techsupporter

Back when Consumerist(.com) was a thing, this had a name: EECB, Executive E-mail Carpet Bomb. You'd find every e-mail you could get your hands on, stack them all on one big message, and let it fly.

These days you mention a company on social media and their bots usually are watching for their name even if you don't @ them.

Just FYI, since the author got close (Apple Pay and Apple Pay Cash), but didn't directly touch on this:

For those who've signed up for Apple Card, currently Goldman Sachs (the bank that issues the Apple Card) does not permit moving cards from one Apple ID to another. The only way to "move" is to close the first card and reapply on the other ID, which is not a guaranteed approval.

Only one nit: The "heavy metal" Microsoft logo silkscreened onto that card was introduced in early 1980, not the 70s, and hung around for less than two years before being replaced by the "Blibbet" logo in 1982.

Heavy Metal Microsoft will always be my favorite of their logos.

Sure, but consider the marketing. Opening an account at a credit union requires:

- Knowing the credit union exists and which ones someone can join (not all of them are "anyone in [region]")

- Going to the credit union during business hours (no mean feat; several of the credit unions around me have shorter hours on Friday and three hours on Saturday)

- Qualifying for an account, and not just membership. Lots of credit unions pull Chexsystems--credit reports for checking accounts--and a report from the traditional Big Three and having poor credit will be a bar to an account (something that the ProPublica article points out as a reason people use Chime).

Those steps even presuppose that you find a credit union that, itself, isn't abusive. I was a member of one that was outright terrible and had miserable fees, but I had to stick with them for a year longer than needed because of a bankruptcy. There's nothing endemic to a credit union that requires it to be a "nice" entity, just that their structure makes it more probable.

And it all comes down to how many of us on this site are financially savvy or at least have a better understanding of the pros/cons of how banks and credit unions and "fintech apps" work. The people being targeted by the marketing for Chime are less likely to have that same set of information, and are winding up abused as a result.

> The sudden account closures have put financially vulnerable customers under stress.

Of course they have. It's no accident that accounts like these are heavily marketed to people with terms like "faster access to YOUR money" and "virtually no fees" and "manage YOUR MONEY from anywhere, down to the penny!" These companies are targeting people for whom every single dollar is of vital importance.

To then yank the accounts right as a large deposit from a government agency lands is malfeasance, or at least immoral.

The vast majority of us who post on this site have plenty of money, or at least credit, in reserve so that even losing $10,000 worth of deposit isn't crippling. It's bad, for sure, but it's not "I'm homeless starting tomorrow" bad. We are not the target market for apps-that-should-be-proper-banks like Chime.

> She was directed to a passage in the company’s account agreement that states, “Chime and/or Bank may suspend, freeze, or close your Account for any reason with or without notice”

Yup, sounds about right. And of course there's a binding arbitration agreement, requiring all arbitration actions to be on an individual basis.

So customers can be turned away with no reason, no recourse, no private right of action against the offending company, and no ability to group together to push back on a larger foe.

This is, no pardon requested, fucking bullshit. I loathe that we've gotten so deep into contracts of adhesion and abstractions between supplying company and supplier and third-party relationships and "oh it's someone else's problem" and automated customer handling.

This view--not that you hold it, but that it exists--frustrates the hell out of me.

"We don't like being a customer of the company that clubs baby seals but our customers would leave us if we didn't use the company that clubs baby seals so I guess we should pay up for some more clubs."

It's a pretty glaring example that "free markets" usually aren't, and often unrelated to government intervention. You have information, you have agency, and you have the thing that the other party wants (money), yet you don't feel free to move away from a supplier who you clearly view as unsuitable[0] because that supplier has gained a market position so dominant through exploiting others.

0 - If I am reading too much into your comment, I apologize and don't mean to put words into your mouth.

I had this exact same problem. When I finally got hold of someone who worked for Google (via a friend of a friend on a mailing list) and with the ability to check whatever their logs were claiming, I was informed that my domain's reputation was "too recent" or something like that.

My domain is a year older than Google itself and has been in continuous use for e-mail that whole time. The IP addresses it is on haven't changed in a decade. But that didn't matter. DKIM, SPF, DMARC, forward and reverse matching DNS, exactly four users who do not send spam under penalty of being buried under legal solicitations for green cards, and all the rest didn't help. Randomly getting sent to /dev/null for no good reason. And not enough traffic to qualify me to use their Postmaster utilities.

Three years ago I gave up and ported to Fastmail with a tear in my eye for the days when even the smallest net on the Internet could be a full participant.

My view of a high-quality outdoor space is one where humans can be without the need to pay, with the ability to sit, and some space for play or leisure. We should also plan for pets being present because no matter how many signs you put asking people to not bring their dogs, cats, turtles, or ferrets, people will bring them. So let's not assume otherwise. A water fountain would be great, a public restroom (like a Portland Loo) even moreso in larger areas.

This same space should also have as much of its volume as possible given over to natural surfaces. Grasses and hardy flowers, in particular. We don't need a rose garden. Most plant species native to an area look quite nice if not mowed down or stunted with pesticides.

We should encourage property owners to give over some of the massive amounts of space currently used for automobile operation and storage to these public spaces. Eliminate parking minimums so that grocery and other big box stores in urban areas are able to rip up the artificial paving and return that space to natural use, for example. Make more planter box seating in movement rights-of-way. Unused parcels owned by governments should not be fenced off but have some furniture plopped down and an "everyone welcome" sign placed here.

I also want people and their cities to think about more than just downtown. Comparatively few people live in "actual" downtowns. We need to deal with that, too, so that downtowns are not just clusters of tall office buildings that empty out at the end of a workday. Nothing says that Downtown cannot be a vibrant neighborhood of its own, arguably even easier than trying to kickstart other neighborhoods. But just saying "putting green space in downtown is difficult" misses the many, many other areas of most cities and towns.

(I'm sure someone will come along and say "but you can't possibly do this because the homeless" so yes, this does mean we are addressing environmental concerns at the same time we are addressing human concerns.)

This is something that cities the world over should be doing, both from a bee and a people perspective. Density is a lot more nice if greenery is nearby. Doesn't really matter if it's a park or an allotment or a library with a wide area. Just plenty of "something" with a large "big something" every so often.

In most cities I have experience with, high quality outdoor space is largely reserved for the parts of town populated by people living in detached, one-family dwellings. The more dense parts of town are clustered next to noisy streets or with pollution. Not much greenspace. The cities that have gotten it more right than wrong are usually in western Europe and parts of Asia.

> Christian Schmid-Egger, who coordinates Berlin’s wildflower meadows on behalf of the German Wildlife Foundation, said any conservation effort would ultimate require broader changes in agricultural practices: “If we are going to save the bees, we won’t be doing it in cities.”

He's not wrong, but he's also not fully right either. One of the biggest damages we've done to our biome is to pave so much of it, largely to make space for automobiles. Animals and insects need places to thrive all over and setting aside more space among our population for both people and insects makes for a better environment.

I mean, sure? How's that different from being 30 minutes late because someone dumped a load of frozen fish on the highway?

This mad rush to be everywhere at a specific time, usually when tens of thousands of other people are also trying to be at a similar spot at the same time, is a major cause of people being traffic. Heck, as the pandemic has shown, we don't even really need to always be in the same physical place to have a meeting; technology can relieve us of that burden.

My family gave up driving years ago, due to cost and stress, and it's been great largely for this reason. I don't worry about dealing with all of the people who have Very Important Places To Be. That's Metro's job, and they do it well.

> My friend that I was traveling with and I would stare at each other and be like "what the hell is going on?" as we looked around at everyone else on the bus and nobody seems to care at all that their day has this arbitrary delay. I can only imagine if a driver did that here in Seattle with 30+ people all trying to get somewhere.

This does happen on Seattle-area transit, but definitely not on every route. Routes on the south end, both of Seattle and in south King County, are far more likely to have a couple of drivers who will pass each other and briefly pop open the door or slide open the window for a minute of chat. I've seen drivers taking their layover or lunch at Burien TC or TIBS who gab like old friends with any other drivers they encounter. But at Northgate or Aurora Village? Almost never happens.

Back before the big restructure in advance of Capitol Hill and UW stations opening, I rode the 72 virtually every day. If I got a particular driver, I mentally built in a roughly 6-minute wait somewhere in Ravenna because he'd pass a friend out walking or also driving a bus and they'd chat. Same for the 4 through the Central District with a different driver.

I like that transit has improved so much around here that it's easier and faster to get almost everywhere I'm going. But I also remember the quirks of transit past with that fondness of memory.

As a parent, a five-day-per-week commute has many more opportunities for something to go wrong than an off-site I know about a month in advance that lasts for three nights.

Every single day, lots of things have to go right: dropping off has to be at a defined time (whether school or daycare, most activities have a predetermined start time unless the kid is very young, which mine isn't any more), then I have to get to work from the daycare, then I have to hope that nothing blows up during the day requiring me to stay longer, then I have to hope nothing blows up on the trip to daycare, and so on. I'm very fortunate that daycare is on a transit path for me because my family doesn't drive and transit around here is usually more reliable than driving.

Working from home for the last 15 months has been a godsend. I don't have to deal with any of those oddities. My spouse and I have traded off who takes a few days off every few weeks or so to be "on vacation" with the kid, or we sync up and take days off together to just veg at home as a family.

If you tell me I can skip the bullshit commute and only have to plan child care around a retreat that is booked a month, or even a couple of weeks!, in advance, I will gladly take that trade. Even if it's a "bring your spouse" kind of thing, I can get a set of grandparents to train or fly in for that time (or even go to them).

The MFA we commonly use right now won't protect against phishing because, as I suspect you mean, the codes are not protected against being entered into the "wrong" site.

Proper MFA, like U2F/FIDO2/whatever-it-is-called-today, will protect against phishing because the visited site won't match the hash needed to complete the second-factor-auth-flow.

> However, basically every mail platform creates tailored links to track click engagement.

Yep, even financial institutions do this and half of them don’t even use domains they own for the tracking links.

Years and years of “don’t click on suspicious links” out the window because bank.example.com/creditcard is turned into 4828fjfneo848.totallyfine.adtracker.thirdparty.example.org

I hate all of it but nobody seems to give a shit (nor do they care to implement proper 2FA to effectively guard against phishing) so whatever. If people have their accounts drained because marketers gotta get that sweet engagement metric, what does it matter any more?

> rather than going down this weird path of trying to warp the definition of "authorized".

I don't think they are. I think SCOTUS is looking at this, as is their wont, from a legal perspective.

We have two legal systems: civil and criminal. Both of them have the concept of "authorized." What SCOTUS has said here is that whether or not something is unauthorized may be a civil tort claim--you broke a contract--versus a criminal offense--you broke the law.

That seems to be the knot everyone is trying to untie here. It's not illegal for me to break a contract with someone. It is illegal for me to break the law.

To me, this is the most accurate point.

When people are upset that a company violates their privacy with the government of their country, I feel as though their ire is misplaced.

We had a time in United States history when companies were essentially more powerful than the government that organized the structures in which they operated. John Rockefeller, through Standard Oil, became the wealthiest and most powerful single individual in the entire world. He routinely told governments to pound sand. He was a kind and generous person to those whom he felt deserving or who treated him well. He was ruthless to those whom he felt had slighted him or stood in his way. I don't want to go back to that.

Does it frustrate me that my government is essentially spying on me? Yes! Can I hold Apple responsible for that? Not for my government having made those decisions, no. That's asking that Apple be stronger than my government when, given a choice, I'd rather have an elected government operating transparently in free elections than a company that's primarily responsible to its owners.

Apple can very much fight this fight on behalf of its customers. Every time Apple refuses to write backdoors into its products at the behest of a law enforcement agency here, Apple is taking on that fight. Apple will sometimes lose that fight, as it is currently losing in China. Apple, as a participant in United States society, will sometimes win that fight, too. But ultimately it comes down to the decisions that our government(s) make.

I'm not sure if I can do this topic justice solely over text, but I'm going to try because I genuinely think it's important to address, and with the plea that I'm truly not trying to be a horse's ass here and disparage people who have different needs. If anything, I think people who have different needs are the ones being taken advantage of, both coming and going.

This quote really stood out to me:

> and they [disposable plastic straws] do not require any upkeep or maintenance for proper hygiene due to their disposable nature.

It's a rather bright example of the problem our global society has put itself into: there's still a need to deal with these items, but that need is no longer on the person using the item; it has been outsourced to the rubbish bin and, thus, to society and the environment at large.

We've done this to ourselves in myriad ways. Expanding public transport is "unfair" to people who have different needs because perhaps some people cannot quickly or easily board transit vehicles, or those trips do not go to the front door of where some people need to go. We cannot eliminate or shrink parking requirements or availability for the same reason.

Politically, we stop at "well, can't do that" without considering "OK, how could we do almost all of that with modifications for people who have other needs?"

We've fallen into the perfect must be the only outcome otherwise why bother. Some of that is genuinely not knowing, but large parts of opposition to the changes we know we need to make--both individually and on the companies and businesses supplying us in environmentally-poor ways--are disingenuously hiding behind those arguments simply to obstruct.

That's frustrating.

> What does count as "a lot of back-end work" that's valuable to you?

By way of examples, something like a weather application or access to content. Weather data is, at least until the end of humanity's existence on Earth, ever-changing and in need of update.

> Why are subscriptions bad and what would your solution to this be?

Because I do not want to wind up in a situation where an app developer suddenly turns on subscriptions and hides features of an app behind it, on the back of an opaque update. Plus, for most apps I am quite happy to pay for a particular version and be done. (I have no problem with paying for applications.) I want the finality of the transaction, that I've given my $5 or $10 or $20 or what-have-you a single time and our business is done. Application makers have done this since time immemorial, sometimes releasing complimentary bug fixes, other times not.

I just don't like the idea that in order to retain access to a program that does all of its work on my device, I have to keep paying rent for it. Like the app at issue here, where it was doing what the user wanted and then poof, a change that cannot be reversed.

I also understand that the current model on the app stores is not conducive to one-and-done application purchase transactions. Apple doesn't make it easy to do upgrade-by-version pricing, for example. In-app purchases are available, but they're not (by default, or nearly as widely) sharable on the family-level like outright purchases are.

> with anything else meaning “upgrade to PRO” which, by the way, costs EUR 0.99 monthly or EUR 8.99 per annum.

This is exactly what I expected to read when I started reading. So many apps have done this to me that I'm now hesitant to install, and become dependent on, any new apps.

I'm genuinely sorry, but I'm not paying a subscription for an app that doesn't do a lot of back-end work (that's valuable to me). No, syncing doesn't count; I have iCloud and Nextcloud and the share sheet functionality for that. No, social features don't count either. This goes quadruple for apps that have a feature enabled and then sneak it behind a paywall many updates later.

And when I write that I'm genuinely sorry, I really am! I know that developers need to earn a living but I'm not willing to sustain it on the back of 10 or 20 or 30 "low annual price of just $9 or $15 or $25 or $49 per year!" subscriptions. If that means fewer apps or fewer people making their living at being app developers, that is bad and I hope that applies pressure on Apple and Google to add features to their app stores that make a better balance.

> If your ISP isn't keeping track of which customer is using which IP addresses and handling complaints sent to their abuse

To be clear, I am the only person (so far as I know) who has the ability to do this. Subscribers are ordinarily segmented by VLAN and the DHCP server hands out a single, predefined IP address on a /30. If a subscriber moves between apartments, their IP goes with them (the VLAN is simply relocated to the new physical port in the new apartment). Which customer has which IP in which apartment is all documented in their customer management system.

What they've permitted me to do, as part of testing, is to manually assign myself an IP by removing the VLAN and DHCP restriction on my specific port. If I try to this same stunt in a friend's apartment, on the same ISP, it does not work.

They claim that they have done so, and that they can't locate any suspicious traffic coming from their network. Of course, these claims might be BS and I've no way to prove or disprove it...

> Instead of pitching a fit at Cloudflare, encourage and promote positive views of Tor-based browsing

I don't know if the person to whom you are replying is using Tor, but I'm definitely not and I also despise how Cloudflare--or their customers, but I have no way of differentiating the two--reacts to various things.

My home ISP is a very small outfit that mainly serves apartment buildings in my area. I don't know why, but every three or so weeks, Cloudflare decides that my ISP is a massive pile of risk and starts shunting almost every request I make through their "analysing your browser please be patient" screen. It's nothing specific to my computer because if I flip on a tunnel through my server in a colocation service in the same city as me, I get zero prompts.

I've worked with my ISP and they've basically given me free reign to assign myself whatever public IP I want out of their /22 (as long as it's not in use by another customer, of course) and, during these times, any IP I choose gets the same response from Cloudflare.

It's the same lack of transparency and being able to say "hey, what gives" that applies to spam filtering by the big e-mail providers or getting dropped into the "scam likely" bucket for mobile phone calls. I understand the need to filter and screen and protect but that doesn't mean I have to like it when it splashes onto me.

Sorry, I was unclear; I meant we would love to hire all of these amazing people who come back to volunteer week after week, but we can't afford it so we rely on donated labor.

The (very small number of) paid staff jobs and volunteer roles definitely don't overlap. First because our lawyer agrees with you, and second because we feel like that would be extremely rude to have one person be paid while another person is doing the labor for free. If one person is getting paid to do the role, everybody doing that role should be getting paid.

We try to do right by our volunteers. For example, when we have a new paid opening, we tell our volunteers about it first. And sometimes someone donates some money with a note of "do something nice for the volunteers, if you can," so we'll throw a party for our amazing volunteers or buy a nicer lunch (everybody gets fed but sometimes it's boxed sandwiches with chips and other days it's a full taco spread from a local restaurant)..

At the time, joining groups in Signal was an involved process and the friction was higher than "a volunteer lead stands at the check-in desk and shows the QR code to each volunteer as they arrive for the day." Plus, most people didn't have Signal installed; almost everyone, and realistically the "almost" doesn't apply any more, has WhatsApp.

Signal's new groups work much more akin to WhatsApp and maybe I can bring it back up again once the pandemic has fully subsided.

To me, this is an example of why individual and collective action on gigantic things, like climate change or privacy, are both important.

I salute everyone here who is able to switch away from WhatsApp. I wish I could dump it as well, but I can't.

Why? I volunteer with a group where one of our main things is to have a small army of people out doing coordinated-but-physically-separated tasks. Everyone has a smartphone of some kind but they're of varying types and quality. We tried using group SMS but that was a disaster, as group-SMS is bad enough but group-SMS-with-30-people is one level below "just fax everybody."

WhatsApp, meanwhile, lets us make daily groups, have a QR code that volunteers can scan at check in to join the day's group, app versions that work on the shittiest Android phone all the way up to the brand newest iPhone. And as a bonus, since almost all of our volunteers have friends and family outside the US, pretty much everybody already has Whatsapp installed and knows how to use it.

The one time our Executive Director tried switching apps, I had to spend an hour talking him out of WeChat, of all things. Point being, we need individual action to pressure our friends and family groups along with regulatory action so that massive platforms can't abuse us like this.

Having been part of an org that asked for volunteers, we did it for two reasons:

First, to try to have a pool of repeat volunteers who we could rely on. In any other context, we would call these people "employees" but we ran on such a shoestring we couldn't pay everyone for all of their labor. Sucks, but such is the nature of the non-profit world outside of the glossy donor magazines. Most of these generous souls were recruited from friends and family or were people who'd received services from us in the past.

Second, is for advertising and to drum up support. People are far more likely to donate to a group they've volunteered with, even once, in the past as they feel a sense of ownership over the organization's outcome. Those "bring a bunch of six-figure salary folks to a group to pack boxes for a few hours?" They tended to result in some of the best donations we received for the whole year.

I think a big reason is because that "1% to 2% base pay raise" gets hidden behind bonuses that (usually, but not always) seem bigger, plus stock-based pay that tends to be bigger every year (until it isn't).

For me, it's not as gigantic of a deal because as long as my raises cover the rising cost of rent--which it might not this year due to where I live becoming even more massively popular in the wake of COVID--then I am fine with this trade because I hate interviewing and I hate change even more. I used to spend the bulk of my annual bonus and stock grants and saving a little; in recent years, I've flipped that.

Agreed about Berlin, but to me that says that as part of a commitment to HSR, we also have a commitment to local transport. Fortunately, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit here.

For example, I live in Seattle. We regularly vote to tax ourselves to build and operate transit service. In 2019, just before the pandemic hit, we had a 10-minute citywide bus network with fast, easy transfers across about 85% of the city. People used the heck out of it, especially in combination with the two light rail stations that opened in 2016.

When my spouse and I took a three-week trip across Germany to see where parts of our family are from[0], we didn't touch the wheel of a car once. Big city like Frankfurt, small town like Lutherstadt Wittenberg, in-between like Leipzig, they all worked. They were some combination of walkable, understandable bus service, and local rail.

There's infrastructure and there's culture. Americans don't have the idea that cities and towns can be accessible on foot and by transport, so we don't hold ourselves to that standard. But we could, with no loss of convenience for many of us.

I doubt your first assumption will be the one that happens, even if this ruling does come out favorably for customers.

There's an easy out for Apple and others: you give the customer the ability to access what they paid for independently of the seller. There's no requirement for Apple to be involved any more once Apple has delivered the file in way that can be opened independent of Apple.

Meanwhile, I've been at the same company for longer than a couple of my coworkers have been alive (though I've changed jobs twice in that time) so "only five years" sounds comparatively short to me.