[jiggawatts]

It's pretty obviously fake. A bunch of "level 1" (new) users, all with the same story? They literally mention the exact time & date in the same style, and mention the 1-minute lockout in the same way as well. Two of them use the same timestamp even, down to the minute.

Also, something I noticed working for large orgs with over 100K staff and 1M users: An appreciable fraction of the human population is simply mentally ill. Hallucinations, drug use, psychosis, etc... all have a non-zero rate. Given enough users, you'll get the same type that imagines being abducted by aliens and even makes police reports that sound suspiciously like the sci-fi movie that's popular at the time.

[clawoo]

Not necessarily disagreeing with you regarding the people that are imagining things, but with a device so relatively popular as the Apple Watch, this could be very well explained by a software update that messed up the touch screen "driver" and is generating ghost touches. As the update rolled out, it started affecting more and more users who turn to the forums to look for help.

One consequence of these ghost touches would be inputting the wrong PIN which will initially lock the device for one minute, so I don't see what's strange about that.

Which messages, specifically, are you referring to with "exact time & date" and "same timestamp"? I skimmed through them but nothing of sort stood out.

[rahkiin]

Not only that, but all those new users actually bothered to look for a pre-existing topic on their issue instead of making their own new topic. Unlikely.

[znpy]

I own an iPhone and i would be a level 1 / new user if i had issues.

Otherwise, why on earth would i care about signing up to apple forums?

I’d only go there if i had issues (obviously)

[II2II]

A lot of the people here are much more experienced with technology, so our behaviour is going to be different, but I have a hard time understanding why someone would sign up for a forum as a first step for obtaining assistance. Calling the vendor, sure. Using vendor support options that connect me directly to their staff, sure. None of the people posting about the issue mention taking other prior steps in obtaining support (even though a couple of posts from established members say they should).

I suppose posting to the vendor forums is fine if you need support. On the other hand, I do not think it is an acceptable source of information about a security flaw in a product. There information provided is not verified. The sources are not verified. We don't know whether the details are true, a misinterpretation (innocent or malicious), or made up. In other words, there is no reason to trust what is being said. If I came in here suggesting that my computer was hacked, I would expect people to respond with similar incredulity. (I am simply someone who posts to a forum. There is no reason for people to trust anything I say, particularly if the posting doesn't contain detail on reproducing the problem.)

[dch82]

Personal experience from browsing n = n + 1 apple support threads: Just message support. It’s much faster and has a higher chance of producing a result.

[Firmwarrior]

Their support raises issues directly to the dev teams when they happen often enough, too. There's a good chance the touch screen team is working their asses off right now on this already

[jeffhuys]

Okay, that covers 1/5th of the parent comment.

[dontupvoteme]

FWIW - The commonality of alien abductions can actually be decently explained by sleep paralysis + hallucinations (+ the mind already having been 'seeded' by the idea).

It's something that perfectly sane people could experience and not realize it was a hallucination because it's a quite rare & unknown phenomenon(and one that you often won't mention because everyone thinks you're crazy if you say it).

[GeoAtreides]

That fraction is about 4%: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

[jiggawatts]

You get different percentages depending on what you’re counting.

I regularly choose one of the first countries in those forms that collect your info so they can spam you. There’s some marketing person out there who is convinced Albania and Afghanistan are a cloud computing Mecca.

That doesn’t make me “crazy”.

Similarly, over 5% of students are on ADHD medication but they’re not what I would consider nuts.

What I mean is that there are people that would be homeless vagrants shouting about space worms burrowing into everyone’s brains, but they’re on medication and got a government job where from they’re nearly unfireable even if they stop taking their pills one day.

Two of my friends are conspiracy theorists… in private. It’s basically a fan-fiction club to them, a setting in which to make up stories.

I’ve met an IT guy who truly believed that software updates were a conspiracy and made sure that every system in that place used the “clean” golden image from the original CD and was never ever patched.

There are statics like “20% of all adults have some mental health issue” and then there is the guy who literally spends his day planning your murder because you didn’t talk to him at the water cooler.