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