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gu009 commented on Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back   washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/luafox
gu009 · 4 months ago
Is there a consensus on what you should actually do in the event your phone is stolen? Someone I know's phone was stolen and I helped them through it (remotely) in real time, and I remember looking up what to do and having to sort through a lot of straight up bad advice, including articles that seem naive as to what actually happens in real life when thieves steal a phone.

In this case, the phone was marked as lost immediately, but a couple of days later the thieves started trying to reset the password on the owner's iCloud account using various methods, the first of which produced 1st party push notifications asking to confirm the account password reset that were sent to the owner's other signed-in devices that were still in their possession. In the moment, it would be so easy for a confused & stressed person to accidentally or mistakenly tap those notifications and enable their own account hijacking.

The thieves then evidently called Apple Support and tried to get the iCloud account password reset over the phone, but by this point the owner had already gotten a new phone and SIM for their phone number, which meant that Apple Support's 2FA SMS codes were received by their replacement phone (in their possession) instead of the stolen phone (in the thieves' possession, and which no longer had cell service). It seems like if they had delayed in getting their new phone and left the stolen device with functional cell service, the hijacking might have succeeded at this point.

Apple's own "What to do if your iPhone is stolen" page [0] has no info these tactics that are actually used in the moment by phone thieves. That page does link to a page about social engineering scams [1] but approaches that in a general sense.

I think Apple's way of handling it should be way more intuitive. For example, they should differentiate between phones that are lost and stolen. If your phone is lost, you want to protect against someone finding it and being able to access the phone's contents. If your phone is stolen, the thieves will most likely try to hijack your iCloud account as well, and they'll try and social engineer both the owner and Apple Support to do so, so add a "Mark as Stolen" option that also adds protections against iCloud account hijacking.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/120837

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102568

gu009 commented on Ask HN: Best way to sell $1 digital product?    · Posted by u/wellthisisgreat
pronouncedjerry · 2 years ago
gu009 · 2 years ago
A lot of people who sell audio plugins previously used Gumroad, but have moved to Lemon Squeezy - https://lemonsqueezy.com

I think it’s because Gumroad hiked their rates at some point, and Lemon Squeezy is cheaper but the customer experience is similar.

gu009 commented on Xash3D: An open-source reimplementation of Half-Life   github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fw... · Posted by u/mepian
skrrtww · 2 years ago
Hoping this would bear fruit for macOS, but looks like the maintainer instead has written a mini anti-Apple screed and intentionally doesn't support it. https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs/issues/61
gu009 · 2 years ago
Mac Source Ports has a macOS version of this, including Apple Silicon support. Played it recently and it works very well despite a couple of annoyances.

Mac Source Ports is fantastic overall, there’s a ton of other games available too.

http://www.macsourceports.com/game/halflife

gu009 commented on Ask HN: Do you know what is going on at Wise?    · Posted by u/ritzaco
gu009 · 2 years ago
Longtime Wise user here, and recently I've been having an issue too, but one I haven't seen posted here as yet.

My account has been flagged several times for "speculative currency trading", even though that's not what I'm doing, and my usage patterns haven't really changed much since I started using the platform.

If you set up a transfer and don't fund it immediately, or you cancel it and set up another transfer within a narrow time window where the exchange rate has changed to your benefit, the system thinks you're speculating. This never happened to prior to the last 12 months or so, and recently it seems they're flagging transfers this way much more often. Seems like it's probably due to overall volatility in certain currencies being higher over the last year or so.

The "penalty" they apply is just that you can't "lock" an exchange rate for international transfers anymore. Usually, your exchange rate is locked at the market rate at the time the transfer is initiated, and then you have a time limit to fund the transfer at the rate you locked.

But now, when you initiate a transfer they add a 3% "buffer" on top of the funds required to fund the transfer, and they apply the market rate at the time they receive the funds, and then refund you whatever the difference is.

gu009 commented on About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off   theverge.com/2023/10/16/2... · Posted by u/donohoe
iainctduncan · 2 years ago
They do exist, but yeah they are rare. Both Ableton Live and Reaper refuse to take outside investments or sell. The Live owners are famous for telling them to screw off. Major reason I use both of them. The music tech business is getting rocked by acquisitions recently.
gu009 · 2 years ago
Worth noting here that the main guy behind Reaper is Justin Frankel, creator of Winamp - would seem like he doesn't really need or want outside investment.

u/gu009

KarmaCake day13September 13, 2022View Original