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Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

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Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#441

Post by akimbostrawman »

tokyotexture wrote: post #320
akimbostrawman wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the same way you should run _all_ proprietary binaries. restricted inside a sandbox. linux makes that easy with flatpaks.

That only goes so far though. A lot of games need internet access, so essentially you are running potentially modified binaries running on your hardware/network, that gets access to the outside. Sure, blast radius becomes somewhat limited, but you still have a potential problem.

The only games that need a network connection are online games. With those you can use a application firewall (which you should anyways) like opensnitch to only allow connections to sites that make sense and block anything else e.g. internal connection.

Unless you get your cracks from google.com it will be fine.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#442

Post by lxgr »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #397
rsync wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a US person and the four (three very large and one smaller, regional) banks that I use do not have any such requirements. Web based online banking (since nothing related to banking requires 3D or VR/AR or camera/mic access or other fancy things that apps do) and 2FA auth. That is all I have ever seen or used.

In the EU, banks are AFAIK banned from using SMS 2FA, and the 2FA needs to be tied to the specific transactions. Which nowadays de facto means a bank-specific (sometimes country-specific) 2FA app, possibly with the alternative option of purchasing a pricey dedicated 2FA device.

> In the EU, banks are AFAIK banned from using SMS 2FA

That's not the case, but SMS-OTP only counts as one "possession" factor, leaving only "knowledge" or "inherence" for the second one, and both are awkward to ask for in a payments flow. (You don't want to train users to enter their bank's password at a merchant site, and biometry/inherence isn't easily possible from an untrusted device.)

By contrast, doing biometry on a linked device provides two factors (possession of the device and inherence), and is significantly cheaper than SMS too. SMS in Europe can be pricey!

As a tangent, they are in fact banned from using email as a factor, which I find infuriating – my mailbox seems much better protected than my SIM card or phone number, which is one successful attempt at social engineering away from being swapped out or ported away. The SMS industry must be pretty good at lobbying.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#443

Post by lxgr »

rsync wrote: post #337
eCa wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do create an ephemeral Apple ID every time I get a new phone In other words, you do have an in-use apple id at (pretty much) all times.

Sure, but it has no value and nothing negative happens if it is revoked. Further: the three apps I install are not crucial - I could live just fine without them. All I really need is Safari and a working POTS endpoint for my cloud-hosted phone number ...

It's nice that this works for you, but unfortunately I strongly suspect that you are part of a tiny and shrinking minority.

Not every service provider offers a web app anymore, and if they do, it's often penalized in terms of functionality or fraud screening hoops one has to jump through (since mobile apps offer device attestation and generally have a higher cost per bot action than browsers). Some even outright demand device attestation, which not only excludes non-iOS/Android devices, but even custom ROMs or non-Google-blessed phones, since they lack the necessary keys.

And yes, people could protest that by just not using these services if they're not strictly necessary to survive, but the dynamics here (tragedy of the commons etc.) just don't work in favor of individual people.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#444

Post by lxgr »

rsync wrote: post #383
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: How do you do your banking? Most of my banks de-facto require an Android or iOS app for authentication, unless you want to do all your banking in person and pay hundreds of Euros in fees every month (and even that would exclude you from many services).

I am a US person and the four (three very large and one smaller, regional) banks that I use do not have any such requirements. Web based online banking (since nothing related to banking requires 3D or VR/AR or camera/mic access or other fancy things that apps do) and 2FA auth. That is all I have ever seen or used.

The big difference is that, historically, there wasn't much you could do in a US bank's online banking other than checking your balance and maybe initiating a wire transfer (which usually costs double-digit USD amounts in fees, so it can be economically secured by manual human fraud investigation for every case).

By contrast, all European bank accounts offer outbound payments, which nowadays clear and settle instantaneously. The fraud risk is just orders of magnitude higher.

The US now has Zelle, which is actually showing just that friction and not going especially well for banks that were kind of blindsided by the sudden requirement to actually authenticate their customer, which is why you see all kinds of strange stopgap solutions mixed with proper security.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#445

Post by moffkalast »

rationalist wrote: post #426
moffkalast wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one self host an email server these days and not get flagged into oblivion?

At least use a service with actual customer support like Fastmail, and backup your email with an email client that downloads copies of your email to your computer.

I mean Proton seems like a good (although extremely expensive) option, but these small companies could go out of business on a dime which is a problem when the effort to switch is a titanic undertaking.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#446

Post by moffkalast »

akimbostrawman wrote: post #440
moffkalast wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flatpaks would make it easy, if they ever worked when you needed them to.

Sounds like a issue with your system. I have used hundreds of them on all kinds of systems.

I'm glad it works on your machine.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#447

Post by SXX »

ragazzina wrote: post #327
SXX wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve get no fees from non-Steam key sales and developers can really request any reasonable amount of keys so tens and hundreds of thousands. It make a lot of sense to discount all these reviews to avoid abuse. A lot of developers would abuse reviews hard otherwise.

Why are hundreds of thousands keys a reasonable amount for a developer? I am not in the video game business so I fail to see the use case.

How keys are used explained in other answers already. Number of keys you can request would obviously depend on how successful is your hame on Steam. E.g I doubt Valve would generate 100,000 keys for a game with zero sales, but likely under 10,000 is possible.

Other than selling keys they can also be used for marketing. If you for instance have a game with multiplayer, lots of DLCs or IAP then giving away keys for base game make a lot of sense: even if only 1% of people who grab the key gonna play it they can still eventually buy other copy for a friend, etc.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#448

Post by mvanbaak »

firefax wrote: post #381
srmatto wrote: post #10

This fiasco stirs up a lot of different topics for me, none of which seem like they are likely to be resolved anytime soon. First, with so much importance placed on an Apple/iCloud account in our current era it's not good that they can be shutdown so trivially. Someone can be shut out from using Messages, Apple Wallet, Digital Identification (depending on where they live) and all their subscriptions and media purchas…

iCloud is overrated, it was not encrypted at rest for ages. I much prefer using Time Machine and keeping the passcodes in a PW manager, and maybe a safe deposit box as a backup.

iCloud is a whole lot of things. What you describe is a backup storage solution. Time Machine does not handle: - photo sync between devices and users - shared storage between devices and users (no, not backup, but actual directories and files etc) - private relay - state sync for games and other apps - etc etc

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#449

Post by burnt-resistor »

The universal workaround is not to buy or use gift cards, but to give people value in other forms like cash, prepaid debit, or bank transfer apps like Zelle.

Reasons:

1. Gift cards artificially tie-up value into a company that cannot be effectively converted into something else.

2. The value can disappear.

3. Weird other hassles like this can happen.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#450

Post by protimewaster »

dylan604 wrote: post #331
protimewaster wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another issue is, how do you get your games when you're banned? Most people don't have all their games installed at any given time. With GOG, there is at least an unofficial, supported way to get an offline installer for each of your games. With Steam, there's no officially supported way to do this, so it's likely to be a bigger PITA to archive all your games ahead of time. In reality, though, almost nobody is thinki…

How is something unofficial yet supported? Is there just no "download installer" button on the site, but can be done as long as you know how to obtain the URL?

It was supposed to be "official, supported". Oops.
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