

> 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

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!

anything can trigger this. it is totally at the company's discretion

I mean it gets triggered every time I download a new app. This has been bugged for years.

Do not redeem /s

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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).

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.

And even if, there are torrents and sites. Same for Steam games. Fuck the cloud.

Xcode.

Development on Apple hardware generally

You only need Apple ID to get Xcode though, everything else is available without

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.

Well I just stopped using a Mac. It's not worth jumping through hoops.

Does iOS?

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.

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.

I don't think the customer should be required to implement their own redundancy on top of the services they subscribe to.

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.

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.

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.

Sure, but until then FOSS solutions are the way to go.

Of course this is not for average people, but neither is making backups.

Regulations that will do what? I think the parent is correct to call out the entrenchment of first-party services as an issue.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

This is what most corporations want, esp for remote employees. I had a work supplied laptop and I couldn’t access via my machine account password. I could login via MFA but I couldn’t reset my local password. They made me initiate the account recovery, wait 8 days, and then I could change the password. I suspect my employer’s account synchronization tools mangled my password or changed it to a password in flux.

In that light, they are fulfilling a use case with greater market value than your conundrum. Is it annoying? Sure. Is it a problem? Debatable. You didn’t recover the passwords on the machine when your employee left. Maybe it’s your problem? Will you get in? Likely and eventually.

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.

> 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”.

> It’s almost certainly not

AIs are RLHF'd to have a corporate-pleasing interface w.r.t. metrics.

> 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?

The gradual decline of quality, and increasing hostility towards the user once they went from software to services.

Probably they tried a real operating system.

Linux and the other unices are great for their CLI, but GUIs seem more like an afterthought on that side.

I find KDE Plasma to be much better than Windows and MacOS.

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.

Windows is very similar to Plasma and copies it sometimes, but is much worse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:)

Because you can’t get rid of your government, whilst you can easily stop buying apple crap.

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.

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.

Exactly. Corp. at least have some expectation about revenue and reputation etc. Certain % of people only cost government, literally.

oh, no, they will do a lot to make you pay taxes

they can always print the difference, lol.

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.

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.

In… 5 years, and the prejudice won’t accumulate because your claims will still be based on 5 years ago :/

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.

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.

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.

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.

>go through with the lawsuit

That's a big ask.

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?

I'm not sure even if someone goes through an excessive expense that anyone else is better off.

Lmao this will not work

Waiting for all the weeping and gnashing of teeth because holding companies accountable might mean programmers have to actually care.

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.

> 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.

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.

I am guessing it's not that they wanted the money. They thought there was something illegal happening and seized the money. I.e. not for themselves but for whatever law enforcement agency they thought might come looking for it.

If they thought you were money laundering, maybe giving it back would be a liability.

> 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.

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".

Which bank?

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.

All banks can, but it’s not true to say all banks will. It’s also not reasonable to suggest that some banks aren’t worse than others, so when someone wants to know of a less unsafe bank we should recommend one.

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.

> 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.

> which shows some questionable judgment

Convenience is a hell of a drug.

When you are an Apple Developer, as the poster states - it goes deeper and more destructive.

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.

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?

Apple (via Executive Relations) says they won't do anything. Guess I'm stuffed.

> there are things you can't backup like shared actively edited iWork documents

If they’re shared, surely someone else can still access them?

What's an iWord and why can't it be backed up?

Nobody said iWord.

My apologies, I see I've misread it. Still don't know what iWork is. Surely what the question referred to was obvious

Here, I Googled it for you https://www.apple.com/iwork/

Oh, so I did understand correctly that it's Apple's version of Word etc.

My question was why one can't back up one's data though. I'm even more confused now that I know it refers to Pages/Keynote/etc. since those have always been file-based so far as I've seen from classmates who used it. Surely even Apple allows downloading your documents and spreadsheets from whatever storage front-end their live editing server uses?

> 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).

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.

Great victim blaming there buddy.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

There are 1.5 BILLIONS of iOS users. Is that what you call a dark alley? This is a broad day, city center attack.

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.

If I entrust money to someone who I know to be a thief, and then he runs off with it, how am I not at least partially culpable for my own negligence? Obviously the thief is the criminal and deserves to be punished and to pay restitution, but the idiot who should know better isn’t blameless.

One can express a need for regulation while also being aghast that people are still falling for the cloud scam, despite the overwhelming evidence that it is indeed a scam.

> I know to be a thief

A trillion dollar company with premium hardware and software that has more than 50% smartphone share in US and is used by 1.5 billion people worldwide is not "know to be a thief".

Your rant is essentially a crazy hobo stashing cash under his mattress and calling anyone using a bank idiot.

Banks, except for Wells Fargo, are not known to steal your money. Cloud services, however, are well-known for this kind of thing, especially in tech circles. Most people think it’s so rare that it won’t happen to them. And they are right, statistically, but they don’t consider the outsized impact if they are wrong.

Most people don’t save enough to handle an emergency, even if they have the cash flow for it. Most people don’t do basic, cheap preparation for a natural or manmade disaster. Most people don’t do at least minimal planning to make life easier for their families and loved ones if they are incapacitated or die, until very late in life. Most people are indeed idiots.

Calling 1.5 billion people idiots because they use a service where this happened to like one guy is too much of a stretch.

More like taking a deal with the devil and then being surprised that you lost your soul.

That's not what happened here though. The victim paid the muggers... so as you can see something is very wrong in this relationship.

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.

read the TOS before agreeing

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.

You don't even have to actually read them, just assume the worst case for the customer and you'll be right.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

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.

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.

Apple isn't filing SARs - they want no business in that and have banking partners to do that for them.

AML is a concept not a law itself. Which law is forcing Apple to act like this?

[flagged]

If he succeeds, perhaps you shouldn't care. If he fails, you should care, because that means that the average person will certainly fail. They will lose the cancer test results on their iPhone, the job they use the iPhone for, possibly their home, the copies of their birth certificate on their iPhone, and the friends they could crash with but whose phone numbers they've forgotten because they only communicate with them through iMessage.

[flagged]

You don't care that massive unaccountable corporations control all our data, devices and connectivity, and can lock us out of all of that on a whim or accidentally, and refuse to fix the problem?

This could happen to anyone. It can happen to people trusting Apple with their data, to people using Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other big cloud platform.

This deserves everybody's attention, and also a massive lawsuit to force these corporations to treat our data more responsibly.

[flagged]

I am surprised that evangelists keep thinking they are safe from the evil of big corporations.

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.

Brillant, I'm stealing it.

Even Meta approves. If it is not your data why should data protection laws apply ?

And Linus himself mostly just stores data on the cloud. At the end of the day, practicality matters.

Sure, you can be as "practical" as you like, just as long as you don't come crying when Apple decides to revoke your access to their data. You accept the benefit, you accept the risk.

If you're a scientist at an institution, why would you need root on the cephs or whatever storage system?

In that case it's the institution's data, not the scientist's personal data.

There's no reason to presume that the author 'thinks' that.

Then why did he mention it (their credentials)? It has literally zero relevance in this case. Maybe they were trying to show off?

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.

“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?

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> 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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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".

> 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.

[flagged]

> 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.

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.

> Textbooks don’t contain section headers every few paragraphs.

Yes they absolutely do. What are you even talking about?

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> 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.

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!

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.

[flagged]

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.

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.

[flagged]

> 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.

This is a bad faith argument and you know it.

[flagged]

The author is reputable, just look at the rest of their website.

Your accusation on the other hand is based on far-fetched speculation.

My writing from 5+ years ago was accused of being AI generated by laymen because I used Markdown, emojis and dared to use headers for different sections in my articles.

It's kind of weird realizing you write like generic ChatGPT. I've felt the need to put human errors, less markup, etc into stuff I write now.

> I've felt the need to put human errors, less markup, etc into stuff I write now.

Don't give in to the nitwits!

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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

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.

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.

privacy.com even if it was available in some country just means you give transactions of your identity to some other company. Cash (and so gift cards if they don't accept cash) is the most private way.

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).

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.

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

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?

> 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).

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.

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

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?

“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

There is if you want to blame the victim and/or work for Apple.

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.

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.

Indeed. The machine eating its enablers.

Oh, yes, only "important" people deserve customer service. That is an appallingly elitist attitude.

Nobody said that.

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.

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.

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...

Yeah that’s a great idea

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

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.

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".

> 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

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.

> 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!

Best take in this whole thread

It’s also possible this person does have some personal or external backups of stuff like the photos, but they’re not going to mention it here as the existence of those doesn’t change the fact that they’ve been extremely wronged. It also won’t help with their developer account etc.

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

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 ?

> 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.

Corporations play the role of gods in our society.

edit: about the same role as Greek or Roman gods.

Equal chance of them replying to your prayers and offerings

miracles happen

Source?

Because their TC is $400,000 and they need it to justify their Bay Area mortgage. Come on, folks, follow the money.

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"

Crazy how the industry with the biggest margins has the worst contempt for their customers

That’s part of where the margins come from.

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

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.

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.

At Apple’s scale, the likelihood of someone pulling any weird or shady nonsense that can be imagined is not potential, it’s eventual.

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.

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.

[flagged]

So let me try to understand you. You have 200 friends on whatsapp and FB locks you out . Now you can start sending them letters ? And how do you get their number .

WhatsApp,WeChat , messenger , telegram all use private addressing

You don't have 200 friends on WhatsApp. You have 200 contacts on your phone, which WA will pick up.

Maybe you do. I have zero contacts synced with WhatsApp

Reminds me of a story: When Facebook was launched I created an account.

Fast forward 10 years, account got permanently locked for suspicious activity.

Unsuccessful appeal. So permanently lost contact with some of my childhood friends and no way to recover them as they are in private mode.

If you hope on Instagram to find a girlfriend, it can also have a serious impact on your life to not have access to it. No instagram + no WhatsApp = paranoid weirdo = not dating material

Facebook's actually the only company I've heard of that will ban you for inactivity. Gmail will delete addresses if you don't log in for a while though I think they probably scan for 'one and done' things, and not things that look like critical infrastructure, but that's just a guess

Seems very hand in hand with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15222240

See, this is why IT MATTERS when we have confirmed emails of Zuckerberg going "...dumb fucks". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 You get all kinds of excuses https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38560321 Sounds good until you can't see any posts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 or they lock you out of your contacts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 Some people are just malicious and should be avoided at all costs and if their feet were held to the fire early they would've never been allowed to take over people's lives in the way they have. It matters.

I’m sorry but this sounds so preposterous that it’s making my point

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??

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.

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

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.

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.

Hoping housing happens—you deserve it.

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

Meta-critical or self-critical comments on hackernews get downvoted . It’s about 1.5 ° above Reddit

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."

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.

> 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Then proton becomes your single point of failure.

"But I use my addresses on my own domain" ok your domain registrar, then.

https://sidebox.net is a nice way to do this as long as the site doesn't restrict to mainstream email domains

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.

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

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.

Little trick: You can also randomly insert dots in your email address, a bit more stealth and compatible with more sites :)

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.” :/

This can become unmanageable if you sign up for more than a few things.

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

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.

You lose the Google content , since the export is lossy (docs , sheets, slides , etc) . And most of the value is collaborative . You’ll lose anything that you contribute to that’s not in your account . You’ll lose credentials (eg sso to third parties ), messaging access .

You’ll lose indexing and metadata , like Google Drive search , Google Photos search , thumbnails .

It’s a myth to assume the value is in the backup. Most of the value you have is in the access and the application

I don't have anything serious on Google drive, just some files I share with third parties that primarily exist on my network; and certainly no photos. Photos are on my NAS which is backed up on several disks; I publish them on a small app that I built, self-hosted (after years with Smugmug I left them two years ago).

Most accounts with third parties use domains I own that are not on Google in any way. Some still use a gmail address and I need to migrate those. But nothing essential.

That’s helpful context . How do you collaborate ? For example when a customer or partner sends a Google Drive / Dropbox folder for you to contribute to ?

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

It means people that don’t use cloud at all can’t possibly work with anyone else

It's a joke.

Thank you . I feel like many are reaching to take offense to a common idiom

What tools are you performing live backups with ? I can think of rclone running , but gdrive/icloud doesn’t send change lists

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.

Google Photos deliberately broke all backup tools in March, so there's that.

Yes you can still mostly do Takeout, but it's garbage. (not incremental. Requires me to remember. duplicates files for every album (total incompetence). downloads regularly fail. Requires more room than I have on my mac to decompress so I have to put it on an external drive.)

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.

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

> How do you collaborate ?

I commit code. I pair program. I share screen. That sort of thing. Code is mostly set up to have reproducible results. If it is not working on the other machine, then that's a bug and we need to solve it. There is not much collaboration I need to be doing in my free time. What I did on the last job is not what I depend on, but what a business thought they depend on. That's their stuff. If it fails because of some cloud ban or outage, not my problem.

When I need to share files with friends, I send them the files. Or I use Copyparty. Or, if they are more technically minded, I use Syncthing. For not so technical friends, I don't have to share 10k photos at once. Maybe I will send them a few photos via a messenger. Or some files they need via a messenger or have them on Copyparty, if needed often or again in the future. There is no issue.

> Do you have friends ?

Yes.

> A job ?

Had, and probably soon will have again, but I don't know what that has to do with what I depend on. If my job prescribes some cloud usage that is unnecessary, I guess I can try and show an alternative and begrudgingly accept that I have to use shitty tooling. But if somehow it is made impossible for me to use that, then it is their job to find an alternative. I am never the one prescribing it, and I myself don't depend on cloud.

> 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

I surely have friends, who probably use some MS or Google cloud stuff. But that's their problem, not mine. I don't depend on that. And they don't share that much stuff with me, that there is sufficient incentive to start depending on it. And if they did, I would tell them, that I don't want to make a shitty account on MS or Google cloud storage thingies.

I can’t tell if this is disingenuous.

How do you plan an event like a wedding , moving, a project with your friends without using cloud apps?

And surely one of your employers had you use Onedrive / Google Drive / Dropbox etc.

If you really do all those things without cloud, are you just using email for everything? How do you keep the docs in sync ?

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.

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.

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.

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

> and then, the form is behind... a Google login wall

Ugh. The people making that should really be informed about the issues they are causing with this. They probably are just uninformed and want to offer a good service, but actually are forcing people to give up personal data to Google, which is a big no-go. This is what happens when digital rights and privacy unaware people are in charge of something like this.

:( Google forces signin when the form creator adds upload fields on Google Forms… real simple service but huge privacy downsides for sure.

They “got it done” w/o much technical knowledge, but at a cost.

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.

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 ?)

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).

> 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.

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.

[flagged]

It could be a reasonable opinion, but unfortunate choice of words made it angry (and FWIW snobbish) towards wrong people.

apparently those living in basements are a protected class? English depends on idioms, you know.

> 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.

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.

And yet all it takes is buying a piece of hardware and installing an app, something that plenty of "normal" people do every day.

"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.

[flagged]

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.

You’re not getting parity to the actual value of the cloud apps. Cloud apps aren’t about syncing your content. They are about adding value on the content by collaboration, indexing, first-and-third-party credentials, and now AI generated content.

If you don’t acknowledge the value in that functionality, I’m assuming you aren’t collaborating with anyone..

Well the goalposts have moved outside the stadium, folks.

I wish I could “just” buy a computer and keep it permanently powered and connected.

A cellphone is a computer that is (typically) permamemtly powered and connected.

By “powered” I meant plugged in. Leaving a phone permanently plugged in would be a massive fire hazard.

Right, they said normal person.

How do you collaborate with your coworkers , customers and friends ? What industry are you in ?

Want to bet we can find holes in your solution too?

Off topic, but I'm curious. Why are you typing spaces before every period and comma?

Maybe iPhone is adding those ?

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.

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.

[flagged]

bunch of chatgpt trolls on hackernews.

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.

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.

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.

i'll try that or resetting my keyboard. thanks for the tip

How precisely do you reckon a lawyer would help?

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 .

Didn't they boot him for a ToS violation?

> Any lawyer can file a complaint in small claims .

No, in many states _no_ lawyer can file a complaint (except his own) in small claims court.

They booted him for TOs violation, that was their action. A judge can decide whether that action was a breach of the contract, or if the contract itself is lawful.

We live in a common law country. It means that the judgement defines the law, not contracts (and not even statute, strictly)

>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.

Own cloud is a fun hobby. Exclusively owncloud is entirely impractical.

It’s the snobby part that I’m critical of

> Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more.

So, fallacy aside, the abnormals would be...

a) people that don't tech, and b) people that saw the writing on the wall years ago, and either didn't trust the system and didn'tget into it, or those that did for a while, and got tfo.

?

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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

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 .

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

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.

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?

Yes, I think they just keep retrying the cards on a regular basis.

Surely the company could trivially detect that?

They try, but a combination of multiple layers of work arounds used by the attackers, and a strong desire not to false positive legitimate voucher buyers means there’s always a way.

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.

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>

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.

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.

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)

Also some people struggle to spend money on themselves without guilt. Gift cards absolve that guilt as they can buy that thing without feeling bad about it

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Sometimes you can buy gift cards with a small discount (cash back)

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.

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.

> 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.