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Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

daringfireball.net

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Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#251

I just bought my niece a Visa gift card and she said she had the hardest time using it. Not many would accept it. What's up with this latest gift card scammed .. tampered gift cards. Has the media not done a blitz on this issue yet? It's the holiday season and many are going to be scammed! I will be giving a greeting card with cash or just cash app family members.

Visa gift cards never were widely accepted since they are so often used for fraud.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#252
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With GOG you can download the games's installer, vy backing up those you can still install your games even if you get banned

For purposes of backup I don't see that large of a difference between a single installer executable and a zipped folder that you'd get after installing a non DRMed game from Steam.

GOG has allowed third party backup software like https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader to exist. I have a full offline mirror of my GOG library that I update monthly that will never happen with my Steam library.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#253
post #18

The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. Even if they have real humans to talk to, they simply follow a script. Those agents do not have the ability to investigate a situation or the power to use their discretion to take meaningful action. We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers. 1. If they…

I previously worked in fraud/risk at a major ecommerce platform. On my biggest day I closed 60,000 accounts. In one day. I knew other agents who'd done 10x that. The scale of this work is unfathomable to those who have only been on the consumer side of it. #1 is doable but would destroy our ability to combat fraud. "Here's how not to get banned next time" is not an email anyone in this space would consider sending. #…

Saying #1 and #2 are not possible or not likely is not a good take, in a world where our digital accounts take more and more a central place in our daily lives. It may work for autocratic societies, it won't cut it for democratic ones: imagine if our legal systems were that irresponsible to us collectively and individually?

Why not introduce friction on both sides, like: 1/ just face to face, physical meeting? 2/ or a basic (paid, yet reasonable) insurance that account management doesn't happen over the shoulder?

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#254
I kinda thought Apple was better about this sort of thing, what with the Genius bar and that sort of thing. I pretty much made an ass of myself by assuming that, I guess, because I switched from Google stuff straight into Apple. I should probably start to work on self-hosting now that I can see I was incorrect to trust Apple...

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as they are both in the advertisement business Apple isn't. Just sayin'. They are trying to do it, but they aren't really anywhere near the scale of Google and Facebook. They make money ( lots of money) by selling high-margin hardware, and, to some extent, digital media, on that hardware. Currently, Apple is genuinely serious about preserving user privacy. I realize that can change, in the future, but it's the way…

Apple makes money on hardware and a 30% tax on developers. They might have some goodwill but are not making any money on privacy.

They only get 2.5% of their revenue from app store transactions.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not every one has that kind of public reach to get a satisfactory resolution. You can contact an employee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation

This is not a known fact about the world and would not be a solution even if it were.

It doesn't have to be a fact. But it does point out that in practice you are not that many connections away from a human can fix the problem.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#257
I won't be redeeming any, that's for sure. I've been lucky so far, but I got a brush with this experience a couple years ago. I logged into my apple account from a web browser on my work computer. Turns out my company has pretty shitty security and our NATs were on the naughty list (I should have known better, I had been getting CAPTCHA'd every day if I browsed outside our network). Because I logged into the apple account from a naughty network, they instantly locked the account until I could prove it was really me and that everything was okay.

I did get it resolved relatively quickly, but for the next couple weeks I was randomly running into the fallout from that. It became really clear just how far reaching the impact would be if I lost the account and could not recover it. Ever since then I've tried hard to disentangle myself completely so that the blast radius will be much smaller.

At this point the biggest worry I have is what would happen to my MBP and iPhone. All of my cloud services are non-Apple, but they might be able to keep me out of my own machine and that would be devastating.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real real problem are shameless shitheads that will abuse anything to any length the run scams or malware distributions. " Yes support tech, please understand my child just died of cancer and my wife in a car accident last week and the only pictures I have of them are on my bitcoin4free@gmail.com account! " Google probably also bans thousands of accounts a day. And suddenly every single one of them needs a full h…

Dealing with fraudsters should be baked into the cost of doing business for these megacorps. A smaller business couldn't get away with this kind of "support". The largest companies should be held to the same standard. The only way this is going to change is if shareholders hold executives accountable. Consumer protection regulation with real "teeth" that impacts the bottom line will bring angry shareholders to the ta…

> Dealing with fraudsters should be baked into the cost of doing business for these megacorps. A smaller business couldn't get away with this kind of "support". The largest companies should be held to the same standard.

It is already baked into the costs in business models of big companies. And they are pretty good at it, actually; we’re talking about one high-profile case, and it’s not the only one, but it is rare enough that such stories are still newsworthy.

The standard that people want, though, is absolute certainty: zero errors that affect real customers, a 0% false positive rate.

The scale is in fact a challenge. If a small business has a 0.00001% false positive rate, they will affect approximately zero of their customers. For Apple, managing billions of accounts, that same false positive rate would affect hundreds of real customers every day.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they've changed recently, I thought GOG's platform itself does not have DRM? Steam does provide DRM and doesn't tell you if a game uses it, though as far as I know there are generic tools to bypass it. GOG also specifically advertises games that don't have DRM, e.g. [0]. Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable wi…

> Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable with no rollback ability. Yeah, but that's a developer choice. Steam doesn't force anyone to use their API for things like that. If that's a concern for someone as a gamer, they should probably support the companies that don't do it no matter the platform, not blame Steam for it…

Steam is its own DRM on top of whatever else a developer chooses to do. I found this out one year when I spent months without internet access. At a certain point steam would refuse to run any of the locally installed single player games I had paid for through their platform until my computer phoned home to their servers. I'd already configured everything for working offline and they did successfully for a long time until one day they just wouldn't anymore.

If you don't want lose access to every game you fully paid for on Steam you'd better pirate a copy of everything you bought because on a whim they can take it all from you at any time.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. A situation similar to this happened to me with Steam over a payment issue with their service. They banned me even though I had thousands of dollars of games and an account since Sept 2003. I had to go to my bank and escalate multiple times to get letters providing the info steam wanted about my account and credit card to prove it was legitimate. Eventually after contacting them enough times they said they wo…

They've made it clear that you don't own your cloud library, so the only reasonable answer is to never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove (including things that require an online account for functionality you consider important), and treat services like Steam as a temporary convenience to download known good files that you then fix to remove any DRM. If you only treat these services as a download tool, thei…

> never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove

I take this to mean to sail the seas but I have apprehension over running modified binaries from random people. Is there anything that can be done to alleviate this worry?

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