I woke up to the strangest customer support conversation with Apple.
Around 8:15am, I checked my email and noticed I had been auto-subscribed to a free trial of Apple Music.
Weird. I'm a Spotify user, and wouldn't have started a trial. So, I asked my wife, and she said she hadn't done anything with Apple Music.
Hmm, maybe my account was hacked. That would be quite a predicament since I use 1password with crazy long passwords for all services. So, I contacted Apple Support over SMS to ask how and why the Apple Music subscription got initiated.
They told me that Apple auto-subscribed me because I was given a free month... and it was done at 5:14am (when everyone in my house was asleep).
The whole conversation felt like a phishing scam. Decided to move to phone support, and they are telling me my Apple TV in my living room subscribed me.
Is it possible for someone to remote into my Apple TV and auto-subscribe me? I wouldn't have guessed an Apple TV to be hackable.
Depending on your model of TV and how it's connected, it's possible for the Apple TV to be on and responding to inputs even if the TV is off. If it was on, and a promotional popup came up offering the free trial, then depending on just what the flow is for those popups, it's possible that a small child just fiddling with the remote could accidentally have accepted it.
(I know that our TV is often off while our Apple TV is on; I have no knowledge of how those promotional popups work, as I haven't accepted one.)
Density.io (https://www.density.io)
Senior Backend | DevOps | Linux C++
Remote for all positions
At Density, we build one of the most advanced people sensing systems in the world. The product and infrastructure is nuanced and one-of-a-kind. Building this product for scale has been an exercise in patience, creativity, remarkable engineering, laser physics, global logistics, and grit. The team is thoughtful, driven, and world-class.
As someone who recently drove down the path of learning all the new "hotness" in the DevOps world, I can safely say I came out of it with two learnings:
1. I have a much better understanding of what's happening behind-the-scenes
2. For most small startups, you should seriously consider the time (and therefore, cost) of investing in your own infrastructure.
For point #1, I think understanding your options and how they benefit your company is essential for you transition from a small -> medium -> large size company. The paradigms you learn by virtue of researching the new technologies might end up being applicable in other parts of your development process.
On point #2, I partially regret not deploying to Heroku, seeing where our system became stressed, and optimizing. Attempting to scale for things you don't know about yet is tough, and can lead you down a path of wasted time and money.
