First, I’d like to state that I am extremely grateful to all the people that have helped me in the past. It’s allowed me to stay in a safe place until now and have health insurance. However, October hasn’t been too kind to me. I was trying to get a job, but that fell through. I’m currently overdrawn, can’t afford the sadly expensive rent (and don’t have enough money to move to a cheaper location than Silicon Valley), I’m a month behind on my electricity bill, and I’ll lose all health insurance if I can’t pay October’s bill by October 30th. I’m also so overdrawn on my accounts that I can neither afford groceries nor can I afford the appointments needed to manage my disability. I have constant panic attacks from the fear of being evicted again due to my disability, as occurred in 2014. I lost everything.

In May of 2024, I was let go from my previous job because my disability wouldn’t let up, and I couldn’t get the medical assistance needed to properly treat the disability. I used up all my disability leave at my job at the time and was given an ultimatum by HR: Either come back to work or stop having a job. I chose the former. However, since I was still suffering from my disability, I couldn’t keep up with the productivity requirements needed to keep the job, and so I was let go.

On a semi-related note, I care an enormous amount about user privacy, and to that end, since May of this year, I’ve been working on an iOS application to help semi-automate the finding of privacy bugs or things that have been overlooked by Apple that leak either personal information about a user or leak unique identifiers that allow malicious actors/companies to track users across apps and devices to target them with malware or sell the user’s information to the highest bidder to serve ads to them.

Because Apple has a security/privacy bug bounty, I figured I was attacking two problems with one action:

Sadly, the latter hasn’t occurred. While Apple has fixed 3-4 (search for my name) of the 21 bugs I’ve written up reports for, Apple determined they weren’t eligible for the bug bounty at face value. One wasn’t eligible because I wasn’t the first to report it to Apple, which is understandable.

Luckily, a forthcoming release of iOS 26.x will fix a privacy leak I reported that is eligible for the lowest bounty. Sadly, Apple doesn’t pay the bounty until some weeks after the fix is released to the public, so there’s no way to get it in time to pay any of my October bills.

You can view my CV here, if you are so inclined.

So I’m kind of stuck as it is. I didn’t manage to get the job I was hoping to get based on my many reports to Apple. The bounty won’t be here in time, and I have no future prospects. I just need enough donations to allow me to pay my rent and insurance.

I really, really appreciate any amount you can offer.