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Linux Users Are Unable To Manage Their Apple ID on Applecom (9to5mac.com)

Posted by msmash on from the stranger-things dept.

For some reason, Apple's website where you can manage your Apple ID (appleid.apple.com) is blocking users of Linux browsers from accessing it. From a report: Having access to the website is important to manage things such as payment information, two-factor authentication, and other account details. Even though the number of Linux users accessing the website must be relatively small compared to other operating systems, some iPhone users who use Linux on the desktop noticed the issue. This behavior was first explained by user Alexander Martin on Mastodon. He discovered that when the browser reports itself as being a Linux browser, Apple's website will block the access by throwing a "Bad Gateway" error.

11 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. But not Android by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    If the user-agent contains both Linux and Android, it's allowed.

    Sounds more like some intern fucked up.

    1. Re:But not Android by jythie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah.. I suspect some horrible mess of nested if-then-else clauses with some fall throughs or cases with errors in them.

    2. Re:But not Android by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      In the end, this will probably affect 25 people. Making sure things work with Linux is probably a job given to interns.

      This statement demonstrates the kind of utter ignorance that is the source of such problems.

      Nothing is needed for any web site to "work with Linux" -- the problem is that such sites arbitrarily reject web browsers with user agent data that claims the OS is Linux. If you run Linux and change your web browser's user agent info to spoof OSX, then the site suddenly works on that browser.

      I would bet that this affects a lot more than 25 people, as not only are there plenty of Linux users with Iphones, but there also must be one or two savvy Windows and OSX users who employ user agent obfuscating plug-ins on their web browsers.

    3. Re:But not Android by Albanach · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Fortune.com reported over 700 million iPhones in use in 2017 with an expected billion within a few years.

      If only a tenth of one percent of those iPhones were owned by someone who uses Linux on their desktop. you have a million folk impacted.

      Sure, Linux is a niche, but when you're the size of Apple, even small percentages quickly become big numbers. Let's be conservative ans say just 20% of Linux users buy their iPhone new - that still points to 140 million in revenue, not including any app store sales.

    4. Re:But not Android by infolation · · Score: 2
      Alexander Martin, the fosstodon.org person who discovered the issue writes:

      It sniffs your User-Agent.
      If it says Linux, Bad Gateway error.
      IT WORKS WITH A WINDOWS UA
      IT WORKS WITH A BSD UA
      IT WORKS WITH ... OS/2 UA

    5. Re: But not Android by infolation · · Score: 2

      Bear in mind we're talking about Apple, the company that maintains Linux's printing subsystem.

  2. Re:Server to server access by mccalli · · Score: 2

    That's what I thought too, although another possibility is that several JS frameworks compile for only specific browser targets. It's possible they have just omitted the target.

  3. Re:Apple and free don't mix well by JackieBrown · · Score: 2

    That doesn't make sense at all. Do you have an example of this - and that it only works using Linux servers?

  4. Re: Apple and free don't mix well by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Tell that to the cloud install that my business has. Right now, I'm paying the VPS for machine costs, and all my CM stuff is handled by Ansible playbooks. Total license cost? Zero. Were I to do the same in Windows, I would need at least 20 copies of Windows Server 2019 Data Center Edition, SCCM, a full volume license, and a metric ton of CALs. I then would need to throw in the time and effort to have patching done by SCCM, SCUP entries so third party stuff gets patched, AV software, and so on. Then, I'd need to have boxes for KMS activation, and so on.

    The Linux machines are configured so I can manually inspect erratas, and if the security patch is critical, they will fetch it themselves. Otherwise, I push stuff to them, test boxes first, then production.

    In house, I use KVM for virtualization. For authentication, FreeIPA. Backups? Cron + Borg Backup to borgbase, ensuring backups are encrypted, plus the SSH keys are append-only so ransomware can't take out backup repos.

    License costs $0. However, I do donate back to F/OSS projects because it is the right thing to do.

    Now, please explain to me again how Linux is expensive, and how it takes more time to learn, manage, and fix?

  5. Seems to be fixed by hawky · · Score: 2

    I just tried and it is working fine, yesterday I was getting the error.

  6. Headline should say "were maybe not able to" by thecombatwombat · · Score: 4, Informative

    I just got in fine with Firefox on Fedora 29 and I'm not spoofing the user agent or anything.

    It seems this was fixed within a few hours at most of the source article going up, and it's not clear exactly what user agent string got the error, or for how long, or even if that was definitely the thing that broke it. This is nothing.