Yesterday, I posted about my account being stolen and Apple's AI failing. Today, I called in this because, once again, the person in China who had hacked my account was able to change the password without access to my emails. Apparently, once they change your Security Questions it's game over unless you have MFA (which I did not because I never used the account and do not own any Apple devices).

Finally reached a person after yelling at the AI (thanks Lemmy), who was only able to disable the account from buying stuff on the Apple store. They were unable to do anything beyond that and had to transfer me to another person. This senior advisor confirmed the initial guidance on the security questions (old way) and MFA (new way). The only way to bypass that is for me to sign into an Apple device (which I do not own) or to sign up for AppleTV and enter a payment method, which would lock out the security questions going forward.

Being without an Apple device, I tried to access AppleTV but could not sign in because my region is now locked to China (thanks hackers). Now I am busy trying to get my mother to use her iPhone and/or iPad to log in with my account over the phone so it will add MFA, but I have no idea what to do because I do not own any Apple products and she's not very tech-savvy. Even then, the only way to get my account on her iPad is to wipe the thing entirely or create some kind of Frankenstein merging of our accounts.

Finally got someone from advanced support again to walk her through everything. Trying to sign into the account to set up the MFA still has it region locked to China so you cannot add a phone number from outside China. So that doesn't do anything at all either. At this point my account is completely stolen and Apple, the people with all the access, cannot do anything about it. All I can do is keep resetting the password (using my email) every time they change it using the security questions.

For a company as big as Apple, they are insanely shitty about account security. The fact that someone could bypass my entire account's security without ever needing access to my email is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is that they (Apple) can do nothing because of it and my account will be forever bricked. I cannot delete the account. I cannot sign into the account. And I cannot use my email address ever again to sign up for an account.

So I guess will I never use an Apple product ever again.

Fuck you, Apple.

I started getting emails (that went straight to spam) about my account having changes made. I haven't used it in forever and ignored the first one. As soon as they started coming in Chinese I knew it was comprised. I reset the password but could not login because I couldn't answer (or reset) the security questions, which were now all in Chinese

Called in at 8:50, got a useless run around from the AI gatekeeper, until it apologized at 9:02 that all the real people were off shift and to call back tomorrow.

Fuck Apple.

Update: Fuck Apple with a rusty cheese grater

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54173480

Had the bed for a long time now, always held up fine. Then my wife bought a new robot vacuum. Apparently its sensitivity sucks because the bastard took out 3 of four legs running down the middle of our bed.

The legs were initially held in place by a single bolt into a metal receptacle bored into thetop of the leg. Seems like the wood splintered once the vacuum kept hitting them full force.

I decided to brace them all with extra L-bend pieces from IKEA furniture (finally a use for the junk drawer!). Biggest problem was actually installing them and attaching the reinforced arms to the bottom of the bed. My kiddo suggested using a car jack to lift and hold the big. It was just crazy enough to work.

Half an hour on my back and doing my best worm impressions in and out from under the bed and done. The jack was perfect and didn't damage the bed (or let it fall and crush me). All in all about an hour and a half's work.

If that vacuum takes them out again I'm entering it into Battle Bots.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/50029073

edit: source bc I'm sillly and forgor:

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/26699133

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/48002461

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No transcript available

Original comic:

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/50107486

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/50107486

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/69474956

At least that's what VLC thinks when protesting the new French law.

France's National Assembly has voted in favour of a new "internet tax" that would charge companies for every gigabyte of data they send to users in France.

The idea is to make Netflix, Google, Meta and the rest of Big Tech pay more.

That sounds like a dream come true for many of us who prefer taking ownership of data in our own hands but unfortunately things are not that simple.

The way this law is written, it doesn't stop at Big Tech. Even VLC, a free and open source media player maintained by a non-profit, could end up paying this new tax. What the new French internet tax says New French Internet Tax law

The measure is amendment I-1358 to France's 2027 finance bill, tabled by Laurent Lhardit. It creates a tax on "producers of digital data" at €0.055 (5.5 euro cents) for every gigabyte delivered to subscribers of French internet providers.

Internet providers would measure how much data each sender pushes to their customers, with the collection supervised by telecom regulator Arcep and the tax administration DGFiP. Only the volume is counted, not the content or where it goes.

The amount is capped at 15% of the company's revenue in France or 2% of its total revenue, as per the amendment. Note that it's 15% of French revenue, not of total network traffic. And the text joins the two caps with an "or" without saying which one applies when they differ. How much money are we talking about?

The amendment cites an Arcep estimate of 200 billion GB a year flowing to French internet subscribers. It expects the tax to bring in €10 billion a year. It also names Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Amazon, Netflix and Akamai (cloud server provider) as the senders of about half of that traffic.

You'd think the money goes to the telecom operators who build and maintain the networks. That's the "fair share" argument European telcos have pushed for years.

But that's not the case. The revenue goes straight into the state budget, and the amendment's own justification talks about tax fairness between local businesses and digital multinationals, plus the ecological benefit of compressing data.

Why VLC is angry

A gigabyte of open source software counts the same as a gigabyte of Netflix. VideoLAN, the French non-profit behind VLC, posted on X that the tax would cost it over €1 million a year.

Lhardit replied that the cap would protect VideoLAN. He also said he didn't see how the tax could be passed on to users of Facebook, Instagram or TikTok since those services are free.

VideoLAN didn't take that well:

You have no idea what you are talking about. What you said about Facebook and Insta and other social networks are not targeted because they are free, means you don't understand the basics of economy. You don't understand the difference between Revenue and Profit.

VideoLAN (@videolan), October 30, 2026

The cap may limit what a low-revenue non-profit owes. But there is no explicit exemption for associations, free software or free content anywhere in the text. VideoLAN's €1 million is the possible figure before the cap, and right now nobody can tell the exact figure for certain because of all the ambiguity.

VLC isn't alone. OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba put his company's gross exposure at around €70 million a year, and Free's (Teleccom) Xavier Niel called the authors "ignares incompétents", roughly "incompetent ignoramuses". Those are French companies, by the way. Not exactly the US giants this internet tax bill was meant to tame. At the end, the consumer pays the bill

See, a "war on Big Tech" sounds great in a headline, and European governments are fond of laws that squeeze extra money out of American tech companies. But I don't buy the idea that Netflix will pay them out of their pocket.

Netflix will do what it always does and raise subscription prices. And Facebook is "free" only because advertisers pay for it, which is exactly the revenue versus profit point VideoLAN was making.

So the government gets extra money, Big Tech protects its margins, and you end up paying. Meanwhile, non-profit projects like VLC, which never had a price to raise in the first place, are left wondering how big their bill will be.

Let's just hope that this doesn't take the form of law. Because this will set a precedence. I wouldn't be surprised to see other European countries try their own version. No government will say no to extra tax revenue.

Like GDPR, this has all the ingredients of another mess. If a law is going to tax "internet companies", it needs to say in black and white which ones. Right now, it doesn't.

What do you think? A fair way to make Big Tech pay, or a blunt instrument that hits everyone else? Let me know in the comments.