Live data from Hacker News

Apple Sign In

techcrunch.com

251–260 of 544 posts

Re: Apple Sign In

#251
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend buying a 2015 Macbook Pro, if you can find someone willing to part with theirs. Apple laptop hardware started going off the rails after they shipped that one with touch bar + keyboard shenanigans.

Ok, thanks. I know nothing at all about Apple hardware. It's still a very daunting decision to make. I like the ability to buy my own hardware, for desktops, and to build what I like at a cheaper price. Apple charges a premium but now I have more of an idea of what that premium will get me. It would be a huge migration for me. Everything I own is tied to one of a few Gmail accounts. My photo history, my uni work in G…

You can use everything gmail on Apple products. But, as he said, Macbooks 2015 were the top of their art, and it’s all going downhill now. Since 2014 they start to have kernel panics, since 2016 they have a failure-prone keyboard with no hardware “Esc” key. And it now costs 150$ for an external keyboard. Prices up, quality down, emojis in.

Re: Apple Sign In

#252
post #3

Disposable, anonymous email forwarding is a massive step forward for privacy. I know we've all been doing it for a while, but this on a consumer level is fantastic.

Totally agree. I set this up for myself to have a anything@mytrowawaydomain.com and it's great to see when folks sell your email :)

So far it's only happened once, actually, when Keen.io got bought by a PE firm, I got a bunch of spam, so they clearly sold off my email address.

It's a system that would be hard to operate as a "normal" person, so this is a great step.

Re: Apple Sign In

#253
I used to do something similar when I ran my own mail server. Whenever I created an account for a new service, I would add an entry to /etc/aliases e.g.

    news.ycombinator.com: stirner
and sign up for the service as news.ycombinator.com@mydomain.com. If I ever left a service, I would just remove the corresponding alias and restart Postfix.

I eventually got tired of the work required to avoid spam filters and switched to iCloud Mail, so I’m glad to see this feature built in.

Re: Apple Sign In

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case anyone needs something similar today: Outlook already allows you to create ephemeral top-level aliases, i.e. XXXX@outlook.com. You can use this to sign up, then delete the alias. It can't be traced back to your account and nobody blocks @outlook.com. https://account.live.com/names/Manage (not to take away from this announcement at all; just to provide some context. it's an often overlooked feature which peopl…

> It can't be traced back to your account... I'm sure there's logging or other AD property (think something like sidHistory[0]) to keep track of this. Companies don't like being liable for not being able to provide data under order[s]. [0] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/ADSchema/a-...

What liability is there for not providing data you don't have?

Re: Apple Sign In

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay $30/year for a cpanel host that includes unlimited mail forwarding for any address on any domain. This is a byproduct of what I really do which is host a bunch of sites. $48/year for email scrubbing seems like a high price. I think it’s great, and use it a lot. Just wonder how you got to that price vs like $10/year.

Pro users subsidise the free ones, unfortunately. Assuming a 1% conversion rate to pay server costs and 1-2 devs full time at 4 usd/pro user/month you need 2500 pro users, which is 250,000 users. That and people pay 4 bucks for a coke these days so it’s not really much. Also cPanel is most definitely an expert tool. I might make it paid only soon and reduce the price but at present there’s not much option to get real…

Once it's up and running, does it really take 2 full-time people to keep it running?

Re: Apple Sign In

#258
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple ID as SSO, iMessage Profile, Memoji, and Apple Pay. Apple is near FB Messenger parity, now that it functions as an account for external services. It's an extremely strong move on Apple's part, especially considering how close to it they have been for a while. They sure like taking their time sometimes.

Sorry how can I get iMessage on my Android phone? Sensible people do not deliberately handcuff themselves to trillion dollar megacorps and then throw away the key.

Yes they do https://bgr.com/2019/05/31/iphone-11-rumors-leaks-vs-android... AND https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/iphone-use-teens-2018/

>He works in IT at an unnamed company, and his team noticed something crazy: of the 500 employees at the company, only 8 of them chose to use an Android phone. Everyone else — all 492 of them — chose an iPhone over Android phones. It was because they didn’t want to be “green bubbles,” a reference to the fact that iMessage chats in the iPhone’s Messages app use blue bubbles while SMS chats are displayed with green bubbles. Forget all of the great advantages iPhones might offer, iMessage is the main reason all these people wanted an iPhone. 98% of the employees at this company went with Apple over Android, and for the majority of them, it was mainly because of a single service.

If people didnt "throw away the key" services like Google ID, Microsoft ID, and Facebook ID wouldnt exist. Centralized OAuth providers are here to say, even if a lot of us on HN dont like them. You want to get into your tshirtclub account after facebook locks your account, too bad!

Re: Apple Sign In

#259
Great. I guess also you need to use apple machines to remember the email address and any password for you. Sometimes they ask for it.

Re: Apple Sign In

#260
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about 'neither of them'? Trusting Google with your data is like trusting a fox with guarding your hen house, trusting Apple with your data is trusting a fox which claims it turned vegetarian. Run your own mail server and you'll have all the addresses you care to use, using any scheme you might think off. I've been doing this for decades now and it just plain works. A day or so to get the thing setup, 8 hours of m…

Where do you host your mail server? I've been running my own for years on Rackspace, and it works great, except they recently started adding on a $5/month support fee that old accounts like mine had been grandfathered out of. With that, and other price increases over the years, it now costs about twice what I originally paid. I originally picked Rackspace over AWS because Rackspace's cheapest acceptable option was ab…

The server sits in a special cupboard I made which has servers, a switch and storage on top, drying racks on the bottom. All the way in the bottom is a forced draft fan (meant for modern air-tight homes, low-power and -noise) which pulls the warm air from the top through the drying racks. All the way on top sits a large air filter. This keeps the equipment clean and relatively cool while using the waste heat to dry produce (now filled with mint leaves, later it will be used to dry apple, possibly some jerky, etc).

The whole is connected through our gigabit fiber to the outside with a possibility for a wireless backup connection should the fiber go down (which it hasn't thus far).

The hardware runs a combination of Debian stable with some unstable packages plus home-grown tools. I've done Debian upgrades on these servers for years, generally without much breakage. That is actually why I moved to Debian from Redhat which I used earlier (before the Fedora days) as upgrading RH was always a hit-and-miss experience compared to Debian.

So, in short: my own hardware on my own connection on my own premises, with off-site (and even out-of-country) backup in a reciprocal agreement: I run backups for my brother in the Netherlands and get to put my (encrypted) backups on his NAS.

Post reply on HN