Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#821

Post by Nab443 » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:50 PM UTC

sirmarksalot wrote: post #724

zygentoma wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#822

Post by tonymet » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:54 PM UTC

rvnx wrote: post #596

tonymet wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe iPhone is adding those ?

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

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#823

Post by tonymet » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

broken-kebab wrote: post #734

tonymet wrote: post #492

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 collaborati…

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.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#824

Post by ranger_danger » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

igor47 wrote: post #812

ranger_danger wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#825

Post by geor9e » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 10:03 PM UTC

I wish people would understand how common this is. There's no customer service line you can call when some overseas moderation farm worker spends 0.8 seconds looking at something and taps the hotkey for one of the reasons in their terms of service that they deem an account should be permanently wiped for. Have some recourse. Buy a NAS that will do automatic backups of all your cloud accounts. Long ago I lost a decade of Gmail and GDrive because I posted a PNG file of a credit‑card form that said "This post only viewable with Google+ Gold." You need to be treating these accounts as ephemeral.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#826

Post by fsckboy » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 10:19 PM UTC

pxx wrote: post #819

ryandrake wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

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?

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#827

Post by quesera » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 10:24 PM UTC

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #420

quesera wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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!

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#828

Post by jjtheblunt » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 10:37 PM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #790

jjtheblunt wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh that's interesting. i'd tried it several years ago but had not tried uploading anything like you did, so had not noticed that deficiency (randomly).

yea - in retrospect I think it's pretty clear about it from the text on the screens... but it surprised me too, because the initial UX is designed exactly like every other "upload your own music library so you can stream it anywhere" feature elsewhere. which is rather strangely blind to their own ecosystem, and tbh I don't see the purpose of a lightweight "upload your recordings from your phone!" feature, artists gen…

maybe they use Spotify themselves!

I've got Spotify as a native app in my 2024 ev and it's strange in that it starts songs like 1 second in, all the time. very unclear how that happens other than a software bug.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#829

Post by akho » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 10:45 PM UTC

TekMol wrote: post #797

ValentineC wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would I want a shared clipboard across multiple devices? I guess you've never had to type something first on your laptop to paste in a phone app, or vice versa. Or open a link from a phone messaging app in your laptop browser.

In the rare case (maybe once per month or so) where that happens, I start a script on my laptop that starts a webapp both the phone and the laptop can open in their browser and send text to each other. The overhead of starting it and typing "laptop.tekmol" into the browser on both machines is only a few seconds. That seems mich saner to me than to constantly have some interaction between the two devices going on.

> That seems mich saner

Normal people just message themselves on tg or wherever you send and receive messages.

Geeks use KDE Connect.

Whatt you do is weird.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#830

Post by 0xCE0 » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC

These kinds of cases just triggers all the rage for me, be they true or not and whatever is the actual case.

I have fresh experience of setting up Azure/M365 and AppleDev for my startup. Those things are scary as f*uck, in many perspectives:

(1) Dark patterns everywhere (click this checkbox and we'll buy you a license, oops +xxxxx €/$ per year just came; get one-month trial for O365 to get bizaccount, select 1 license, see that there is 25 licenses (~ 4k €/$) to be renewed if I don't cancel).

(2) Microtransactions everywhere (e.g. Azure VM SSD I/O: every read/write operations costs), DDOS and 10/100 k€ bill coming. Everything "scales", especially bills. And no billing caps, of course.

(3) Codesign with Microsoft: I have option to wait weeks for freight ship to ship USB cert token (if it ever survives past toll/postal service after that), or use AzureKeyVault, but that is officially only for companies that has taxes/accounting for 3 years of operation. So no startup can use that by this requirement to codesign?!

(4) AppleDev (and kind of Azure/MS too) requires DUNS number, which takes 6 weeks to get in normal case. Apple's 5 bizday route doesn't exist anymore (at least not for non-US-based companies). Or just use D&B magic link from Grok and get it immediately in 5 mins.

(5) If you base your business on Azure/M365 and AppleDev and be obidient and compliant (as I am doing/being, because I'm building real legit and long-term company, not some hussle project), it still doesn't matter, because they can just can decide by human/ML to shut your business operations and means of living. And getting answers like in the title's article's screenshots with those emojis are just the most non-human interaction that there can be done for affecting so devastatingly to someone's life/business.

These are the most disgusting things that I know of.