Apple locks me out of my developer account by requiring 2fa

Right now I am completely locked our of my apple developer account.

I don't enjoy using apple products. I really dislike getting locked into a single ecoysystem. So I don't use any apple products. However my company has an app in the app store. I'm the manager for that app, and I need to be able to pay for the yearly app subscription and agree to the regular updates to the agreement. As I don't use any apple device I can't set up apple 2fa.

Why could apple not support authy like most normal companies? I've sent apple an email about this - we'll wait and see what they say.

Just another joy of using Apple.

This is so silly.

As this is Apple I'll probably be told to buy some Apple device to actually log into my developer account. So ridiculous.

Productivity Hack - How to block websites like reddit or youtube that are distracting you from your work.

I've read James Clear "Atomic Habits" book and I would highly recommend it for anybody who is trying to be more productive during the day or accomplish a goal. There is so much I like about this book but I'll leave that there for today.

So part of this book, it talks about creating an environment in which you can not fall into bad habits. Will power is overrated. Creating an environment in which you can't fall into bad habits is the key.

So in that regard, I've wasted more hours than I care to admit watching youtube videos and scrolling through reddit. Now you could use a browser extension like blocksite, but that is selling all your clickstream data so i wouldn't recommend it. And it only blocks it in one browser, so you can open another browser and look at it there.

So here is how to do it:

Add the following to your hosts file

127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com

and that's it. Youtube is now blocked, so enjoy all your new found productive time.

Your hosts file is usually located at c:\windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

Sometimes i had to remove this line, to load youtube for a valid work reason and I would forget to block it again. You can use windows scheduler to copy over a blocked hosts every 5 minutes to block youtube again. If you are interested in that let me know in the comments. I can do another article about that.

Paypal Messes up old subscriptions beginning with an "S-"

If you're reading this you likely searched for "old_subscr_id". At least that is how I found this article which helped me solve my latest problem with paypal.

So what's the problem? Well paypal have decided to change the subscription numbers for existing subscription agreements.

Old subscription ids begin with "S-" and look like  "S-49541622WD5398914". New ones begin with "I-" and look a little like I-YU43BS793VG6.

That was fine, until paypal around October 25th 2018 decided to change the subscription id of existing subscriptions from the old format to a new format. And there was no way provided to give some mapping between the old and new.

Yes you have that right. The customer, paypal and the business all used the same subscripton id for the lifetime of a subscription. This was very useful, as we could all make sure we were dealing with the same paypal subscription. Paypal thought this was too uncomplicated and decided to change this.


So if you are like us, and have a business based on subscriptions, it's a little difficult to link a paypal subscription with the subscription in your database when paypal decided to change the id that was linking them.


This was a bad idea paypal. You do not change a subsciption id. We have a database of those old subscription ids and now we have no way of linking them to these new subscription ids.

Absolutely IDIOTIC.

The only way we were able to solve this was to look at the instant payment notification logs that we get from paypal. This was the only place where we could find a link between old and new subscription ids and it looks like this.

address_country_code: US
address_name: XXX
notify_version: 3.9
subscr_id: I-4876BS793VG6
payer_status: verified
business: xx@xx.com
address_country: United States
old_subscr_id: S-1HN53302FN648702V
address_city: xxx

So this was how we linked this information and solved our latest problem from paypal.

Although I'm really thinking the best solution of all is to remove paypal as a payment option. Paypal support were absolutely atrocious. Absolutely no help provided from their support.

VSFTPD require_ssl_reuse ssl ftp

While attempting to connect to a vsftpd server using SSL with a php script to upload a file I encountered this error message:

Warning:  ftp_put(): SSL connection failed; session reuse required: see require_ssl_reuse option in vsftpd.conf man page

The transfer does not complete successfully but an empty file is transferred.

http://vsftpd.beasts.org/vsftpd_conf.html

The vsftpd page says

require_ssl_reuse

If set to yes, all SSL data connections are required to exhibit SSL session reuse (which proves that they know the same master secret as the control channel). Although this is a secure default, it may break many FTP clients, so you may want to disable it. For a discussion of the consequences, see http://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2009/02/vsftpd-210-released.html (Added in v2.1.0).

Default: YES

This is an option to thwart the connection attack described here:

http://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.ie/2008/02/your-ftp-ssl-solution-is-really-secure.html

The php client does not support the option “require_ssl_reuse” so if you disable require_ssl_reuse in the /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf it will work, but you don’t have the extra protection this feature would give you.

My name's Paul

Hope you enjoy your stay!!!