It’s amazing how fragile our digital lives can be, and how quickly they can fall to pieces. Case in point: the digital dilemma that Paris Buttfield-Addison found himself in last week, which denied him access to 20 years of photographs, messages, documents, and general access to the Apple ecosystem. According to Paris, the whole thing started when he tried to redeem a $500 Apple gift card in exchange for 6 TB of iCloud storage. The gift card purchase didn’t go through, and shortly thereafter, the account was locked, effectively bricking his $30,000 collection of iGadgets and rendering his massive trove of iCloud data inaccessible. Decades of loyalty to the Apple ecosystem, gone in a heartbeat.
As for why the account was locked, it appears that the gift card Paris used had been redeemed previously — some kind of gift card fraud, perhaps. But Paris only learned that after the issue was resolved. Before that, he relates five days of digital limbo and customer support hell, which included unhelpful advice such as creating a new account and starting over from scratch, which probably would have led to exactly the same place, thanks to hardware linking of all his devices to the nuked account. The story ends well, perhaps partly due to the victim’s high profile in the Apple community, but it’s a stark lesson in owning your digital data. If they’re not your computer, they’re not your files, and if someone like Paris can get caught up in a digital disaster like this, it can happen to anyone.
Hackaday isn’t the place readers normally turn to for fiction, but we wanted to call attention to a piece of short fiction with a Hackaday angle. Back in June, Canadian writer Kassandra Haakman contacted us about a short story she wrote focused on the 1989 geomagnetic storm that temporarily wiped out the electric grid in Québec. She wanted permission to quote our first-hand description of that night’s aurorae, which we wrote a bit about on these pages. We happily granted permission for the quote, on condition that she share a link to the article once it’s published. The story is out now; it’s a series of vignettes from that night, mostly looking at the disorientation of waking up to no electricity but a sky alive with light and energy. Check it out — we really enjoyed it.
Speaking of solar outbursts, did 6,000 Airbus airliners really get grounded because of solar storms? We remember feeling a bit skeptical when this story first hit the media, but without diving into it at the time, cosmic rays interfering with avionics seemed as good an explanation as anything. But now an article in Astronomy.com goes into much more detail about this Emergency Airworthiness Directive and exactly what happened to force aviation authorities to ground an entire fleet of planes. The article speaks for itself, but to summarize, it appears that the EAD was precipitated by an “uncommanded and limited pitch down” event on a JetBlue flight on October 10 that injured several passengers. The post-incident analysis revealed that the computer controlling the jet’s elevators and ailerons may have suffered a cosmic-ray-induced “bit flip,” temporarily scrambling the system and resulting in uncommanded movement of the control surfaces. The article goes into quite some detail about the event and the implications of increased solar activity for critical infrastructure.
And finally, if you’ve been paying attention to automotive news lately, it’s been kind of hard to miss the brewing public relations nightmare Toyota is facing over the rash of engine failures affecting late-model Tundra pickups. The 3.4-liter V6 twin-turbo engine that Toyota chose to replace the venerable but thirsty 5.7-liter V8 that used to power the truck is prone to sudden death, even with very few miles on the odometer. Toyota has been very cagey about what exactly is going wrong with these engines, but Eric over at “I Do Cars” on YouTube managed to get his hands on an engine that gave up the ghost after a mere 38,000 miles, and the resulting teardown is very interesting. Getting to the bottom of the problem required a complete teardown of the engine, top to bottom, so all the engineering behind this power plant is on display. Everything looked good until the very end; we won’t ruin the surprise, but suffice it to say, it’s pretty gnarly. Enjoy!
“he tried to redeem a $500 Apple gift card in exchange for 6 TB of iCloud storage.”
There is no “cloud,” just someone else’s computer. -Rory Mir and Aaron Mackey at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Yeah, and that’s just to RENT the 6 TB.
$500 buys a 6TB drive, a Raspberry Pi, and a fair amount of electricity… we need better self-hosting solutions for people.
You VIOLENTLY overestimate the the intelligence of the average person in the world.
I will. Two spun main bearings, root cause inconclusive. Possible reasons to not buy Toyota’s explanation of leftover machining debris.
Thank you!
Oops. Sorry about the Report button, I meant to click Reply!
Thank you for summarizing for us.. I thought that’s what Hackaday was supposed to be for: to summarize other websites so I can decide if I want to follow the source links. Not to tease me into finding out if they are interesting.
Thanks, I’m not watching an hour-long video just for 10 seconds of information.
oh, I watched the whole thing and it’s jampacked full of information, mostly variations on why make something in one piece when you can make it in three pieces. Not that I should’ve been surprised, the guts of that look a lot like the guts of my Canon large format printer, which also suffers from the same problem.
That engine makes old 1970 Ferrari Porsche and Maserati engines look like simplicity itself.
“The story ends well,
perhaps partlysolely due to the victim’s high profile in the Apple community”That’s the only reason he got anything back. Any of us plebes would be told to go pound sand.
i have never trusted anything supposedly being automatically saved “to the cloud” and treat all that stuff as if it does not even exist. all of my stuff is stored locally, and when i pull a hard drive out of service, i leave everything on it as a backup and store it in a remote location. (i am aware of SSD bit rot, and all my stuff is also stored magnetically). i have never lost any data in 35 years.
I do the same. Anything ephemeral, like pictures, videos, etc., gets saved to an external hard drive when the device is decommissioned. Never trust “the cloud”.
OMG, never rely on the “cloud” for anything!
I keep three copies of everything. One is the online NAS copy. Another is an offline copy that gets backed up to weekly. And another off-site (30 miles away) that gets backed up to monthly. Oh, and all the photos and important whatnot are on mirrored ZFS pools, so I guess that’s four backups. I don’t put anything in the “cloud” mostly for privacy reasons. I would want to encrypt it if I did. And the 50-odd TBs everything takes up would be too expensive to put in the cloud anyway. I’ve probably spent a couple or three grand on hard drives over the last decade, replacing failed drives as needed.
The weird thing about the cloud is that stuff shows up when you least expect it to. I bought a new television a year or so ago and an ex-girlfriend’s, and I’m talking about from 30 years ago we’re just friends now, pictures show up as the screensaver on my new TV. I think she maybe emailed them to me or shared them on dropbox or Google Drive or something.
Conversely, there is a place in hell reserved for whoever decided that external western digital hard drives should each be encrypted to a private key on the USB board. The drives are quite reliable, but the circuit boards fail and you’re completely screwed.
Reading this reminded me just how brittle our digital lifelines are. Two decades of memories and work can evaporate with one unexpected account lock, and the whole saga started over a gift card glitch — a harsh lesson that the cloud isn’t magic, just someone else’s machine. Robust personal backups and self-hosting aren’t just geek hobbies, they’re survival skills in a world where ‘trusted platforms’ can fail fast and without warning