@Migueldeicaza If you haven't tried calling Apple already, here's the support number: 1-800-275-2273

Other ways to contact Apple directly: https://support.apple.com/en-us/106932?choose-your-country-or-region=united-states

@Migueldeicaza

I don't think I'd be comparing the CEO to Darth Vader... 🤷

@Migueldeicaza
I tried to do the right thing by getting my own Domain Name and finding various hosts to host my data.

Then the DNS provider turned around and said I was not eligible for the domain that I had had with them for 12 years. (.id.au).

I submitted the relevant documents to them to prove my Australian Citizenship, but kept going ‘round in circles for 6 months.
(Hint; it is always DNS).

Turns out; they had outsourced their helpdesk to an LLM.

@Migueldeicaza This is why I hate Apple EVEN MORE than I hate Google and Windows

@Migueldeicaza
I went through something similar with Apple about 5 years ago. After numerous support calls, the CS told me to write a letter and mail it to Apple through the postal service. So, I did. Several months later I received a letter via post explaining that they did not provide support by mail and it included URL and phone number for customer support that I started with. It was infuriating.

@Migueldeicaza by coincidence, doctorow was on the daily show this week to talk about the need to apply meaningful government regulation to tech companies.

(though even if we survive the next couple years, government-anything is probably going to be on shaky legs for at least the next decade. But it's still important to think about for the long-term, and is still relevant for countries that *haven't* fallen into fascism.)

@Migueldeicaza the exact same thing happened to my neighbour (though he is not a dev, he has many Apple devices). Everything gone; contacts, years of photos and emails, and all devices bricked. No response to any inquiry, just a stone wall

@Migueldeicaza It's also, weirdly but sadly not very surprisingly, a story about someone who doesn't seem to appreciate the benefits available to people living in a democratic republic. No mention of talking to any govt officials, who have actual regulatory power over the company named. No effort at all to use that available resource, and maybe not even any conscious awareness of it. Didn't even call the media, apparently.

No "human at Apple" is likely to notice your blog, guy, but good luck.

@Migueldeicaza First of all, no one should be so foolish or naïve as to trust a giant faceless org of any kind with anything you can't replace, and could backup on your own. Second, this was avoidable: They're saying TB (though not how many), which might be accurate, but 4TB of local storage can be had for US$170, so someone like this should have had no problem affording good local storage within the stated time-frame.

This is a story of misplaced trust and poor document management.

@Migueldeicaza I hope everyone is paying attention and thinking hard about the consequences of entrusting your data and livelihood to these corporations that have way too much power and don't give a damn about their customers. I sure am.

@Migueldeicaza Apple does not care. None of the bigcos do. Absolutely everything they offer is made of sand; one good wave can vaporize it forever with no recourse. The fact that this fellow was instrumental to their success and literally wrote books on their infrastructure makes no difference at all to them. He was just another line in a database that could be deleted at any time for any reason. Sorry to say, but it was his error if he thought his contributions bought him any kind of protection

@Migueldeicaza

Dear "Paris":

Welcome to the Walled Garden that your complicity helped create.

And people wonder why I've had nothing at all to do with with the company for the last 40 years! WHY do you think that Steve Wozniak left the company that he co-founded? He was the true creator of Apple, not huckster Steve Jobs, and he abandoned it. What should that have been telling you? (Hint: neurodivergent people like Wozniak tend to have a well-developed sense of ethics, ethics derived from the logic at which they excel.)

@Migueldeicaza another Nelsom Muntz haha moment, believing Apple somehow is a corporation around doing "good" not focused on increasing shareholder value anyways possible. Tim Apple must be licking lot of Oranges lately hoping that will make AI crash happens sooner so they are the only trillion dollar corporation around.

@Migueldeicaza I use Apple products because they're the least bad of all the ones I've tried (especially together) but, when something nontrivial goes wrong, they give you access to zero people who can help.

I haven't had an account banned, but their description of how effective talking to anyone at Apple is tracks perfectly with my experience. It's unbelievably bad, especially for a company that waxes poetic about the experience of using their products and services.

@Migueldeicaza reasons like this are why I have moved everything local using a 3-2-1 backup rule.

For photos I use Immich
For siri/alexa I use Home Assistant that uses a local LLM that can fallback to ChatGPT (looking for ways to eliminate this as well)
Music/Movies/TV shows I use a combo of Plex and Jellyfin

I use wireguard so family can access everything while away from the house. So far it has passed the wife test!

@Migueldeicaza not your cloud, just renting

@Migueldeicaza
Update: I should read the comments first. 😅😆

reminds me of a similar situation someone had with AWS basically 0 human interaction or way to resolve the issue until someone deep in the company manually escalated it after reading/hearing about the blog post.

Hope the author gets it fixed because holy..... that's a fast way to lose loyal customers.

@Migueldeicaza in moment like that, I'm supper happy of being a person of not using any kind of one account for everything... I think today my paypal account was block, (I need to check) what I would have loose with that... NOTHING. 😊 Love my RPi at home with nextcloud. If anything happen, I plug the SSD into my Linux, and access the HD, in case of failure/corruption, I've got backups (in other places)

@Migueldeicaza +1 for not relying on the walled garden

@Migueldeicaza That‘s really bad. While I‘m also heavily in this ecosystem, I migrate out since this year (it hurts) since this threat model seems to be more and more likely. Not only a kafkaesk process fail may lead to this outcome, but also a trantrum of Trump about European policies.

@Migueldeicaza I recently lost my AWS account that I got the year AWS was launched. Their login verification emails began failing to arrive in my email. Their billing emails would arrive, but I could not login. I spent 9 months trying to interact with customer support & having friends who are AWS employees try internal contacts on my behalf to no avail. I finally cancelled the credit card it was billing to and they closed my account for non-payment. Fortunately I mostly only used it for data backups so I didn't lose much. Super weird.