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"Microsoft Locked My Account – I Lost 30 Years of Photos and Work"
- theandrewbailey 1y agoSadly, this reminds me of a facetious story I wrote several years back when Google tried to build a neighborhood in Toronto. It follows a Google fanboy that moves in, only to get locked out when something abruptly decides "No, you don't live here anymore." https://theandrewbailey.com/article/203/Insanity-Locked-Out.html https://theandrewbailey.com/article/203/Insanity-Locked-Out.... > But one day, you come back to your apartment. It's locked, and won't accept your authentication method. Since your technocrat landlords despise plain old metal keys for some reason (What are you, a peasant?), they provide one of several alternative methods for you to open doors. (Why can't those cyborgs be more like normal people?) They advise you to never share how or with what you use to login to them. Whatever it is, it's not working. You hope there's not an electrical outage somewhere. > Because you're living in the future, everything is connected to the internet. Like most everything else, your door has a display mounted into it. A message appears, informing you that since you've violated the terms of service, your account has been terminated. You're locked out from all your stuff! There is a customer service robot downstairs, so you try to get some answers from it. Unsurprisingly, the robot is not helpful, not sympathetic, and it won't listen to an unperson.
- r0fl 1y agoThis would never work in Toronto. Ontario tenancy laws are so pro-tenant that not even Google could evict a tenant that quickly.
- tonyhart7 1y ago"Ontario tenancy laws are so pro-tenant that not even Google could evict a tenant that quickly." that's good then, I bet the rent price is pro tenant too
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoLaws being far too pro tenant don't usually result in lower rents for the tenants, but the contrary. Landlords then prefer to keep their apartments empty instead of risking a bad tenant or have very high bar to entry in order to get an apartment.
- em-bee 1y agoin some places that's illegal
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoWhere is what illegal? And how do you prove it? I just let my grandma or close friend live there. There, I found a workaround in 2 seconds. If I can, so can BlackRock and friends and your rental market is still fucked. You can't fix a supply and demand problem with regulations. Why don't people get this?! I've never seen a place with strong tenant protections that has affordable or easy to get rents. See Berlin as one example of many.
- em-bee 1y agoWhere is what illegal? in some cities in germany it is illegal to leave living quarters vacant for more than 60 or 90 days. in hamburg the local government can take over empty living quarters, renovate them and rent them out without the permission of the owner. I just let my grandma or close friend live there. you can do that if you have only one place to rent out, but not 10. and besides, then your friend is not living somewhere else freeing up another place and they would enjoy the same rent protection too. so in fact you don't win anything. Berlin do you think without the protection berlin would be any better? maybe instead take a look at vienna which has a model that actually works. two thirds of apartments in vienna are subsidized by the government. and when you build something new, again two thirds of that must be subsidized.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
- theandrewbailey 1y agoI did not write it with a specific city in mind, only somewhere in the United States, due to the CFAA invoked towards the end. Then again, Big Tech is often wildly out of touch with both laws and expectations of everyday people outside of Silicon Valley. (Move fast and break things, remember?)
- nusl 1y agoAlso related; https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
- 1970-01-01 1y ago'What if I told you it's just someone else's computer' meme is evergreen.
- khurs 1y agoFor anyone non technical, always use your own domain so if your email service locks you out, you can move to another instantly. And follow the 3-2-1 rule https://www.veeam.com/blog/321-backup-rule.html https://www.veeam.com/blog/321-backup-rule.html
- zihotki 1y ago"For anyone non technical" and "always use your own domain" sound a bit of opposite things to me
- khurs 1y agoFor anyone non technical, either ask a lllm to explain it to you like you are 5 (eli5), search online for ‘how to add a custom domain to [your email provider]’ or seek assistance. Importantly, don’t register the domain name (website url) at the same company your email is with.
- Simulacra 1y agoIt takes less than 15 minutes to go to GoDaddy and purchase a domain. I encourage everyone to own their name.
- the__alchemist 1y agoWhat do you mean by own their name?
- southernplaces7 1y agoAs applies to other major data services providers with shit-useless customer support and arbitrary algorithmic "service" decision-making, DO NOT FUCKING TRUST your data to rest exclusively within anything that they own and control. Export your email archives, spread your personal files across multiple devices and services, and ideally, keep copies of your files on your own backup HDs or at the very least with one other cloud provider, that also happens to be small enough for you to reach a human if something goes wrong. At least Microscum can't yet lock one out of their own PC or laptop at this stage. This person trusted too much in their OneDrive service. To note: looking particularly at people who've let themselves become Google-dependent here, just as much as anyone silly enough to trust 30 years of their work exclusively to fucking Microsoft of all things.
- blibble 1y ago> At least Microscum can't yet lock one out of their own PC or laptop at this stage. tell that to the people that received the dreaded Bitlocker unlock screen after a broken windows update key is... stored in your MS account
- hedora 1y agoI have a windows 8 phone that’s up to 30 days between pin guesses. I probably should give up and recycle it.
- southernplaces7 1y agoBut can you not remove the PIN screen entirely if you have access?
- deafpolygon 1y agoIt's probably the first PIN you thought you tried. Not speaking from experience, or anything.
- nine_k 1y agoBitLocker has rescue codes, or something. I remember using them in such a situation. It was a corporate machine, and I had been instructed to obtain the rescue codes the first thing upon receiving it.
- Simulacra 1y agoNever completely trust the cloud. I will never forget when Mat Honan did this and lost everything, while editor of Wired. Always backup offline as much as in the cloud. https://www.wired.com/2012/08/mat-honan-data-recovery/ https://www.wired.com/2012/08/mat-honan-data-recovery/
- rawgabbit 1y agoI wish he wrote a follow up on his current security practices. He said someone socially engineered and took over his Apple account and reset all his devices. He said he had trouble with 1password as it only existed on the wiped device. He had to get a backup from Dropbox which fortunately was accessible on his wife’s machine. I didn’t understand what happened to his Google and Amazon but he had to reset them too. The only thing I can think of is to have local and cloud backups of your data which is the only thing that matters.
- EGreg 1y agoI gotta say, this is complicated enough that most people don’t do it, and there is a big business opportunity here. Resilio Sync (using bittorrent) kinda sucks for backing up to a USB hard drive that’s been connected. SynThing is what I use. Even so. What I would really want is something that “just works” with multiple encrypted backups around the world, deduplication and chunking. There’s also BackBlaze.
- this_user 1y agoWe had a recent thread about BackBlaze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43802675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43802675 They don't seem to be super trustworthy, at least not as the single copy of all your data.
- 123sereusername 1y ago[dead]
- hbn 1y agoI know whenever this happens, a lot of HN-types like to act smug about how "you should have known to not trust a company with your data, do your own backups" But for everyone else (skipping over the fact that you could have a little more compassion to someone who lost decades worth of important, sentimental data), running your own backups is way more work than should be necessary compared to the mainstream solutions. Especially since most people will likely not hit this scenario anyway, it's just a lottery of the unlucky. And honestly why are we just accepting that these organizations sitting on infinitely growing wealth can use it to incentivize us to give us all their data for convenience and otherwise worry-free management of it, and then just lock you out one day based on bad algorithms, and offer next to no customer support to resolve it because they don't want to spend a tiny fraction of their operation budget on a department for that? I'm not sure how you'd enforce regulation on something like that but if we're gonna let big tech run rampant and collect all this data on the population, it seems like the bare minimum to offer a better experience for stuff like this.
- anonzzzies 1y ago[flagged]
- nyc_data_geek1 1y agoIt is smug because the average person is not a geek running a micro rack in their basement (nor does the average person possess the time, means or expertise to spin up and maintain all such should they even want to). It is smug because, to GP's point, a dismissal of a very real problem with hyper-consolidated markets that allow the most powerful entities on earth to abdicate their responsibility, and foist it upon the people least equipped to handle it, all in the name of "personal responsibility".
- layer8 1y agoThe mistake of the OP was to not buy the new drive right away and copy his data locally. No basement rack needed, just a USB hard drive. They wrote about owning multiple drives and having collected data over the course of 30 years, so they weren’t completely nontechnical either.
- anonzzzies 1y agoI dont know how people are so weird to trust any provider ever. Its nice for a bit and then it rots. You always keep everything on pathetically cheap drives at home. Always. You have to assume you will get screwed even if you pay in the age of AI flagging and 0 protections or recourse. How many stories do we need for this to happen?
- erehweb 1y agoNumber of people saying that you should just make sure you have backups. That's true, but there's still a role for government to play to prevent this sort of thing. We don't let companies sell poisonous food - why do we let them offer digital services that can be arbitrarily frozen?
- anonzzzies 1y agoAgreed, this should not be allowed. Period. But as long as no one does anything, make backups.
- IAmBroom 1y agoData is ephemeral. A backup can be ruined in a millisecond. The government can't react fast enough. Trust but v\e\r\i\f\y\ back up on your own media.
- anonzzzies 1y agoAgain, agree.
- frogperson 1y agoWe 100% allow companies to poison our food and water. If there is profit, there is a loophole. Texas just lifted regulatio s to allow fracking run off into drinking water.
- Sammi 1y agoYou're nit picking a tangential point.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hyperman1 1y agoA good backup strategy is still hard. Over the years, it became clear to me that ther are not only technical but also legal failure modes. So 'a virus ate it' or 'the drive died' are not enough. We now also have 'I sent a photo of my kid to the docter and the kiddy porn alert went off' or 'The Google algo says no' or even 'Someone called the police on my neighbour and they just took the whole building to evidence'.
- hedora 1y agoAlso, “the house burnt down” or “the bank sold the contents of my safe deposit box, including the restore key”. E2E encryption is the only approach I’ll even consider for cloud backup. There’s also the problem where a product manger decides to recompress all your images to save space, or normalize the exif or whatever. I used to use Amazon Cloud Drive, but then they banned encrypted files, so I moved elsewhere.
- sebstefan 1y agoYes - lots of uninteresting discussion about the importance of having backups. > This feels not only unethical but potentially illegal, especially in light of consumer protection laws. You can’t just hold someone’s entire digital life hostage with no due process, no warning, and no accountability. If this were a physical storage unit, there’d be rights, procedures, timeframes. Here? Nothing. Just a Kafkaesque black hole of corporate negligence. ^ This is what's worth discussing, not opinions about that guy's backups, or what the cloud is, or that this is known to regularly happen. We're already all tech-adjacent
- hedora 1y agoRelated: passkeys.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- noworriesnate 1y agoI use BeeFiles for all my important files. I can access them anywhere, it’s not a subscription it’s a one time purchase, and it supports backup to external hard drive as well as backup to an online service (subscription based). Synology really did a good job of building something non technical people could use as an alternative to onedrive etc.
- OptionOfT 1y agoOne issue I have with Synology is that when you film in slow motion (120/240fps) it will upload the 30fps 'flattened' version.
- jpl56 1y agoNew fear unlocked : account frozen due to sudden peak of activity (which happens logically if you _use_ it). Cloud as backup #2, a hard drive as backup #1 and another hard drive in another location as backup #3
- _zagj 1y ago> account frozen due to sudden peak of activity I'm paranoid about checking online bank/brookerage accounts late at night because this.
- lousken 1y agoThis belongs to /r/assholedesign If you force people into bitlocker, at least have a setup wizard at the start that forces them to export the key/print the key, or maybe even ask them if they want their stuff encrypted. For a regular home desktop, it's rarely a need and too much hassle Secondly, why not offer use something like LUKS does just with a password? TPM is a horrible way to secure things anyway and you need a PIN for true security.
- npteljes 1y agoHorrible stuff. Data is far more important than society, regulation, individuals give it mind. Doubly so if the data is technically in another jurisdiction. And it's a classic insurance scenario too - redundant storage seems like money thrown in the fire, but after a disaster like OP's, lost data seems invaluable. Service providers are at the very least part of the problem. For one, they project a lot of confidence for safety, but protect themselves well legally in case of any event - and automate away as much customer interaction as they can. A nice improvement would be customer service that takes the issues seriously. But, I realize, that is far more complex and expensive than how it sounds.
- er0k 1y agoremember when RMS said "cloud computing is a trap" and we all laughed and laughed...
- nedt 1y agoYeah Microsoft can be pretty bad with that stuff. When my sons account, which was also what he used for Minecraft, was stolen I even reached out to a real person. Could they help us get the account back? No because they most protect the owner of the account. Which is even more crazy if you think about it because that would be my son and not the thief they gave the account to.
- geor9e 1y agoI once lost years of Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube, etc., etc., because I posted a meme to their Google Plus social media site. It was a JPEG screenshot of a credit card form, and it said, "This post is only viewable by Google Plus Gold members; sign up now." It just took one click from some apathetic call center moderator, who looked at the post for 0.5 seconds total, to get everything connected with the company insta-wiped. I bought a Synology NAS since then, and now I treat my relationship with any company as very fragile.