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I back up regularly using Google Takeout and similar tools, but I don’t think it’s fair to shame this author . Even if you have backups , your recent and essent
by tonymet 11mo ago
I back up regularly using Google Takeout and similar tools, but I don’t think it’s fair to shame this author . Even if you have backups , your recent and essential content and credentials will be locked out . 1% of your content is the most important
We all depend heavily on cloud storage and sso . Everything works fine until you are locked out .
And using them isn’t fully voluntary. They are necessary for collaboration . You end up using what your team uses .
You can try to be that “own cloud” snob but it only works if you live in a basement
Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure
You’re just not imaginative enough if you think you’re safe .
OPs only recourse is an insider or a lawyer
- rvnx 11mo agoLot of arrogant people here who think they are safe and better than anybody and blame OP. It is totally normal in today’s world to depend on cloud services and reasonably difficult to do without it. In China: no WeChat you are practically dead. Here try to join meetings without account, try to send a message on WhatsApp without account, etc… a lot can go wrong very fast. What if you used your Apple account as SSO to other services ?
- tonymet 11mo agoVery true. And account integrity check pointing is stochastic and more aggressive so at any time there are people being locked out . One of 20 of your services could lock you out tomorrow and that means you’re blocked from coworkers and family
- IndianShitbombs 11mo ago[flagged]
- tonymet 11mo agoSo let me try to understand you. You have 200 friends on whatsapp and FB locks you out . Now you can start sending them letters ? And how do you get their number . WhatsApp,WeChat , messenger , telegram all use private addressing
- skydhash 11mo agoYou don't have 200 friends on WhatsApp. You have 200 contacts on your phone, which WA will pick up.
- kube-system 11mo agoMaybe you do. I have zero contacts synced with WhatsApp
- rvnx 11mo agoReminds me of a story: When Facebook was launched I created an account. Fast forward 10 years, account got permanently locked for suspicious activity. Unsuccessful appeal. So permanently lost contact with some of my childhood friends and no way to recover them as they are in private mode. If you hope on Instagram to find a girlfriend, it can also have a serious impact on your life to not have access to it. No instagram + no WhatsApp = paranoid weirdo = not dating material
- alex1138 11mo agoFacebook's actually the only company I've heard of that will ban you for inactivity. Gmail will delete addresses if you don't log in for a while though I think they probably scan for 'one and done' things, and not things that look like critical infrastructure, but that's just a guess Seems very hand in hand with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15222240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15222240 See, this is why IT MATTERS when we have confirmed emails of Zuckerberg going "...dumb fucks". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 You get all kinds of excuses https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38560321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38560321 Sounds good until you can't see any posts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 or they lock you out of your contacts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 Some people are just malicious and should be avoided at all costs and if their feet were held to the fire early they would've never been allowed to take over people's lives in the way they have. It matters.
- tonymet 11mo agoI’m sorry but this sounds so preposterous that it’s making my point
- ethbr1 11mo agoThe root issue/risk is from cascading service dependencies, and I'm 99% sure this is done unintentionally at Apple et al. Team builds service. Service depends on first party identity/authentication because it's easier. ... Fast forward 20 years, and no one at platform company even understands the dependency graph from a customer perspective anymore. Especially in the case of rare events like account locks. Consequently, those customers face a sudden Kafkaesque maze of edge cases that don't line up, as the customer service processes people are funneled through are literally incapable of solving the problem. Which means the entire "normal" customer support apparatus is unavailable to them. (The same apparatus companies aggressive shove all support through) This is why there should be regulatory requirements for identity platforms mandating the ability to speak to a human who's empowered to fix your issue + an option for customer-choice decision arbitration + continuous random sample audits with penalties for falling below KPIs (timeliness, correctness, etc). It should literally be illegal for a company to have their banning system 'oops' and then pretend they don't know you. Because it's only going to get worse as more AI / probably correct methods infuse account security functions.
- MichaelZuo 11mo agoHonestly it seems like nobody under this entire post has actually fully read the TOS for any Apple service. I have once for iCloud... and the impression I got was that they must think close to 100% of the population on Earth are potential scoundrels for them to put in so many clauses and escape hatches. I don’t think it’s possible to fully read any modern TOS from a bigco and not get an inkling of that. The real issue is why are people signing up to TOS they haven’t fully read, and if they have… why are they signing up for something that directly spells out they are possible scoundrels who need to be dominated. It’s like some kind of mass self humilitation ritual.
- totallymike 11mo agoAt Apple’s scale, the likelihood of someone pulling any weird or shady nonsense that can be imagined is not potential, it’s eventual.
- IndianShitbombs 11mo ago> t. What if you used your Apple account as SSO to other services ? Your own wrongdoing. Always use a site-specific auth method, i.e. by email. And a separate email for each site.
- rationalist 11mo agoUsing a separate email address for each site is smart, but creating a separate email account for each site is going to be very tedious, and I imagine Google, Yahoo, etc are going to stop you very quickly after you've opened 20+ accounts with the same phone number. (Use a catch-all to have different email addresses for different sites, because when one gets hacked, then the damage is limited.)
- a2fz 11mo agohttps://sidebox.net https://sidebox.net is a nice way to do this as long as the site doesn't restrict to mainstream email domains
- zygentoma 11mo agoGoogle allows email suffices a la my account+anything@gmail.com. So you can use different email addresses for different accounts while having only one Gmail account.
- rvnx 11mo agoLittle trick: You can also randomly insert dots in your email address, a bit more stealth and compatible with more sites :)
- tomrod 11mo agoThis can become unmanageable if you sign up for more than a few things.
- rationalist 11mo ago
- Waterluvian 11mo agoI’ve interpreted it as a sort of head-in-sand coping mechanism for those low-likelihood, high-consequence events people feel powerless over. It’s less distressing to be powerless if you decide that the real issue was a fault by the victim and not a powerlessness you have in common with the victim.
- paulsutter 11mo agoSurprised at the downvotes to your excellent comment. Good insight - that people dunk on the author as a cope to help the dunker feel less powerless
- tonymet 11mo agoMeta-critical or self-critical comments on hackernews get downvoted . It’s about 1.5 ° above Reddit
- Noaidi 11mo agoI love your comment and I could not just upvote it because it is true with so many things. The technocracy/corpocracy is trying to sell you things that mnake you believe you can have power over everything, even your life. Anyone who "fails" at anything, it is all your fault. I have literally been told my mental illness, and my current homelessness, is my fault because I did not do the right thing. The power and control people think they have over their lives is a paper thin delusion. Our shared powerlessness should bring us in communion with others, but the technocracy/corpocracy wants to rip that apart and make us dependent on them for profit.
- Barbing 11mo agoHoping housing happens—you deserve it.
- tonymet 11mo agoYou’re right that nearly all responses are emotional , to maintain internal consistency. Even purchasing large gift cards is a common discounting approach when paying for cloud . The sad news is when important people get locked out they can call dedicated support . This case was of someone who wasn’t celebrity enough to have that access
- alex1138 11mo agoCommentators here presumably work in the industry, possibly even for 'the big companies' (I'd say FAANG but any big, life-depending, big-architecture corp, but you know what I mean, basically) They should be tripping over themselves of "How can we fix our corporate incentives to actually deal with customer problems". Not "lol OP, sux"
- tonymet 11mo agoCrazy how the industry with the biggest margins has the worst contempt for their customers
- nickpeterson 11mo agoThat’s part of where the margins come from.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 11mo agoIt is possible to suggest preventative/corrective action without blaming OP. I find it kind of sad that you can't make helpful suggestions (to future potential victims) without someone saying you're "victim blaming."
- tonymet 11mo agoyou're right there's a fine line. I interpreted the tone of most as judgmental / critical. saying "get a lawyer" or "file a complaint" is constructive. saying " it's your fault for not backing up" or "that's what you get by using cloud" is just judgmental. Neither are practical solutions, regardless. Even with perfect backups it would have happened. And for 99% of social people, it's impossible not to cloud.
- HumblyTossed 11mo ago> Lot of arrogant people here who think they are safe and better than anybody and blame OP. You see this a lot in the Apple "community". Apple can _never_ do wrong. Apple can _never_ make a mistake. Apple's choices are _always_ the best choices. I don't understand why people put corporations on pedestals.
- mike_ivanov 11mo agoCorporations play the role of gods in our society. edit: about the same role as Greek or Roman gods.
- ljlolel 11mo agoEqual chance of them replying to your prayers and offerings
- mike_ivanov 11mo agomiracles happen
- Ylpertnodi 11mo agoSource?
- venturecruelty 11mo agoBecause their TC is $400,000 and they need it to justify their Bay Area mortgage. Come on, folks, follow the money.
- nialv7 11mo agoit's not just about cloud service dependency, or his loyalty to Apple, or things like that. for important data you _have_ to have backups, 3-2-1 rule and all that. the fact he put all the eggs in Apple's bucket is beyond me. sure i am dependent to cloud services as much as he is, much to my own chagrin, but at least i have all my data backed up??
- pitaj 11mo agoOff topic, but I'm curious. Why are you typing spaces before every period and comma?
- tonymet 11mo agoMaybe iPhone is adding those ?
- rvnx 11mo agoFor what it’s worth, I remember having this issue with Samsung OneUI keyboard when it was in French. In French there is this rule there that you should put a space before “?” and “!”, so perhaps their developers understood “all punctuation” or something. I wonder what is his case.
- tonymet 11mo agoi'll try that or resetting my keyboard. thanks for the tip
- zelphirkalt 11mo agoFirst of all, you don't have to care about this, unless you are wanting something from others and you depend on others and their opinion about your writing significantly. That said, it does make your writing seem very odd. A little bit like the people, who apparently don't know what the shift key does, or how to trigger capital letters on their phones or something, and write only in lowercase letters. Just because your phone does something silly, and it is not you doing it intentionally, that doesn't mean, that other people will not get a weird impression from you writing like that. In a way, you are letting your phone change the impression others are getting from your writing. And that impression is for many people that they wonder, whether you know the conventions of writing. Now, like I said, you don't have to care about this. But if you want your texts to not come across like teenager written texts or low effort texts, it would be a good idea to fix your phone's silly settings, so that it doesn't do that to your writing.
- 11mo ago
- zelphirkalt 11mo agoI am not depending on cloud storage at all. What do I need to upload onto some cloud? And when I need to sync between devices, or rather want to sync, then I have a Syncthing setup on my server running. No cloud. And copies on participating devices. Sure, it is not directly their fault, when they are treated badly by big tech. Though of course they could have been more careful, and rely less on big tech and cloud. We can all learn from this example, like many others before this one.
- EvanAnderson 11mo agoPresumably, as the GP said, you're not a normal person and you live in a basement. >sigh< (I'm with a lot of what the GP said but they didn't need to be insulting.) The solutions self-hosting storage for non-technical people are terrible. Presumably there's no market for selling a solution that gives individuals data sovereignty. I would guess the margin isn't there and a recurring subscription for something you own is probably unpalatable to a lot of consumers. So this is what we get.
- rvnx 11mo agoThe main side-effect is the lack of trust and integration. For example, if you self-host your email (or more realistically push it on a VPS), then the moment you want to send an e-mail you are going to be marked as spam. To register on some websites you may sometimes receive: “please use real email from gmail/outlook/etc”. When you have a business meeting with a customer: “oh just install Jitsi on your mobile phone” is the best way to lose a sale. Or no way to pay train tickets because you cannot install the app because your Apple / Play Store account is locked.
- zelphirkalt 11mo agoI get what you are saying, but the examples are not great: I've rarely seen (if ever?) a website so stupid and user hostile, to claim that there are no other "real" e-mail service providers out there, other than gmail, outlook, or a maybe a few others. There are services, which reject things like tempmail, that much I have seen, definitely. Jitsi Meet runs in the browser. Does it not on a mobile phone? Perhaps there is something to this one, if it is the case, that customers in some areas don't even own any working machines any longer and only have phones. Train tickets, at least where I am from and living, one can always buy, by going to a service center, or online via browser. I never had to use an app to buy train tickets. Even when traveling in China, which is arguably much further in terms of digitization than Germany, I was able to buy train tickets via a website comfortably, upon which the ticket was registered to my passport. But I get it, there can be such examples. Though I don't think this really matches the "depend on the cloud" thing. It's more like depending on services, that make use of "the cloud", and not directly using cloud services oneself.
- IndianShitbombs 11mo ago> Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure. Well, i don't. I have my local file storage. Contacts and Calendar get synched, thats it. These get lcal backups, but aren't important so or so.
- slumberlust 11mo agoWant to bet we can find holes in your solution too?
- g947o 11mo agoNot saying this in a derogatory way, but that pretty much means you are not a "normal" user but someone who is tech savvy enough to not rely on someone else's cloud.
- leptons 11mo agoAnd yet all it takes is buying a piece of hardware and installing an app, something that plenty of "normal" people do every day.
- Fogest 11mo ago"all it takes" is a very naive simplification of how to accomplish this solution and is much more complicated for a non tech savvy person than just hitting "yes" on a backup option their phone prompts them for.
- leptons 11mo ago[flagged]
- Fogest 11mo agoI feel like you must be in a social bubble if you think this is a task the average Walmart American views as easy. These devices also are typically marketed for PC backup and don't usually make backing up their phones "easy". It also is something they'd have to regularly remember to do. It's substantially easier for a user to have their photos immediately and automatically backed up to icloud or Google Photos, and you're being intentionally obtuse if you're suggesting otherwise. It's also not at all appropriate to claim people are "developmentally challenged" simply because they don't feel comfortable backing up their own data regularly to an external device. As such I have also flagged your comment.
- singleshot_ 11mo agoHow precisely do you reckon a lawyer would help?
- tonymet 11mo agoThe legal Deparment runs most companies . They are the only way to get something bespoke done (like unlocking an account ). And companies are terrified of discovery. Any lawyer can file a complaint in small claims . OP has paid for a service and has a contract TOS is binding to both parties .
- singleshot_ 11mo agoDidn't they boot him for a ToS violation? > Any lawyer can file a complaint in small claims . No, in many states _no_ lawyer can file a complaint (except his own) in small claims court.
- tonymet 11mo agoThey booted him for TOs violation, that was their action. A judge can decide whether that action was a breach of the contract, or if the contract itself is lawful. We live in a common law country. It means that the judgement defines the law, not contracts (and not even statute, strictly)
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- codedokode 11mo ago> Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure It only means that the content is not valuable for them. I know people who created Google Account only because the phone required them to and they do not even remember the password or username, and do not use Gmail (why use email when there is Telegram). If they lose the phone, they would just probably make a new account. If you were an investor or trader, managing millions of dollars, would you keep the only copy of critical information in a cloud? I don't think so if you are a reasonable person. Would you keep the only copy of a cryptowallet key in a cloud?
- EvanAnderson 11mo ago> If you were an investor or trader, managing millions of dollars, would you keep the only copy of critical information in a cloud? I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their accounts occurs to most people. I've done enough business continuity and disaster recovery work with small business to be confident in saying it doesn't occur to small business owners. I'm not sure why individuals would be any different. It's very hard to put yourself in the mindset of a non-technical person.
- wlesieutre 11mo ago> I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their accounts occurs to most people. "It just works" was practically a mantra for Steve Jobs, now we turn around and blame users for thinking that it will work
- codedokode 11mo ago> I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their accounts occurs to most people Most people do not store anything valuable in the cloud anyway. The only problem is that they won't be able to login into Windows if MS bans the account, and they won't be able to install apps if Google bans their account along with phone serial number.
- hyperjeff 11mo agoAverage users have no idea what of their information is in the cloud or not. Even if they did, they have no idea of the implications.
- t0astbread 11mo agoI get what you're saying but implying someone who doesn't use the cloud is not a "normal person" and lives in a basement is needlessly condescending. Not an average or "normal" computer user? Granted. Not a normal person? No.
- bambax 11mo agoI have content on Google and Dropbox but I have live backups. It would be very annoying to be locked out of Google, but I would not lose any data. Anyone can have a NAS, you don't need a while basement or to live inside of one (??!?) Yes, those companies should absolutely be forbidden to behave like this, and punished heavily when they do. But until it happens (which doesn't look like it will), your data is your responsibility.
- tonymet 11mo agoWhat tools are you performing live backups with ? I can think of rclone running , but gdrive/icloud doesn’t send change lists
- crapple8430 11mo agoYou can run rclone every couple minutes on your NAS, it checks mtimes like rsync so it is reasonably efficient for most cases, though you may run into ratelimits with bigger data.
- x0x0 11mo agoGoogle Photos deliberately broke all backup tools in March, so there's that. Yes you can still mostly do Takeout, but it's garbage. (not incremental. Requires me to remember. duplicates files for every album (total incompetence). downloads regularly fail. Requires more room than I have on my mac to decompress so I have to put it on an external drive.)
- griffzhowl 11mo agoYeah, the living in a basement comment was a strange rhetorical exaggeration, as if you have to be feeding and caring for your server 24/7, haha
- tonymet 11mo agoIt means people that don’t use cloud at all can’t possibly work with anyone else
- 11mo ago
- leptons 11mo ago>You can try to be that “own cloud” snob but it only works if you live in a basement WTF is this about? So you think anyone proficient in hardware/software lives in a basement? This kind of derogatory statement does not belong on HN.
- tonymet 11mo agoOwn cloud is a fun hobby. Exclusively owncloud is entirely impractical. It’s the snobby part that I’m critical of
- broken-kebab 11mo agoIt could be a reasonable opinion, but unfortunate choice of words made it angry (and FWIW snobbish) towards wrong people.
- tonymet 11mo agoapparently those living in basements are a protected class? English depends on idioms, you know.
- Ylpertnodi 11mo ago> Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. So, fallacy aside, the abnormals would be... a) people that don't tech, and b) people that saw the writing on the wall years ago, and either didn't trust the system and didn'tget into it, or those that did for a while, and got tfo. ?