271–280 of 1001 posts
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I would love to feel sorry, but seems you’re technically capable of preventing this (unlike most people), just chose “convenience.” Well, this is the downside of “convenience.” If you manage to recover your belongings, I hope you stop preaching around how living in a normal apartment in society is good and everyone should accept the risk of home invasion instead of living in an underground bunker with biometric acces…
living in an apartment sucks for security. You can't really own a gun and practice castle doctrine. Your landlord has a key to your home and can lock you out at any time, or can go through your mail. There are other options like living in your own property, living in an RV, etc. that are better if you are worried about security. If I was living in an apartment, I wouldn't be stashing all of my money under my mattress…
> our landlord has a key to your home and can lock you out at any time
Illegal to do without notice and permission. You can change the locks as long as you change them back or pay for cost of doing so when you leave.
> I wouldn't run a business out of my apartment such that I would lose all of my equipment if I got evicted.
Eviction requires a legal process that takes months.
> I wouldn't run an important business that depends on their platforms.
That implies no one should develop software for Apple, MS or Google platforms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
> 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 dis…
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to truly save your photos, make backups of the locals and put it in your safe deposit box at the bank. Or alternatively, at a trusted friend/relative's house. Even doing this yearly can save the immense sadness of lost memories. And of course, this works for emails, and everything else. If you encrypt it, make sure you use a method not tied to any external service, or the machine you're on. I don't use Ap…
Yeah, the plan would be external disk -> offsite storage. I wouldn't bother to encrypt, it's just family photos and I wouldn't want to complicate restores. Especially if it was my wife who eventually needed to use it.
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…
>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 potenti…
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 b…
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…
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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.
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From this discussion
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…
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 s…
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.