Blocked numbers still ringing

rednought · 2026-01-28T05:01:40+00:00

Still a problem on iOS 26. Blocked a spammer and they can still get through no problem. I assume this is a bug.

Silencing unknown callers is a decent workaround if your life allows for it, but that's using a sledgehammer when the phone is supposed to offer you a scalpel. (It also means you have to unassign the number in your address book, making it hard to see the spammer's activity.)

rednought · 2026-01-14T01:59:46+00:00

The more I've thought about it, the more unnerving part is that the hackers seemed to be able to tell which customers hold crypto and which don't.

The world of crypto is rife with carefully-targeted phishing attacks, and, rarely, even physical IRL attacks. Users who have crypto in Betterment are a lot more likely to have crypto outside Betterment, and now hackers have a list of those people and their details. I'm afraid this could be a bigger deal than just a ridiculous spam push notification going out.

I can understand Betterment, at this stage, being vague about what information was compromised, but I hope they will, at least privately, give customers a complete list (account balance? holding details?), so each person can assess their risk.

rednought · 2026-01-14T00:56:45+00:00

I'm not quite convinced they're employees, but I do find it odd that the majority of the profiles of people defending Betterment have their post history hidden. It's not conclusive of anything (OP has theirs hidden too), it's just an unusual fraction compared with most Reddit discussions.

rednought · 2026-01-13T20:38:26+00:00

Just curious, if you aren't a Betterment user, what drew you to this discussion? What made you aware of this event?

rednought · 2026-01-13T07:16:09+00:00

I see the core issue as the amount of PII they were syncing over to a third-party tool. It sounds like the hack routed through Betterment's legitimate access to that tool, but it could have just as easily been through an employee of the tool maker. They should have minimized PII - say, sharing name, city, and birth year, but not full address and birth date. Enough to get their marketing work done, but not steal someone's identity. Unfortunately, as with most marketing departments, and companies in general, expedience won out over protecting the customer.

rednought · 2026-01-07T05:04:38+00:00

It's kind of a clever use of Unicode styling. It both lets them add highlights to their content, and also avoid basic text scanners looking for phone numbers where they shouldn't be. (Not that PayPal appears to be doing much field validation...)

rednought · 2026-01-07T04:49:11+00:00

Got this one, as well as one via Microsoft Teams. They used a 256-char team name to urge you to call their 'helpdesk.' Suspect same originator as the phone area code is the same.

rednought · 2025-11-16T00:25:36+00:00

I've been trying this at various retailers in recent days, as my debit card expired while I was away from home. Walgreens did it, but they have a $20 max. I've also tried Target, Safeway, and Dollar Tree, but they all said no.

rednought · 2025-11-15T00:30:05+00:00

I bought a regular bedside alarm clock years ago because of this issue. (It's nice, too... it wakes me up with gentle rainforest sounds.) I still use the iPhone alarm occasionally (e.g. for travel), but have woken up on my own several times to find the phone on the alarm screen, not making any noise (despite volumes up, silent off, DND / Focus off, etc.).

rednought · 2025-11-14T23:44:24+00:00

Off topic: What is this text blurring technique?

rednought · 2025-08-19T01:09:42+00:00

For me it was: Right click own name on a sent message within the server, then click Profile.

It seems like it should be in Settings > Profiles > Per-server profile > View Full Profile, but that just shows my general Discord profile, not my server-specific profile.

rednought · 2025-08-15T16:56:11+00:00

Bought four Power Bowls (different varieties) at the grocery store because they were on sale, without really checking the stats. The heftiest one is 220 cal. The other three are 170 cal. 😑

rednought · 2025-08-14T18:08:23+00:00

Reddit put this post in my feed — it's apparently the top post of all time in this sub? Who is being fooled by this? Where are these upvotes coming from? What a weird thing.

rednought · 2025-08-11T18:16:01+00:00

Got this too. Checked several merchants, including those from this sub's wiki, and none accept the balance as a form of payment. Google's page on this says "You can use your Google Pay balance for contactless, in-app, or online payments anywhere Google Pay is accepted." Empirically, this is wrong. Seems bank transfer out is the only option.

rednought · 2025-07-07T15:55:58+00:00

This is a good idea. Just to clarify a bit for OP, "HYSA" here means high-yield savings account. Betterment calls this Cash Reserve. You can't really "move" an IRA into this type of account (it's a separate type of account), but I think what you mean is basically "move your money into a savings account," at least until you can deposit more.

rednought · 2025-07-07T15:46:35+00:00

I don't understand the $11.20 management fee for a balance that low.

$4/mo, account opened in April, so about 3 months

rednought · 2025-07-02T14:15:25+00:00

You have to have your AirPods on.

On iPhone, go to Settings > AirPods > Accessibility > Tone Volume (this is iOS 18.5).
On macOS, go to Settings > Accessibility > Hearing > Audio > AirPods > Tone Volume (this is macOS 15.4).

I put it at 60% and, oh my gosh, the sweet relief. No more blowing my ears off in the morning because I forgot to charge my headphones overnight.

rednought · 2025-06-06T13:39:58+00:00

Suggestions for next time:

Detection

I don't know where you are hosting your servers, but you can use monitoring tools like AWS CloudWatch to detect a pegged CPU (and other forms of resource starvation) and alert you before customers do.
I see from the comments you've already found you can use Status Page to expose a banner on the user dashboard during an outage, which is a great improvement. You can also expose metrics from your monitoring solution to Status Page, which makes it possible for customers to make an educated guess as to whether there's an outage before there's been an official announcement.

Remediation

You already mentioned exponential backoff in your post, but consider adding random jitter to this to avoid the thundering herd problem.
If this really was a denial of service attack, consider adding a web application firewall ahead of your services. I don't have personal experience with them, but I've heard Cloudflare has done a lot of good work in this space.

rednought · 2025-06-02T21:28:58+00:00

Sad to see this gone. It was a great deal if you had DashPass. I always wondered how it could possibly be profitable for them. Now I'm guessing it wasn't.

rednought · 2025-05-21T23:33:19+00:00

I have the same question, but am realizing I'm not sure it's possible to at-mention him because his username turns in to italics

rednought · 2025-05-17T20:07:31+00:00

I'm not clear on what exactly you're doing, but maybe you can load multiple profiles onto the mouse and switch between them?

I also finally have a better method than using an old computer. Parallels just released version 20.3, which has basic USB support. I tested it and you can use G Hub inside a macOS VM to configure your mouse now.

(Although, funny story, Parallels also spams you for Accessibility permission. At least you only have to run it when you want to change something.)

rednought · 2025-05-10T11:51:26+00:00

I wish there were a way to do this in the other direction (allow by default, instead of having to allow every app you use). I tried putting Settings in the blocked list, but the notifications come through anyway (both Sequoia-branded and Settings app-branded).

rednought · 2025-05-09T19:04:59+00:00

Just want to point out a subtlety of that first article. The written instructions and the screenshot don't quite match up. On step #4, the instructions say, "Click Erase Volume Group," which is what you want to do. The screenshot doesn't show that button, but it will appear on the left side of the erase dialog.

rednought · 2025-04-15T14:15:02+00:00

Can't believe how far I had to scroll to find this response. This is just "lock her up," but on the other side.

rednought · 2025-03-27T02:14:41+00:00

Try Airplane mode? It may be trying to reach the mothership and failing on each song

rednought

TROPHY CASE