171–180 of 1001 posts
Out of curiosity, why did you buy and redeem such a large gift card instead of paying directly? And was this a form of payment that was unusual in light of your account history?
I prefer to keep it topped up like that. It's been the same for 20 years.
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The issue with OneDrive is that it doesn’t store metadata like the photo location, its damn near useless. But I do pay for storage for Google Photos and iCloud. If you take all of your photos from your phone, you don’t need your Mac at all. Google Photos will sync directly. I wouldn’t use BackBlaze (the $7 a month service). It doesn’t support NAS at all and it has to phone home every 30 days or it will erase anything…
Backblaze doesn’t erase after 30 days… I’ve had a computer be offline from it for several months and it still retained all data. And you can use the backblaze docker container to run on a NAS, much much much cheaper than B2. Wasabi is much cheaper than AWS as well. Finally the best solution for backing up your iCloud Photos is definitely Immich. Set it up on your own NAS or a VPS, back up to that, and then back up th…
It’s actually more nuanced. It will back up files on a USB attached drive. If it doesn’t see the drive attached for 30 days, it will erase the backup.
If you have your computer off for more than 30 days and you bring your computer back on and the USB drive isn’t attached when it connects to BackBlaze, it will erase it.
Yeah I’m not going to trust my storage to Wasabi.
AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive is $1 a month.
As someone using Linux to build web applications, I wonder what about the Apple ecosystem could make it worth to have such a Damocles’ sword hanging over me my whole life. Am I missing something? My current perspective is that not only am I free of all the hassle that comes with building for a closed ecosystem, such as managing a developer account and using proprietary tools, it also comes with much harder distributi…
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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…
> 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…
Under common law, lawyers (in the US sense) are not required on either side in the case of handling a dispute or a small claim.
Specifically in Australia, the company would have a complaint department, and the case would be dealt with by a complaint officer, not a lawyer.
If the scope of the case exceeds the tribunal's authority, the case is handled in the state's district court or in a federal court for cross-jurisdictional matters. The official title of the person representing the defendant (e.g. a company) in a courtroom is the barrister, but the case documentation and legal advice are provided by a solicitor.
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…
What changed your outlook? Did you get burned by Microsoft?
I can understand this happening if it was a freshly created account topped up with a sus gift card but it’s unacceptable that the first action is to completely block an account with history.
Even more concerning is the nonchalant support response to “go create a new one” with emojis. C’mon Apple — this is just a terrible way to respond to this situation.
It's hard to believe EU governments are actually considering mandating iOS and Android as gateways to access government services. It's a level of ignorance that's unfathomable.
This story is also exactly why I invest precious time running a Linux machine in the basement that rclones my cloud drives locally, as well as having full local copies of my webmail contents.
I know this might sound cynical... But the author should really understand that Apple gives less than zero fcks about them. Apple is known (and, weirdly, loved) for being tyrannical in this sense. Apple is known for their "my way or the highway" approach to anything, without much explanation and with self-attributed "we're always right" attitude.
> The Damage: I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media.
And that's why people complain about Apple's walled garden. Given the size of the damage I'd look into getting a lawyer involved, and possibly try and get Apple to court (in coerce them into being reasonable).
Frankly, I'm taking note of the archived page (https://archive.is/jrsLV) that I will reference to anybody that will ask why not to trust Apple in the future. Note that Google is also known for having a similar approach (there is no way to get support if something like this happens UNLESS you happen to know somebody inside google). Amazon on the other hand has made customer support one of its defining traits.
Btw if you are doing any decent amount of tech stuff, you should REALLY get off walled gardens and at the very least have an on-premise backup solution (an off-the-shelf nas with spinning disks could be a good starter solution).
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…
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.