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> I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C series, which Apple themselves

> I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C series, which Apple themselves used to write, for O’Reilly Media, and then 20+ books following that). I help run the longest-running Apple developer event not run by Apple themselves, /dev/world. I have effectively been an evangelist for this company’s technology for my entire professional life. We had an app on the App Store on Day 1 in every sense of the world. I am surprised that with such a pedigree, the author doesn't already have contacts at Apple they could reach out to for that personal touch.

amelius 11mo ago
I am surprised that evangelists keep thinking they are safe from the evil of big corporations.
- yreg 11mo ago
  There's no reason to presume that the author 'thinks' that.
  - AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
    “This isn’t just an email address; it is my core digital identity” If he doesn’t think like that, then why does he act like it?
    - evanelias 11mo ago
      [flagged]
      - lapcat 11mo ago
        > That sentence smells like AI writing, so who knows what the author actually thinks. The author has been a professional writer since long before LLMs were invented: https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/ https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/ LLMs were trained on books like the ones written by the author, which is why AI writing "smells" like professional writing. The reason that AI is notorious for using em dashes, for example, is that professional authors use em dashes, whereas amateur writers tend not to use em dashes. It's becoming absurd that we're now accusing professional writers of being AI.
        evanelias 11mo ago
        I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment! If this isn't AI writing, why say "The “New Account” Trap" with then further sub-headers "The Legal Catch", "The Technical Trap", "The Developer Risk"... I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years.
        lapcat 11mo ago
        > I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment! I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but common reason why people unjustly accuse professional writers of being AI. > I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years. What would you have written instead?
        evanelias 11mo ago
        Most of those section headers and bolded bullet-point summary phrases should simply be removed. That's why I described them as superfluous. In cases where it makes sense to divide an article into sections, the phrasing should be varied so that they aren't mostly of the same format ("The Blahbity Blah", in the case of what AI commonly spews out). This is fairly basic writing advice! To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. For me, it reduces the trustworthiness of the claims in the article, especially combined with the key missing detail of why/how exactly such a large gift card was being purchased.
        lapcat 11mo ago
        > To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. It's unlikely that the article had the benefit of professional, external editing, unlike the books. Moreover, it's likely that this article was written in a relatively short amount of time, so maybe give the author a break that it's not formatted the way you would prefer if you were copyediting? I think you're just nitpicking here. It's a blog post, not a book. Look at the last line of the article: "No permission granted to any AI/LLM/ML-powered system (or similar)." The author has also written several previous articles that appear to be anti-AI: https://hey.paris/posts/govai/ https://hey.paris/posts/govai/ https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ https://hey.paris/posts/genai/ https://hey.paris/posts/genai/ So again, I think it's ridiculous to claim that the article was written by AI.
      - flatter 11mo ago
        Did you even read the article? "The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan" a 6TB plan is $29.99 monthly.. It's not farfetched to assume he purchased a $500 gift card so he could keep the subscription without worrying about it! "The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)" There's not much of a reason to assume someone else unaffiliated with the author bought this card, he mentions talking to the vendor and getting a replacement which means he has the receipt
        cwillu 11mo ago
        “Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". ” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        hamdingers 11mo ago
        Did you read the comment you're responding to? Where in the article does it explain why an adult is buying a $500 gift card to pay their apple subscription instead of just paying for it directly?
        evanelias 11mo ago
        Yes, I read the article and it simply does not directly address who purchased the card. It certainly implies the author bought the card for himself, yes; but that seems rather unusual to me, especially in such a high amount. Why would you purchase a $500 gift card for yourself to "keep a subscription without worrying about it" as opposed to just paying the small monthly amount? Honest question, I literally don't understand that motivation at all. In my mind a gift card is more problematic than a normal credit card in this scenario since it eventually runs out. Second question: why did you create an HN account just to write this comment?
        rvnx 11mo ago
        I wonder if you can prepay using a card ? But otherwise to answer your potential question, I understand OP as I like to prepay things like my phone operator. I put 500 USD there, and come back one year later. This way it can free-up my limit of 10 virtual cards I have, and most of all, can keep their limits as close as possible to the minimum. If you have a mix of services on the same card it is much more difficult and more risky. If you have 100 USD + 50 USD + 25 USD + 75 USD + 60 USD in monthly spend. Then you have 310 USD at risk, when your risk could be way lower.
      - Gabrys1 11mo ago
        > I'm more curious how/why the author ended up with a $500 gift card. That's a large amount, and the author never shares how this was obtained, which seems like a key missing detail. Did the author buy the gift card for himself (why?) or did someone give him a very large gift (why not mention that?) The author mentions a big store (names it similar to Walmart for US based readers). I would assume this was an accepted form of "return a product without a receipt" or "we want to accept your complain about this product we sold going crazy 1 day after it's warranty but we cannot give you cash back" etc
        evanelias 11mo ago
        I don't understand. Gift cards typically cannot be returned, at least in the US. And the author said the gift card was redeemed "to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan", which also cannot be returned I'd imagine.
        Gabrys1 11mo ago
        But gift cards aren't supposed to work that, right? If it wasn't "legal" or "okay" to have a 500 dollar card, they shouldn't be sold. They are available, therefore they should be perfectly usable. I don't want to speculate more, but one of the use cases for them is for people that choose to not use cards online (or even don't have credit cards at all) to be able to buy digital goods with cash. Either way, if we're questioning buying/using the gift card, we're blaming the victim
        evanelias 11mo ago
        I'm not blaming anyone; I just find it surprising that this detail wasn't mentioned or explained. Its omission makes the article less trustworthy to me. People are fast to pull out pitchforks in response to outrage-bait posts like this, but (generally speaking) a nontrivial percentage of such posts are intentionally omitting details which can help explain the other side's actions. Also I genuinely wasn't familiar with this specific use-case for gift cards. At least in the US, you can buy general-purpose prepaid debit cards for this type of thing instead, or use various services which generate virtual cards e.g. privacy.com. To me that seems infinitely more normal than buying a large-value "gift card" for yourself, but I'm admittedly not familiar with the options in other countries.
      - xuki 11mo ago
        The author lives in Australia. You get points from supermarket for purchasing some gift cards during some promotion, it's around 10% of the card value.
        SoftTalker 11mo ago
        Gift cards are associated with money laundering and many online scams. I would guess any usage of them (especially in larger denominations) would attract increased attention and additional risk. That's nonsensical of course, why does Apple sell them if they are also suspicious of them, but I would guess if he had paid with a credit card there would have been no issue. If you receive them as a gift, use them only in a situation unconnected with your cloud ID, such as to pay for new hardware at an Apple store.
      - nullfield 11mo ago
        Re: AI writing: AI tends to (and might be getting better) use commas for such claims, in the form of, “it’s not just X, but [optional:also] Y”. Even if it feels sus, remember that AI is trained on what it sees: even the posts here will make it more and more effective at “writing like a human”. As for the OP, the claims to exist and have published books, etc. are relatively easily publicly verifiable. No, $500 isn’t a large amount, doubly so anymore. I consistently have to try to re-anchor, but $100 is the new $20 (sadly).
        evanelias 11mo ago
        AI used em-dashes initially in that type of sentence structure, but more recently moved to a mix of semicolons and commas, at least from what I've been seeing. I never claimed the author doesn't exist. $500 is objectively a large amount for a gift card. Off-the-shelf gift cards with predetermined amounts are almost always substantially less than this.
  - haspok 11mo ago
    Then why did he mention it (their credentials)? It has literally zero relevance in this case. Maybe they were trying to show off?
    - jeromegv 11mo ago
      It's relevant because it shows they are not newbie on the platform and are unlikely to have misbehave in some capacity to warrant a full deactivation. It adds credibility to their story.
  - venturecruelty 11mo ago
    There is if you want to blame the victim and/or work for Apple.
- kibwen 11mo ago
  If you don't have root access to your machine, it's not your machine. If you don't have root access to the machine your data is on, it's not your data.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bobim 11mo ago
    Brillant, I'm stealing it.
    - rvnx 11mo ago
      Even Meta approves. If it is not your data why should data protection laws apply ?
  - jama211 11mo ago
    And Linus himself mostly just stores data on the cloud. At the end of the day, practicality matters.
    - kibwen 11mo ago
      Sure, you can be as "practical" as you like, just as long as you don't come crying when Apple decides to revoke your access to their data. You accept the benefit, you accept the risk.
      - _vertigo 11mo ago
        That’s stupid. We can have a law that protects users from bullshit like this. Lacking technical savvy should not mean you forfeit the right to your data.
        stkdump 11mo ago
        I think this is speaking in the absense of sufficient protections like laws. Because how does it help that a hypothetical law protects you if that law doesn't exist?
ovi256 11mo ago
> I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success. Ouch. If he can't get it fixed, it's scary
- bragr 11mo ago
  From my experiences with people at Apple, everyone seems so siloed that it doesn't surprise me that they couldn't help him. It doesn't seem like they have the culture where you could just drop by the Apple fraud team and ask for help for a friend.
  - e28eta 11mo ago
    Or, they hit the brick wall that is US anti-money laundering laws. It’s illegal to “tip off” (warn) the person if they’ve tripped the AML checks. At that point, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have on the inside, unless you’ve got one that’s ignorant of the law or willing to risk the penalties.
    - abigail95 11mo ago
      Apple isn't filing SARs - they want no business in that and have banking partners to do that for them. AML is a concept not a law itself. Which law is forcing Apple to act like this?
- sodafountan 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kragen 11mo ago
    If he succeeds, perhaps you shouldn't care. If he fails, you should care, because that means that the average person will certainly fail. They will lose the cancer test results on their iPhone, the job they use the iPhone for, possibly their home, the copies of their birth certificate on their iPhone, and the friends they could crash with but whose phone numbers they've forgotten because they only communicate with them through iMessage.
elphinstone 11mo ago
Oh, yes, only "important" people deserve customer service. That is an appallingly elitist attitude.
- basisword 11mo ago
  Nobody said that.
kombine 11mo ago
This reminds of a joke we have in Russia which roughly translates into English as follows: "Comrade Stalin, it has been a terrible mistake!" The phrase could belong to one of Stalin's own sycophants who unluckily for themselves got imprisoned and executed during the big purge in the 1930s. They didn't understand why it happened to them. I have a feeling that this guy also doesn't get why this happened to him and that he himself contributed towards it with the work of his life.
- IndianShitbombs 11mo ago
  Indeed. The machine eating its enablers.
vintagedave 11mo ago
I went to Uni with this person (though I doubt they remember me.) They have a very high reputation. If anyone should be able to resolve this, it’s them — that they can’t, and they have to go public, is absolutely terrifying and should make Apple execs pay attention. I mean that. Exec level. This story and that this specific person cannot get it fixed indicates absolute failure.
widowlark 11mo ago
or the common sense to not store absolutely everything they own with one giant megacorp

amelius 11mo ago

I am surprised that evangelists keep thinking they are safe from the evil of big corporations.

yreg 11mo ago
There's no reason to presume that the author 'thinks' that.
- AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
  “This isn’t just an email address; it is my core digital identity” If he doesn’t think like that, then why does he act like it?
  - evanelias 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - lapcat 11mo ago
      > That sentence smells like AI writing, so who knows what the author actually thinks. The author has been a professional writer since long before LLMs were invented: https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/ https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/ LLMs were trained on books like the ones written by the author, which is why AI writing "smells" like professional writing. The reason that AI is notorious for using em dashes, for example, is that professional authors use em dashes, whereas amateur writers tend not to use em dashes. It's becoming absurd that we're now accusing professional writers of being AI.
      - evanelias 11mo ago
        I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment! If this isn't AI writing, why say "The “New Account” Trap" with then further sub-headers "The Legal Catch", "The Technical Trap", "The Developer Risk"... I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years.
        lapcat 11mo ago
        > I didn't mention em dashes anywhere in my comment! I know. I just mentioned them as another silly but common reason why people unjustly accuse professional writers of being AI. > I have done a lot of copyreading in my life and humans simply didn't write this way prior to recent years. What would you have written instead?
        evanelias 11mo ago
        Most of those section headers and bolded bullet-point summary phrases should simply be removed. That's why I described them as superfluous. In cases where it makes sense to divide an article into sections, the phrasing should be varied so that they aren't mostly of the same format ("The Blahbity Blah", in the case of what AI commonly spews out). This is fairly basic writing advice! To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. For me, it reduces the trustworthiness of the claims in the article, especially combined with the key missing detail of why/how exactly such a large gift card was being purchased.
        lapcat 11mo ago
        > To be clear, I'm not accusing his books as being written like this or using AI. I'm simply responding to the writing style of this article. It's unlikely that the article had the benefit of professional, external editing, unlike the books. Moreover, it's likely that this article was written in a relatively short amount of time, so maybe give the author a break that it's not formatted the way you would prefer if you were copyediting? I think you're just nitpicking here. It's a blog post, not a book. Look at the last line of the article: "No permission granted to any AI/LLM/ML-powered system (or similar)." The author has also written several previous articles that appear to be anti-AI: https://hey.paris/posts/govai/ https://hey.paris/posts/govai/ https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ https://hey.paris/posts/cba/ https://hey.paris/posts/genai/ https://hey.paris/posts/genai/ So again, I think it's ridiculous to claim that the article was written by AI.
    - flatter 11mo ago
      Did you even read the article? "The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan" a 6TB plan is $29.99 monthly.. It's not farfetched to assume he purchased a $500 gift card so he could keep the subscription without worrying about it! "The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)" There's not much of a reason to assume someone else unaffiliated with the author bought this card, he mentions talking to the vendor and getting a replacement which means he has the receipt
      - cwillu 11mo ago
        “Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". ” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - hamdingers 11mo ago
        Did you read the comment you're responding to? Where in the article does it explain why an adult is buying a $500 gift card to pay their apple subscription instead of just paying for it directly?
      - evanelias 11mo ago
        Yes, I read the article and it simply does not directly address who purchased the card. It certainly implies the author bought the card for himself, yes; but that seems rather unusual to me, especially in such a high amount. Why would you purchase a $500 gift card for yourself to "keep a subscription without worrying about it" as opposed to just paying the small monthly amount? Honest question, I literally don't understand that motivation at all. In my mind a gift card is more problematic than a normal credit card in this scenario since it eventually runs out. Second question: why did you create an HN account just to write this comment?
        rvnx 11mo ago
        I wonder if you can prepay using a card ? But otherwise to answer your potential question, I understand OP as I like to prepay things like my phone operator. I put 500 USD there, and come back one year later. This way it can free-up my limit of 10 virtual cards I have, and most of all, can keep their limits as close as possible to the minimum. If you have a mix of services on the same card it is much more difficult and more risky. If you have 100 USD + 50 USD + 25 USD + 75 USD + 60 USD in monthly spend. Then you have 310 USD at risk, when your risk could be way lower.
    - Gabrys1 11mo ago
      > I'm more curious how/why the author ended up with a $500 gift card. That's a large amount, and the author never shares how this was obtained, which seems like a key missing detail. Did the author buy the gift card for himself (why?) or did someone give him a very large gift (why not mention that?) The author mentions a big store (names it similar to Walmart for US based readers). I would assume this was an accepted form of "return a product without a receipt" or "we want to accept your complain about this product we sold going crazy 1 day after it's warranty but we cannot give you cash back" etc
      - evanelias 11mo ago
        I don't understand. Gift cards typically cannot be returned, at least in the US. And the author said the gift card was redeemed "to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan", which also cannot be returned I'd imagine.
        Gabrys1 11mo ago
        But gift cards aren't supposed to work that, right? If it wasn't "legal" or "okay" to have a 500 dollar card, they shouldn't be sold. They are available, therefore they should be perfectly usable. I don't want to speculate more, but one of the use cases for them is for people that choose to not use cards online (or even don't have credit cards at all) to be able to buy digital goods with cash. Either way, if we're questioning buying/using the gift card, we're blaming the victim
        evanelias 11mo ago
        I'm not blaming anyone; I just find it surprising that this detail wasn't mentioned or explained. Its omission makes the article less trustworthy to me. People are fast to pull out pitchforks in response to outrage-bait posts like this, but (generally speaking) a nontrivial percentage of such posts are intentionally omitting details which can help explain the other side's actions. Also I genuinely wasn't familiar with this specific use-case for gift cards. At least in the US, you can buy general-purpose prepaid debit cards for this type of thing instead, or use various services which generate virtual cards e.g. privacy.com. To me that seems infinitely more normal than buying a large-value "gift card" for yourself, but I'm admittedly not familiar with the options in other countries.
    - xuki 11mo ago
      The author lives in Australia. You get points from supermarket for purchasing some gift cards during some promotion, it's around 10% of the card value.
      - SoftTalker 11mo ago
        Gift cards are associated with money laundering and many online scams. I would guess any usage of them (especially in larger denominations) would attract increased attention and additional risk. That's nonsensical of course, why does Apple sell them if they are also suspicious of them, but I would guess if he had paid with a credit card there would have been no issue. If you receive them as a gift, use them only in a situation unconnected with your cloud ID, such as to pay for new hardware at an Apple store.
    - nullfield 11mo ago
      Re: AI writing: AI tends to (and might be getting better) use commas for such claims, in the form of, “it’s not just X, but [optional:also] Y”. Even if it feels sus, remember that AI is trained on what it sees: even the posts here will make it more and more effective at “writing like a human”. As for the OP, the claims to exist and have published books, etc. are relatively easily publicly verifiable. No, $500 isn’t a large amount, doubly so anymore. I consistently have to try to re-anchor, but $100 is the new $20 (sadly).
      - evanelias 11mo ago
        AI used em-dashes initially in that type of sentence structure, but more recently moved to a mix of semicolons and commas, at least from what I've been seeing. I never claimed the author doesn't exist. $500 is objectively a large amount for a gift card. Off-the-shelf gift cards with predetermined amounts are almost always substantially less than this.
- haspok 11mo ago
  Then why did he mention it (their credentials)? It has literally zero relevance in this case. Maybe they were trying to show off?
  - jeromegv 11mo ago
    It's relevant because it shows they are not newbie on the platform and are unlikely to have misbehave in some capacity to warrant a full deactivation. It adds credibility to their story.
- venturecruelty 11mo ago
  There is if you want to blame the victim and/or work for Apple.
kibwen 11mo ago
If you don't have root access to your machine, it's not your machine. If you don't have root access to the machine your data is on, it's not your data.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- bobim 11mo ago
  Brillant, I'm stealing it.
  - rvnx 11mo ago
    Even Meta approves. If it is not your data why should data protection laws apply ?
- jama211 11mo ago
  And Linus himself mostly just stores data on the cloud. At the end of the day, practicality matters.
  - kibwen 11mo ago
    Sure, you can be as "practical" as you like, just as long as you don't come crying when Apple decides to revoke your access to their data. You accept the benefit, you accept the risk.
    - _vertigo 11mo ago
      That’s stupid. We can have a law that protects users from bullshit like this. Lacking technical savvy should not mean you forfeit the right to your data.
      - stkdump 11mo ago
        I think this is speaking in the absense of sufficient protections like laws. Because how does it help that a hypothetical law protects you if that law doesn't exist?

ovi256 11mo ago

> I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success. Ouch. If he can't get it fixed, it's scary

bragr 11mo ago
From my experiences with people at Apple, everyone seems so siloed that it doesn't surprise me that they couldn't help him. It doesn't seem like they have the culture where you could just drop by the Apple fraud team and ask for help for a friend.
- e28eta 11mo ago
  Or, they hit the brick wall that is US anti-money laundering laws. It’s illegal to “tip off” (warn) the person if they’ve tripped the AML checks. At that point, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have on the inside, unless you’ve got one that’s ignorant of the law or willing to risk the penalties.
  - abigail95 11mo ago
    Apple isn't filing SARs - they want no business in that and have banking partners to do that for them. AML is a concept not a law itself. Which law is forcing Apple to act like this?
sodafountan 11mo ago
[flagged]
- kragen 11mo ago
  If he succeeds, perhaps you shouldn't care. If he fails, you should care, because that means that the average person will certainly fail. They will lose the cancer test results on their iPhone, the job they use the iPhone for, possibly their home, the copies of their birth certificate on their iPhone, and the friends they could crash with but whose phone numbers they've forgotten because they only communicate with them through iMessage.

elphinstone 11mo ago

Oh, yes, only "important" people deserve customer service. That is an appallingly elitist attitude.

basisword 11mo ago
Nobody said that.

kombine 11mo ago

This reminds of a joke we have in Russia which roughly translates into English as follows: "Comrade Stalin, it has been a terrible mistake!" The phrase could belong to one of Stalin's own sycophants who unluckily for themselves got imprisoned and executed during the big purge in the 1930s. They didn't understand why it happened to them. I have a feeling that this guy also doesn't get why this happened to him and that he himself contributed towards it with the work of his life.

IndianShitbombs 11mo ago
Indeed. The machine eating its enablers.

vintagedave 11mo ago

I went to Uni with this person (though I doubt they remember me.) They have a very high reputation. If anyone should be able to resolve this, it’s them — that they can’t, and they have to go public, is absolutely terrifying and should make Apple execs pay attention. I mean that. Exec level. This story and that this specific person cannot get it fixed indicates absolute failure.

widowlark 11mo ago

or the common sense to not store absolutely everything they own with one giant megacorp