[HN Gopher] Oracle Suspended My Account
___________________________________________________________________
Oracle Suspended My Account
Author : stradiv
Score : 368 points
Date : 2022-08-02 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (batin.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (batin.sh)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| At this point, if you trust companies with terrible, terrible
| track record and you get bitten, what do you expect us to say?
|
| People keep repeating "vote with your wallet", and almost nobody
| does. It's already hard to make peace with that, but we learned
| to.
|
| However if most of the IT community place billboards saying
| "don't go into the bear cage" for years, and you still do, what
| can we do?
| bombcar wrote:
| It's hard to vote with your wallet on a free tier, to be fair.
| Radim wrote:
| I read "vote with your wallet" as a shorthand for not giving
| resources to offending entities.
|
| It doesn't have to be literally banknotes out of your wallet.
| Not spending your attention or time or future on _Google /
| Oracle / abusive digital platform of the day_ counts too.
|
| I'm with BiteCode_dev here: if people manifested their
| business preferences clearly and consistently, by such
| peaceful but proactive "voting", the world would be a better
| place. Once you accept you have no power, you truly don't.
|
| Actions speak louder than words, and companies listen. "Do as
| I say, not as I do" is not a successful recipe in general.
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you think these free tiers of offerings are not making
| money because _you_ don 't pay them, then you are confused on
| who the company's customers really are. The free service you
| are using is the bait to get you the product to offer
| yourself to their customers without being the wiser. It's as
| shady as shady can be, but hey, it's free!!!
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| Well, one day this Turkish student will have money (I wish
| him/her that) and will be willing to purchase a paid service,
| and he/she will not choose Oracle because of this bad
| experience.
| dncornholio wrote:
| I don't think there's much to see here because I suspect we
| aren't seeing the total picture. When it's suspected fraud, it's
| not smart to give out details on the suspension.
|
| What's odd in this post is that he goes into detail on what steps
| he did. Too much detail on something that's irrelevant.
|
| So I'm not making any assumptions about OP or Oracle.
| jordemort wrote:
| I tried to sign up for a developer account with them to try out
| their ARM servers and met a similar brick wall. They won't
| activate my account and support won't talk to me, except to tell
| me that they won't talk to me. I tried hitting up sales and
| didn't get any luck there either. Too bad for them, I probably
| would have ended up paying for some servers if things worked out.
| lgxz wrote:
| Amazon suspended my Kindle Paperwhite a week ago.
|
| I was reading a book when it suddenly said that my kindle had a
| critical problem, and gave me 3 choices: 1. Unpair my Amazon
| account with the kindle. 2. Sign out my account 3. Contact
| customer service
|
| I tried choice 2 but it didn't work. I contacted customer service
| and they told me their engineers will investigate the issue.
|
| Then I got a phone call from Amazon. They told me their engineers
| had fixed the problem and I only need to reboot it.
|
| I rebooted it. The "critical problem" gone. Still don't know
| what's wrong with my kindle.
| [deleted]
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Well. I guess that's how Oracle works. After trial period ends
| they shut down random accounts that are using their 'Always Free
| (not for long)' services.
|
| End of the discussion, Oracle suspended your free tier and while
| it sucks, it's a free tier and Oracle can suspend it as they
| wish, it's in their TOS (edit: in case of suspected fraud).
|
| Do not rely on free tier for anything important, free tiers are
| here to test the service sure, not to build an app that is
| important to you.
|
| They will probably never tell you the real reason for legal
| reasons.
| smoothgrammer wrote:
| The TOS says they will provide advance warning. Oracle is in
| breach of their own contract.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > The TOS says they will provide advance warning. Oracle is
| in breach of their own contract.
|
| Not in cases of suspected fraud, they won't. Connecting these
| services with a VPN is the very definition of shady.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Where in the TOS does it say this?
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| > Connecting these services with a VPN is the very
| definition of shady.
|
| I don't think OP mentioned using a VPN.
|
| But even if they had: really, managing a cloud
| infrastructure via VPN is so far from shady that it's often
| recommended or required by many tech companies' security
| policies for people working from public wifi locations
| among other circumstances, as an added layer of protection
| against local eavesdropping and sometimes also for specific
| predictable networking routing within a cloud network
| perimeter.
|
| I realize that OP is acting as a student/hobbyist, but
| there's no inherent reason why someone immersed in best-
| practice tech culture would necessarily be shady if they
| applied this VPN recommendation to their own personal
| tinkering. Many of the benefits of using one still apply.
|
| It would, of course, be shady if Oracle intends to deny
| service to people in Turkey and the VPN use is to
| circumvent that restriction. But I don't believe that there
| is such a restriction on place.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > But even if they had: really, managing a cloud
| infrastructure via VPN is so far from shady that it's
| often recommended or required by many tech companies'
| security policies for people working from public wifi
| locations among other circumstances, as an added layer of
| protection against local eavesdropping and sometimes also
| for specific predictable networking routing within a
| cloud network perimeter.
|
| We're talking about 2 different kind of VPN here, and you
| know it, please don't spread confusion on that topic.
| Nobody needs to connect to his own database service using
| some B2C service like North VPN to obfuscate where the
| actually queries come from.
|
| > It would, of course, be shady if Oracle intends to deny
| service to people in Turkey and the VPN use is to
| circumvent that restriction. But I don't believe that
| there is such a restriction on place.
|
| They probably don't, problem fixed. I'm not siding with
| Oracle, but Oracle owes absolutely nothing to a free tier
| user suspected of fraud.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| > We're talking about 2 different kind of VPN here, and
| you know it, please don't spread confusion on that topic.
| Nobody needs to connect to his own database service using
| some B2C service like North VPN to obfuscate where the
| actually queries come from.
|
| Honestly, a student/hobbyist from Turkey who is trying
| specifically to defend against a local eavesdropping or
| censorship threat, or to work around restrictive firewall
| configurations on public WiFi networks, might very well
| use exactly the same types of VPNs you're describing, for
| some of the same legitimate purposes as any professional
| would use their corporate VPN. After all, they don't have
| a corporate IT department to maintain their own private
| VPN. These types of companies probably have more friendly
| pricing for a student/hobbyist from Turkey than the VPN
| companies whose marketing material focused on corporate
| use cases instead of circumventing Netflix geo blocks.
|
| You're right that it would not be the ideal type of VPN
| for database access control, but I can imagine it being
| an element of viable defense-in-depth strategies where
| one is in a country where most inbound local traffic
| other than your own would be malicious. Imagine coupling
| a restriction on source IP range with TLS + IAM
| credentials, or something like that. Requiring a presence
| on the specific chosen VPN company's netblock drastically
| shrinks the threat model vs allowing connection attempts
| from 0.0.0.0/0.
|
| > I'm not siding with Oracle, but Oracle owes absolutely
| nothing to a free tier user suspected of fraud.
|
| I agree that they don't _owe_ anything to such a user,
| but equally we don 't owe it to Oracle to refrain from
| criticizing these kinds of false positives in their fraud
| detection with no avenue for redress. Anyone who either
| experiences or hears about these kinds of outcomes is
| justified both in criticizing Oracle and in being less
| likely to recommend or choose Oracle for their or their
| employer's cloud computing needs.
|
| In turn, Oracle owes it to themselves to at least
| consider that possible consequence, and to allow at least
| enough redress to keep the severity of this reputational
| impact within whatever range they deem acceptable.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Oracles owes absolutely nothing to someone using their
| free tier. Oracle doesn't care why would anybody use a
| public VPN and would certainly mark any person who does
| that as a fraudster.
|
| Finally, here is their pitch for their free tier.
|
| That ends that inane discussion with your misplaced moral
| arguments(also known as entitlement) quite clearly.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32322140
| xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE wrote:
| Wow, what an absolutely horrible take. The free tier is
| supposed to be a representative introduction to what you can
| expect from paid tiers. As long as you aren't breaking the TOS
| there should be no reason for suspension, and if there is a
| suspension, it should be handled gracefully and respectfully,
| _as literally promised by their own friggin ' TOS_. The paid
| tier doesn't have a separate TOS either.
|
| Oracle dropped the ball big time, and they should go out of
| their way to fix this ASAP. If I were their customer, which I
| am not and will never be, I'd be migrating my shit right now.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Don't rely on any free tier if your work is important at
| first place. That's a realistic take, and don't use a VPN to
| connect these services either, Oracle knows it.
| nojito wrote:
| TOS is voided in cases of suspected fraud.
|
| Additionally they make no promises of informing the user.
|
| >When reasonably practicable and lawfully permitted, we will
| provide You with advance notice of any such suspension.
|
| I think people are confusing billing payment notices with
| termination.
| roastedpeacock wrote:
| Glad to see I am not the only one who gives pause to the recent
| aggressive marketing of Oracle Cloud services.
|
| Oracle is the epitome of rug-pulls.
| locutous wrote:
| OCI it's pretty confusing.
|
| They have two free tiers, the expanded initial time based and the
| always free tier. As far as I can tell, when your time runs out
| on the expanded free tier they turn everything off and you have
| to re provision into always free or do an account upgrade.
|
| They deny a lot of credit cards they should accept. I have been
| unable to upgrade on any of my cards.
|
| Since provisioning always free tier a second time I've not had
| any issues with them turing off resources.
| ricktdotorg wrote:
| > when your time runs out on the expanded free tier they turn
| everything off and you have to re provision into always free or
| do an account upgrade
|
| yes, this is exactly it! nailed it
| matt_heimer wrote:
| Having different tiers that are free is pretty typical.
|
| AWS has three free tiers - https://aws.amazon.com/free/
|
| MS Azure has two free tiers - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
| us/pricing/free-services/
|
| Google Cloud has two free tiers - https://cloud.google.com/free
|
| OCI has two free tiers - https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
| locutous wrote:
| The only cloud service I've had pro actively turn off
| provisioned resources is OCI. I've used all but Google cloud.
| That's a pretty distinctive difference IMHO. My post attempts
| to describe when and why. Though I have only used time based
| free credits on the other providers.
|
| Despite my always free having been up a year now I'm still
| reluctant to put production critical resources on it because
| of the experience.
|
| I'd be more willing if they would take one of my cards for an
| account upgrade as I otherwise generally like the service.
| adlpz wrote:
| I had this exact experience. Created the account, built a "home
| lab" style server over a couple of weeks, worked on several
| projects and experiments, all within the free tier limits.
|
| When the initial free credit expired, _poof_ it all
| disappeared.
|
| Luckily the boot volume was still there so I reprovisioned with
| the same block storage and worked.
|
| I was a stressful morning though, I had no backups.
| pure_simplicity wrote:
| I have a similar experience. Recently my account got suspended
| for no reason. I have been logging in and reading up on the
| tutorials / documentation to see how to use Oracle Cloud and I
| hadn't even started using any of the free resources yet, but my
| recently created account got suspended nonetheless. Unless my
| account was hacked (which I would like to be notified of) I
| cannot have violated any ToS. I got the same non-response when I
| asked why my account was removed.
|
| To me it looks like Oracle isn't being honest about their "always
| free" tier and they just shut down non-paying accounts to cut
| costs if they don't foresee them converting into paying customers
| any time soon. If it were a bug / mistake, then I would have
| expected better support (restoring the account or providing a new
| account if that's not possible), but being ghosted by a big
| corporation when you know for a fact that you did nothing wrong
| is pretty frustrating.
|
| I have not had such a bad experience with any cloud company ever.
| I sincerely hope Oracle changes, but as it stands I will never
| spend a dime with Oracle and I will dissuade anyone from using
| their services, because of how unreliable they have demonstrated
| themselves to be.
| [deleted]
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Same. Though I created one instance with one ARM core just to
| test and forgot about it. Oracle must have used some model to
| see I wasn't going to pay or something.
| yonixw wrote:
| I guess I'm the lucky one. Still has my free VM from Aug 2021.
| They DID remove the public IP suddenly some time ago...
| kasajian wrote:
| bob29 wrote:
| hestefisk wrote:
| Very annoying for you. Is it correctly understood that Oracle
| offer a free tier instance with 24 gigs memory? _That_ sounds too
| good to be true comparing to other vendors.
| toyg wrote:
| They moved late into the game, and have to compensate their
| tardiness and generally low appeal with incredibly generous
| allocations. They can always pull that back later when they
| feel like, after all, like OP found out today...
| stradiv wrote:
| Yes. 24GB of RAM and 4 OCPU.
|
| Source: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free
| hestefisk wrote:
| That sounds crazy desperate from Oracle's side to lure in
| customers from larger cloud providers and avoid getting
| sucked further into irrelevance. Better to pay up and get a
| proper dedicated instance that you control (I use Hetzner
| dedicated servers and they are great).
| hestefisk wrote:
| Disclaimer - I don't work for Hetzner.
| [deleted]
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Wow, that Oracle Cloud customer support transcript the author
| found is particularly damning. What a terrible customer
| experience. I guess this is Oracle-ese for "you're not rich
| enough for us to care."
|
| > Customer: Can you help me to see what happen with my Oracle
| Cloud account please?
|
| > Agent: let me check it . one moment
|
| > Customer: Sure. It says in the Tenancy details that my user is
| inactive. Even if I try to upgrade and manage payment it says I
| don't have access to perform that operation :(
|
| > Agent: thank you for waiting. Unfortunately, we are unable to
| .resolve this issue Sorry, this is all the information we can
| provide. thank you for contacting us
|
| > Customer: Wait, who can help me? Please, provide me at least
| another way to contact the proper support team.
|
| > Agent: we would be the correct department for this issue, but
| unfortunately we are unable to help further with this issue
|
| > Customer: But why? You didn't tell me what was the problem, or
| what I did wrong... This is very disappointing
|
| > Agent: I am afraid I am unable to advise you further. Thank you
| for contacting us . bye
| Iolaum wrote:
| Could the account be flagged for Anti-Money Launder
| Investigations or something? In those cases regulations say
| that if you inform the customer of it you are conducting a
| tipping offense - which carries criminal penalties. Therefore
| in those cases representatives will try to say as little as
| possible.
| tyrfing wrote:
| Definitely reads as a KYC or fraud flag of some sort. You'll
| never get any information about those.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| I think a money laundering flag in particular is unlikely; if
| so, consider how we got here:
|
| - Customer is likely not a money launderer, or he wouldn't
| have posted this transcript as evidence.
|
| - How many money launderers buy cloud computing credits with
| their dirty money? How would there have been money activity
| at all on the free tier?
|
| - Who's doing the flagging? An internal list of people Oracle
| thinks is shady? That's concerning. Or actual law
| enforcement? (See points 1 and 2.)
|
| Rather I bet it's some internal sweep that Oracle _thinks_
| needs similar treatment as money laundering. Whatever process
| managed to flag these accounts clearly casts way too wide a
| net.
| treis wrote:
| >- How many money launderers buy cloud computing credits
| with their dirty money? How would there have been money
| activity at all on the free tier?
|
| Lots, I think. Dirty money goes in and clean bitcoin comes
| out.
| shagie wrote:
| The transcript section begins:
|
| > Even one member has shared it's customer support (which
| is not available for Always Free users).
|
| That isn't _his_ transcript (it is from April 25th).
|
| The person _is_ into cryptocurrency and NFTs (
| https://batin.sh/blog )
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Customer is likely not a money launderer, or he wouldn't
| have posted this transcript as evidence.
|
| The atuthor could have been a false positive
|
| >How many money launderers buy cloud computing credits with
| their dirty money? How would there have been money activity
| at all on the free tier?
|
| Buying cryptocurrency mining compute or something else with
| stolen commit cards is not a remotely new concept.
|
| >Who's doing the flagging
|
| It could be an internal system.
| [deleted]
| soco wrote:
| Well he had a support discussion. When I got terminated on
| Tumblr, support never answered on the open case. So there's
| room for worse.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Kafka would be proud of this dialog.
| dessant wrote:
| I wait for the day that this conduct becomes illegal, because
| it can destroy people's lives. It is actually surprising that
| consumer protection laws do not yet address the issue of due
| process.
| mpol wrote:
| I would assume it is contract based and thus falls already
| under contract law. You could start a civil case. There is no
| need to make something illegal that already has ways to get
| resolved.
|
| Part of the problem in the US is that a civil courtcase is a
| horrible thing. At least in Europe the loser pays the court
| costs of the winner. That already makes this kind of
| behaviour less likely. In the US you have to spend lots of
| money on a court case and they will just drag it out and
| bleed you dry. The court system is designed to protect the
| rich minority from the poor majority.
|
| Also, do not throw away the baby with the bathwater. A shop
| owner should have ways to get rid of a bad customer. And yes,
| even if it is just based on a face that you don't like.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Many consumer protection laws streamline resolution
| specifically to unbog the courts.
| seanhunter wrote:
| > You could start a civil case
|
| Good luck winning any kind of lawsuit against Oracle also.
| Their legal dept (like their sales dept) is famously
| aggressive and well-staffed.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > Good luck winning any kind of lawsuit against Oracle
| also.
|
| They don't always win, but it can be hard to see if the
| case does not go to trial. Settlements typically include
| confidentiality provisions to prevent publication of the
| result. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.upcounsel.com/confidential-settlement-
| agreement
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| https://palisadecompliance.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2013/11/or...
| btown wrote:
| See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
| bastardoperator wrote:
| You just bypass their legal department by filing a small
| claims case. Do it in CA, you can sue for up to 10K in
| damages.
|
| A valet crashed my car, I sued for diminished value for
| 9999.99 dollars. Their attorney told me I would never see
| a penny, told me they would move for change of venue and
| tie me up in civil court. I went to court, won, they
| appealed, I won again. About 5 days later I had a check
| in the mail for 9999.99. I paid 100 bucks to file and
| serve them through the police department and had to take
| two days off, but I won and it was kind of easy.
|
| They can bring an attorney to represent them, didn't seem
| to help them in my case with zero legal expertise.
| dingleberry420 wrote:
| > Their legal dept (like their sales dept) is famously
| aggressive
|
| Just like their support, apparently!
| kube-system wrote:
| There is no valid contract here. Consideration is one of
| the elements of a valid contract.
| akudha wrote:
| People underestimate the cost, time and other resources
| associated with a court case. Especially the stress.
|
| My employer (a tiny company) sued another company because
| they owed them a bunch of money. We are in the right,
| legally and ethically. The amount of time, stress and money
| it takes to sue someone, even if you are 100% in the right,
| even when the law is 100% on your side - it is insane.
|
| The only real winners are the lawyers. It is better to just
| avoid companies with shitty service than go to the courts.
| dessant wrote:
| Once a platform is past a certain size, they should no
| longer be allowed to permanently ban a person without due
| process.
|
| See for example the people whose lives have been affected
| because they were banned from Facebook for absolutely no
| reason, and they could no longer access Facebook
| Marketplace. I think it's very dangerous to create a new
| type of second-class citizen that can no longer access
| certain online services, because naive algorithms were
| allowed to go rampant, without any checks and balances.
| shagie wrote:
| Unless there is fraud checks involved, I don't think the
| person's account is banned. It may be suspended and in
| which case this can be rectified by adding a payment
| method and upgrading the account from the free tier to a
| paid tier.
|
| They can still access oracle cloud services... just not
| for free.
|
| As a note, think about the egress charges they were
| racking up (on a free tier) by doing a mongodump for five
| hours.
|
| The free tier is meant as a teaser for migrating to a
| paid account - not a perpetual production workload.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| The support case says:
|
| > Even if I try to upgrade and manage payment it says I
| don't have access to perform that operation
|
| So no.
| shagie wrote:
| That customer support chat is from someone else from
| April 25th.
|
| It is not from the blog poster. There is no indication
| that the blog poster communicated with Oracle Support in
| that blog post. Everything from Oracle support in the
| blog post is from other people and paraphrased Q&A on the
| Oracle Community Support forum (where the support became
| a private correspondence with the person rather than out
| in the open).
|
| At the very end:
|
| > Q: Did you create a thread in Oracle Community forum?
|
| > A: Yes, no answers.
|
| And digging into the FAQ for the free tier...
|
| > Does Oracle Cloud Free Tier include service level
| agreements (SLAs) and technical support?
|
| > Oracle Cloud Free Tier does not include SLAs. Community
| support through our forums is available to all customers.
| Customers using only Always Free resources are not
| eligible for Oracle Support. Limited support is available
| for Oracle Cloud Free Tier with Free Trial credits. After
| you use all of your credits or after your trial period
| ends (whichever comes first), you must upgrade to a paid
| account to access Oracle Support. If you choose not to
| upgrade and continue to use Always Free Services, you
| will not be eligible to raise a service request in My
| Oracle Support.
| onli wrote:
| Not for 5 hours. Five hours ago. Author is talking about
| a "huge" database, but then mentioned 1GB, which is tiny.
| In that case there were no significant egress charges.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| egress is usually metered.. Oracle could simply put a
| limit on their free egress. no need to ban
| jsmith45 wrote:
| It is planned to become illegal in the EU soon.
|
| The Digital Services Act requires that if on the basis of
| law/copyright or terms of service violation the service is
| doing any of the following actions, then there are things it
| must do: removing or hiding content, stop providing service
| to a user, suspend/terminate a user's account, or
| suspend/terminate monitation for a peice of content or user.
|
| It must provide a clear explanation of why they are
| suspending the account, including the precise grounds on
| which they are relying. If the action is being taken due to
| feeling some piece of information violates the terms of
| service, they must identify which term they feel was
| violated, and an explanation of why they feel the information
| violates that term. They must clearly indicate if automatic
| processing was used to come to this decision.
|
| For only online service that is not a micro or small
| enterprise they must: Provide a complaint handling system for
| appealing these decisions, where the user can explain why
| they feel the decision is incorrect. The appeals must be
| handled by qualified staff, not solely based on automated
| means.
|
| The law originally had binding out-of-court arbitration as a
| mechanism to resolve disputes here (like a company refusing
| to consider a well founded appeal within the 6 month window),
| but the latest version has downgraded it to non-binding
| arbitration ("dispute settlement bodies"). If the consumer
| wins, the service provider has to cover all costs of the
| arbitration, but technically they are not bound to do as the
| arbitrator decided. If the customer loses it must pay its
| portion, which is free or a nominal charge. Only if a
| customer file the dispute "manifestly in bad faith", does the
| customer ever need to cover the service's portion.
|
| See Articles 15, 17, 18 of https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doc
| eo/document/TA-9-2022-0269... for the details as approved by
| the European Parliament.
|
| ----
|
| Bottom line the behavior shown here by oracle would be a
| massive violation for failing to provide an explanation, and
| failure to offer the required dispute mechanism.
| biztos wrote:
| I discovered recently that my bank (in Germany) can cancel my
| account without cause. My best guess is they were purging the
| books of Americans, they refused to tell me the reason, but
| my takeaway is that if this can happen in the consumer-
| protection nirvana that is the EU, don't hold your breath
| waiting for exploitative practices to be outlawed.
| fanf2 wrote:
| This is probably to do with the requirements that the IRS
| imposes on foreign bank accounts belonging to US citizens.
| https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-
| finance/10291...
| SSLy wrote:
| Well, EU banks hate dealing with USA exporting their laws
| to their (states') citizens abroad, regarding reporting
| etc.
| biztos wrote:
| Indeed, my other German bank will promptly disown me if I
| stop living in Germany, but they at least are upfront
| about it.
|
| Leaving aside my annoyance at the first bank's behavior,
| it was a definite learning moment, in that I had assumed
| a "normal" bank could not just kick you out because they
| feel like it. In Germany, indeed they can!
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| Did they give you your money promptly? How?
| biztos wrote:
| Well sort-of. They have to give two months' written
| notice, and they did, and I was very lucky to catch it in
| time as I'd been traveling and they had of course not
| bothered to send me an e-mail nor call any of the three
| numbers they had for me.
|
| So I had about a week's warning and I was able to
| transfer my money out to other accounts. Had I not done
| that, they would presumably have held on to it until I'd
| gone in and personally told them where to send it, which
| would have locked me out of my money had I been abroad --
| it was my primary account, held in good standing for 13
| years.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Sure, it starts with due process for the customer and spreads
| like a cancer to the employees...no thanks. Democracy will
| not be tolerated here. --Corp Overlords
| LegitShady wrote:
| Dealing with the customer support agents of these companies in
| cases like this is when the technological dystopia becomes
| obvious and unavoidable.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| This is why I'm finally slowly starting to self-host things.
| It's not really convenient compared to *aaS, as it's a whole
| lotta new stuff to learn with great consequences for an error
| (because of the security issues), but I would be absolutely
| screwed if I needed customer service for any of these "customer
| is the product" services I use (e.g. everything Google). That
| alone is worth the hassle.
| striking wrote:
| I kind of understand not wanting to be at the whims of your
| service provider, but Oracle is not a particularly amazing
| example of a typical SaaS provider in any sense of the word.
| Knowing the first thing about Oracle's history or how it
| operates should be enough for anyone to choose any other
| service provider. GCP's support has been fine for me, I've
| seen folks have acceptable experiences with AWS' support,
| etc., etc.; I don't really see this as a good reason to go
| off the grid unless that's something you're already looking
| to do.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I guess we should expect our isp to start banning us without
| giving reason in the future too.
| Animats wrote:
| Here's Oracle's marketing pitch for their free tier.[1]
|
| _" Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Free Tier includes a free time-
| limited promotional trial that allows you to explore a wide range
| of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure products, and a set of Always Free
| offers that never expire."_
|
| Their FAQ:[2]
|
| _" When you've reached the end of your 30-day trial or used all
| your Free Trial credits (whichever comes first), you'll be
| notified and will have a grace period of 30 days, starting from
| the expiration date, to upgrade to paid. You will no longer be
| able to create new paid resources, but your account will remain
| active. Your resources will continue to exist for a few days,
| allowing you to upgrade your account and keep your resources
| before they're reclaimed by Oracle. If you do not upgrade to paid
| by the end of the grace period, your Free Trial service instances
| and data will be deleted."_
|
| Which is reasonable enough.
|
| I can't find their terms of service or EULA. Most web sites have
| a "legal" or "terms" link at the bottom of pages, but Oracle does
| not. Google can find their web site terms of service.[3] But
| that's for the web site only, not their cloud services.
|
| [1] https://docs.oracle.com/en-
| us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
|
| [2] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/faq/
|
| [3] https://www.oracle.com/legal/terms.html
| gurchik wrote:
| They differentiate between Free Tier and Always Free. The
| disclaimer that your instances will be deleted after 30 days
| seems to be worded specifically to not apply to the Always
| Free, isn't it?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I was a little confused about the author of the article talking
| about running large resource free services.
|
| I signed up for an 'always free' Oracle Cloud account, and I have
| had a small 700MB VPS running for a very long time, never any
| problems. Admittedly, my CPU utilization probably averages down
| around 5%. Perhaps OC has an automated system in place to detect
| "greedy free users?"
|
| It probably makes very good economic sense for OC and GCP to
| provide one 'always free' micro VPS because when I need something
| larger for myself or a customer, it is natural to use their
| services because I am familiar with them.
| bebrws wrote:
| How does Facebook stand here? Haha I have an account I tried to
| go through the reset account process more times than I can count.
| No reset email was evvvvver sent. Don't waste ur time adding the
| friends that can reset your account.
|
| But hey, maybe Facebook does favors. And maybe it's all just one
| big dumpster fire.
|
| Who's to say
| nix23 wrote:
| I made a account a year ago and some friend's (around 4) too, we
| never had any problems...just saying, maybe something else is
| going on here.
| midislack wrote:
| Google did the same to me recently. Face it, Cloud was a stupid
| idea all along
| rldjbpin wrote:
| joke's on you! my card gets debited and reversed but never gets
| validated to even get started lol
| Havoc wrote:
| I'm pretty much just using mine for testing sandbox purposes.
|
| Unlike my other cloud accounts it doesn't have a billing card so
| has utility in the billing footgun sense - but build anything on
| top of it hahaha nope
|
| Oracle is really harming their rep with the seemingly random
| closures and killing all the goodwill created via the
| exceptionally generous allowances
| tomcam wrote:
| I would instantly vote for a federal politician (senator,
| congressperson, president) who authored a bill clearly stating
| that there would be transparency in the suspension process, and a
| defined set of actions for recourse, appeal, etc.
|
| But it's not likely to happen. All the tech companies have
| virtually all these slimeballs (both parties) in their pockets.
| Plus many of the pols and their staff are rotating in and out of
| positions at these companies as employees or lobbyists.
| tlogan wrote:
| On the other hand, I run a very small SaaS and I can tell you
| that abuse is really a big problem. Stolen CC and similar things
| are so common.
| efxz wrote:
| password4321 wrote:
| If you want a VC-funded "free" PostgreSQL db (500MB, 2GB
| egress/mo, paused after 1 week inactivity), check out Supabase.
| onli wrote:
| That sucks, but honestly, this is why I did not jump on the
| Oracle cloud offering with all its free resources. It's Oracle,
| it's a trap. I assume they saw an activity spike they did not
| like and thus blocked you. Of course they don't feel bound to
| their TOS, again, it's Oracle...
|
| Maybe someone here knows a fitting alternative? 1GB is not much
| data, but it might be over the limit for free tiers.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Same behavior is reported by a lightly-paid individual user
| previously(use translators). Same story, account gets suspended,
| Oracle _be_ "you take our words seriously and understand what
| you've done to us" and paths end there.
|
| 1: https://zenn.dev/shinshin86/scraps/022e44712274fd
| josephcsible wrote:
| Why is the cloud still so popular even though stories like this
| one are so common now?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Because it's free and provides some what of a convenience. It
| doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
| rob_c wrote:
| yup, you let the free tier get into a suspended state without a
| VM for more than 24hr. happened to 2 people I know and myself.
|
| Nice in principle, free gets no support or nobody to shout at and
| it's Oracle so, yeah, sucks if you put anything important on it
| :P
| speedgoose wrote:
| I don't understand how Oracle can convince companies to sign with
| them considering their behaviour.
| zaarn wrote:
| Because it integrated with OracleDB.
| speedgoose wrote:
| But if you are still stuck with OracleDB, you are probably
| not happy about that and you can get it in other clouds
| providers anyway.
| kube-system wrote:
| If someone is "stuck with OracleDB" then it sounds like
| they don't make the purchasing decisions.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Oracle doesn't sell to you. Oracle sells to your vice-
| president, on the golf course. The reason they have this free-
| tier at all is to be able to say "yes, your engineers can go in
| and evaluate this for free".
| speedgoose wrote:
| Can't a CTO say << no >>?
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Same way that lawn mowers convince people to stick their hands
| into the blades, despite common sense and all the warning
| stickers screaming at you to not do that. It seems expedient in
| the moment, you're not thinking about long term consequences
| and just want to fix a problem fast right now.
| chimprich wrote:
| One of the many infuriating things about this story is the
| useless "contact your administrator for help" message beloved of
| many orgs with multi-user accounts set up.
|
| It would be nice if they didn't trigger that for admin accounts,
| because that only adds to the annoyance when you're trying to
| figure out what has gone wrong. It's just a lazy way of saying
| "we haven't bothered to figure out exactly what's gone wrong
| here; we've just hit a generic try/catch, so we're going to pass
| the buck! Good luck searching through our inadequate
| documentation and guessing what's wrong, sucker!"
| l30n4da5 wrote:
| I have never trusted Oracle with anything important.
| ohCh6zos wrote:
| If you don't own it then you can be cut off at someone else's
| whim. The cloud is to the cloud provider's benefit not yours.
| rambojohnson wrote:
| Oracle who?
| Erlangen wrote:
| I remembered I had a similar experience with IBM cloud last year.
| I created an account, created several VMs and deleted them. Then
| after half an hour, boom, my account was banned, telling me
| something like "violated our policy".
|
| Interestingly, I just tried to log into my IBM cloud account and
| it was successful. I don't know how and when I was un-banned. I
| received the email about the ban but not the unban.
| nojito wrote:
| Free tier user and no statement if he had a payment method
| attached to his account.
| pure_simplicity wrote:
| in order to sign up you have to provide credit card details, so
| you automatically have a payment method attached to your
| account
| jwilk wrote:
| My understanding is that's only used for identity
| verification, not as a payment method.
| nix23 wrote:
| Correct, you have to attach it a second time to use it as a
| payment method.
| bombcar wrote:
| I have no clues beyond what's in the article, but I suspect that
| a combination of being from Turkey (author spells it that way)
| and being on the free tier triggered some sort of auto-script
| that attempts to detect crypto-mining or something.
|
| Attempting to use a VPN to distract from the access from Turkey
| would probably also trigger some _other_ auto-detector.
|
| Free tiers give free tears; they're always fraught with danger.
| svnpenn wrote:
| > Turkey (author spells it that way)
|
| ... that's the correct way to spell it:
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| For context, there was a discussion recently regarding the
| change of the official (english) name of the country:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32066453
| lief79 wrote:
| Recent change:
|
| The Republic of Turkiye changed its official name from The
| Republic of Turkey on 26 May 2022 in a request submitted to
| the Secretary-General by the country's Minister of Foreign
| Affairs.
|
| https://www.un.org/en/about-us/member-states/turkiye
| [deleted]
| numpad0 wrote:
| By the way, turkey the bird was so named because it was
| believed to have been brought to the anglosphere by Turkish
| merchants, so if the nation is to be renamed, so should be
| the bird.
| metayrnc wrote:
| Why would being from Turkey have an effect in this situation?
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| For the exact same reason being from Russia would. Hostile,
| unpredictable, militaristic country, ran by a wanna-be
| dictator, committed to an active invasion of another
| country's sovereign territory.
|
| (My point is those two tend to go hand and hand: higher
| percentage of unwanted traffic originates from authoritarian
| lands still engaging in 19th century style barbarism.)
| orangepurple wrote:
| > Hostile, unpredictable, militaristic country, ran by a
| wanna-be dictator, committed to an active invasion of
| another country's sovereign territory.
|
| Just imagine living in America in 2003 with 9/11 fresh on
| everyone's minds. Were you there? Do you remember the
| mindset of adult Americans in 2003? What did the US
| military do in 2003? What did the average CNN-watching
| American feel and want? I remember well. We wanted to
| bulldoze Saddam Hussein and his "Axis of Evil" because
| terrorism. We wanted to raze Iraq to the ground as revenge
| for "harboring terrorism" and "WMDs" which were about to be
| unleashed upon our friends. Americans were in a complete
| frenzy, psychosis, and out for blood. Do you remember? I
| remember soldiers wanting nothing more than to "take out
| those stupid rag heads." Did the occupation ever end? Did
| Iraq have anything to do with 9/11? Did anyone suffer the
| consequences of the invasions back in America besides the
| Americans killed overseas? Do you think Russians are not
| actively being brainwashed by their government to support a
| war like the Americans were for their wars? Think again.
| The media is more powerful than ANY WMD because it
| perpetually and incessantly corrupts the minds of its
| viewers.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Sure I remember. Let's talk about that another time.
| Those things have been discussed. You are missing some
| key plot elements such as the entire rest of the UN
| security council.
|
| Whataboutism aside, those events are not 1:1 relevant to
| what is going on today. Turkey maintains an indefensible
| invasion of Cyprus, and engages in acts of wargames by
| frequently flying fighter jets over Greek airspace,
| constantly taunting them and threatening to take more of
| their land, laying baseless claims to Aegean seas, and
| Russia maintains an indefensible invasion of Ukraine, and
| followed a very similar plot.
|
| Missing in either of these two situations was 16 other
| nations imploring the country soon to be invaded to
| comply, and the largest act of terrorism in the modern
| world.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I remember people doing daily protests against the war
| and organizing large demonstrations.
|
| There was a lot of support for that war, but that support
| was far from unanimous, especially on the grassroots
| level. I do not remember any supporters of the war who I
| knew personally who wanted to raze Iraq to the ground
| and, as I recall, the antipathy was more directed at the
| Saddam regime and not the Iraqi nation.
|
| Your overall point is valid, whitewashing enter nations
| with a single brush is inaccurate and unfair. However,
| you are doing the exact thing you are trying to
| criticize.
| sozforex wrote:
| There were at least 16k detainments [^1] of anti-war
| protesters in Russia since the start of the invasion,
| most of them in the first month of the invasion if I
| remember correctly. Somewhere in the first 2 months it
| became more risky to protest the war - fines starting at
| 50k rubles (~1 median monthly salary) and the risk of
| criminal persecution increased (in addition a high risk
| of being fired from a job).
|
| [^1]: https://data.ovdinfo.org/anti-military-events-
| report
| shkkmo wrote:
| I was not intending to imply that the Russians did not
| protest. They did and generally faced far higher
| consequences for doing so.
| sozforex wrote:
| Just added a bit of info/context to this branch of
| discussion, without any additional intent.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| Unlikely any of that, and more likely that a large
| percentage of their "unauthorized usage" comes from the
| country.
|
| Companies find it easier to simply block or restrict access
| from certain countries because it's "more hassle than it's
| worth".
| stunpix wrote:
| I would like to support your opinion here. I've been a
| beta-tester for one bank as well as I've been reading
| it's CEO's blog where he was occasionally explaining what
| stays behind their decisions as a bank and I had learned
| a bit from their back stage.
|
| When you as a company (especially financial one) is
| serving thousands or millions of customers you must
| have/rely on statistics with a heuristic to detect
| fraudulent or an abusing customers. Also you have to
| decide whether you will have any troubles by giving a
| loan to a particular person. Such heuristic systems are
| scoring using hundreds (if not thousands) parameters like
| age, marriage status, sex, whether you believer or not,
| what is your smartphone (e.g. according to bank's
| statistics Android users are tending to not return
| credits more ofter) and so on...
|
| What's most important: banks will never disclosure what
| has lead them to their decision like to decline in a
| credit line. Just to avoid further cheating with their
| heuristic systems.
|
| I believe the author had become a victim of such
| heuristic which is likely had detected something unusual,
| then it considered his profile + recent connections
| (perhaps he had specified a different country than
| Turkey), and finally <<free tier>> had added some
| alarming amount to scoring. Otherwise I can't explain why
| support had wrapped up a chatting so quickly and
| unfriendly. For me everything points out on that there
| was a distinct reason for them to cease his account and
| they won't like to disclosure it in any way.
| [deleted]
| Shorel wrote:
| Every company that does international business has a table
| that ranks problematic countries, some where they don't do
| business, or some where they do with proper preparation, or
| some where they do business with some caveats.
|
| The list would include descriptions like: "officials
| routinely expect bribery to perform their normal duties",
| "has armed conflict, travel is restricted", or simply "very
| high inflation, only accept USD and EUR".
|
| Only countries not in the list are considered open to do
| business normally.
|
| Turkey would be part of that list, with some danger level.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Allegedly Turkey has a lot of fraud.
|
| Many years back, a guy who worked where I worked at the time
| (we'll say, Company A) left and formed a competing company
| (Company B). It was OK, nobody really considered it real
| competition. He was a colorful individual, and so his
| official company blog contained a lot of screeds about
| personal gripes. This gentleman was Turkish, which becomes
| important in a second.
|
| One such a saga came when a Turkish company (Company C) tried
| to buy their product. They refused to process the
| transaction, and a company representative literally over
| email told them to go F themselves, saying it's company
| policy to not do business with Turkey or Turkish people
| (again, the founder being Turkish) because of the huge
| amounts of fraud from that country. The spurned customer
| posted their version of events on _their_ company blog too.
|
| It was a great time to work at Company A. This saga was our
| Friday cafeteria chatter.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > being from Turkey [...] and being on the free tier
|
| I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, I assume this
| wasn't the tone you were aiming for, but this _sounds_ a little
| like you think that 's _okay_. Which, to be clear, it
| absolutely isn 't.
| bombcar wrote:
| I don't like it, but it is how companies act; I feel that
| they should be much more upfront about it instead of hiding
| behind the scripts - just deny access from the country to
| non-paying customers, or otherwise make it explicit.
| OrangeMonkey wrote:
| There is a pattern in technology companies and user reports of
| them:
|
| * User does thing that appears to be fine.
|
| * User is banned
|
| * User has no way of fixing this, ask for redress, they are just
| cut out now.
|
| I think this pattern is something that should be held in contempt
| and is eventually thrown away. If I had to guess, though, it
| won't be.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| It's worse than that. You omitted
|
| * User has no idea what they did wrong, and nor does anybody
| else.
|
| And the trouble with that is, nobody can learn what the
| offensive behaviour was. (Perhaps that's intentional?)
| vkou wrote:
| It's not intentional against legitimate users, but it is
| intentional against people abusing the system, because
| telling them how they got caught will let them adjust what
| they are doing, to avoid getting caught in the future.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Yes. Exactly. Telling people what they've done wrong
| enables them to behave better in future. Isn't that what we
| want... rehabilitation?
| vkou wrote:
| That works on people who are using your system with good
| intentions.
|
| That does not work on people who are using your system
| with malicious intentions (and who face zero personal
| consequences when they get caught again, and again, and
| again). They don't get rehabilitated, when you tell them
| which rule you broke[1], they just adjust their malicious
| use to work around that rule. Rehabilitation is only
| possible when both parties are operating in good faith,
| which is why it is done with threat of prison, fines,
| revocation of parole, etc. It can't be done when the
| 'rehabilitated' party can just reneg on the agreement
| with zero consequences.
|
| The point of anti-abuse rules isn't the letter of the
| rules, it's the intent behind them. 'There's no rule that
| says a dog can't play basketball' only works in
| children's fairy tales.
|
| There's a reason why no large firm or financial
| institution will tell you the _why_. It 's not because
| they think you have good intentions, and they hate you.
| It's because they are afraid you have malicious
| intentions, and they aren't interested in holding your
| hand as you defraud them.
|
| Of course, people in category one get burnt by this, and
| then complain on Twitter/FB/HN.
|
| [1] If you want to live in a world where anti-abuse
| systems tell you which rule you broke, you'll probably
| need to also live in a world where there are very serious
| consequences that are - with high consistency - inflicted
| on people breaking those rules in bad faith. We don't
| live in that kind of world, things like the CFAA are at
| the same time, both overly broad and draconian and
| largely toothless.
| jjav wrote:
| > The point of anti-abuse rules isn't the letter of the
| rules, it's the intent behind them.
|
| This is really indefensible abusive behavior by all these
| cloud companies. It needs to be made illegal.
|
| Imagine if the real world operated that way. The police
| arrest you and throw you in jail for unspecified reasons
| and you're not allowed to know why or defend yourself.
|
| There are excellent reasons why they must instead charge
| you with a specific crime and the laws that define those
| crimes are written down and you can look them up. And
| then they need to present evidence and you do get a
| chance to defend yourself.
| vkou wrote:
| > Imagine if the real world operated that way.
|
| The real world does operate in exactly that way, with a
| scant few exceptions. It's often even less scrutable than
| what I described.
|
| > The police arrest you and throw you in jail for
| unspecified reasons and you're not allowed to know why or
| defend yourself.
|
| Since you're saying this, it doesn't sound like you've
| had a lot of interactions with police.
|
| The police can and absolutely do arrest, intimidate,
| harass, and violently assault people for unspecified,
| fabricated or utterly bullshit reasons, and then release
| them (because they can't justify those reasons in a court
| of law, but they have an incredibly broad, completely
| unaccountable amount of inscrutable discretion that they
| can use to make your life a living hell.)
|
| A store can absolutely throw a nuisance customer out, and
| ban them from returning, without specifying exactly how
| _much_ of a nuisance they permit that customer to be.
|
| Hell, even in a court of law, one of the most
| deterministic billiard-ball-newtonian-world aspect of our
| life, the ultimate decision of life or death, freedom or
| innocence is decided by an opaque group of 12 neural
| networks, each full of their own biases, prejudices, and
| each heavily influenceable by courtroom demagoguery. Who
| don't - and aren't required to - explain their decisions.
|
| _There 's very few, very narrowly defined set of spaces
| in our society where the rules are clearly, fully spelled
| out, with little to no room for arbitrary interpretation,
| and where decisions can be scrutinized._ They are an
| incredibly narrow exception, not the rule, and they tend
| to be more present in situations where the consequences
| of a mistake are more serious. (Questions of housing,
| credit, money, life and death.)
|
| Unfortunately, access to a rented VM doesn't quite rise
| to that level of seriousness. It does, however, tend to
| offend programmers, who are both over-represented here,
| and often mistakenly think that the world is a fair
| newtonian-billiard-table.
| bowsamic wrote:
| No, the goal is to identify problematic humans and
| blacklist them forever
| Shorel wrote:
| "Your free instance used more than 12345* CPU credits
| under 24 hours, therefore you exceeded the threshold for
| automatic termination."
|
| This number is published, and someone creates a script to
| launch hundreds or thousands of free instances that all
| run exactly 12344 credits every 24 hours and are used as
| spam boxes, or cryptocurrency mining, or something
| similar that degrades the platform for all other users.
|
| * meaningless number, pulled out of nowhere, as an
| example.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Helping the handful of customers you fuck over accidentally is
| not web scale. So, they are not interested. If you can't
| automate it, they automate it anyway.
| jnwatson wrote:
| It helps to understand the motivation why "Big tech" operates
| this way. Any time a company offers something free that is
| Turing complete, abuse occurs at incredible scale, scale that
| can only be opposed through automated means.
|
| The next level of abuse is that the same abusers will use all
| the same escalation methods as legit accounts. They want to
| figure out why they got blocked so they can evade the blocking.
|
| It takes a lot of work to separate the legit accounts from the
| abusers.
| jl6 wrote:
| The problem is tractable when the users are paying customers.
| The issue arises when the product is "free". The users treat
| their account like a burner phone, and the service providers
| treat the users like disposable cattle.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I thought so too buy many abusers will create accounts en
| masse & add stolen fake credit cards as payment options (or
| create virtual cards with very small limits? Not sure if
| services disallow those kinds of options for that reason).
| People are quite creative.
| deltree7 wrote:
| You missed out an important step
|
| * HNers, redditors and TikTokers somehow always believe the
| user's side of the story even though they have absolutely no
| clue about the context or the integrity of the complainer
| because pitchfork and anti-corp is always the default stance
| rather than due process on social media
| OrangeMonkey wrote:
| You are not wrong at all.
|
| That said - I would only state that myself, and more than a
| few users here I imagine, have been in situations where we
| did nothing untoward and were banned, suspended, had a
| corporate automatic system take negative action for us that
| was undeserved.
|
| I think most folks are willing to assume a corporate
| "banality of evil" because they have seen it.
|
| You are 100% right though, this could be warranted.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| In general, this point of view has some merit; but this is
| Oracle.
| josephcsible wrote:
| If you get sued and don't bother to show up to court, the
| judge will take the other side's word as gospel and you'll
| lose with a default judgment against you. This isn't unfair,
| though. Similarly, since these companies never give their
| side of the story, I see nothing unfair about assuming
| they're in the wrong.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Actually companies absolutely should take that path.
| Society deserves Trump and Musk way of dealing with public
| instead of being professional and courteous.
|
| Oracle should absolutely out the guys whom they suspend
| because they have kiddie porn or did illegal transactions
| on their site or break terms of services.
|
| Seeing Musk and Trump's success, one bold company will do
| it and will be enormously successful in deploying an army
| of cults against the Karens of the world. As they say, you
| can't bring a knife to a gun's fight
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It sounds good but in practice it's a no win situation
| though. Going to war with current and/or former customers
| can make you look worse than saying nothing. Also, I
| don't know if I would put Trump and Musk up as model ways
| of responding to criticism vs just straight up using
| their money and power to bully those people away.
| mooreds wrote:
| Don't forget step 4 and 5:
|
| * User posts on HN (or reddit or someplace else)
|
| * If post gets attention, issue is resolved via manual,
| backchannel efforts. If post doesn't get attention, issue
| remains unresolved.
| OrangeMonkey wrote:
| I always forget step 4 and 5 - the most important steps as
| its the only thing that helps the user.
| soco wrote:
| I tried that for my Tumblr account termination. But because
| Tumblr is not Google, nobody cared.
| notlukesky wrote:
| That does not work for Oracle because they are not on these
| forums to the extent of say Stripe or FAANG engineers.
| nixcraft wrote:
| Well, I tweeted the link, but my experience shows that
| Oracle is not a darling company for most solo developers.
| Typically solo devs go with DigitalOcean, Linode and co
| (or free stuff from AWS, even Lightsail offer some
| support). Either way, I hope they get some help.
| [deleted]
| zaarn wrote:
| Oracle doesn't care about HN unless they can use HN as a
| direct source of money. Users being mad on HN doesn't matter,
| being mad at Oracle does not cause Oracle to make profit.
|
| If OP wants the issue fixed, the most likely solution is to
| drop affiliate links in the comments, as a positive revenue
| flow might get one of Oracle's sales-lawyers to investigate
| the commotion and see if more monetary sources are available
| to be cracked open.
| cyxxon wrote:
| Hm, I just yesterday read a post where someone stated that
| they could not get their account fixed while they themselves
| were a SWE at Google (I think), so especially 5 is not in any
| way guaranteed.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Hmmm. It almost sounds like some hidden egress cost limit got
| reached and when he didn't have payment on file, it nuked the
| account.
| blfr wrote:
| Their free tier is 10 TB of outbound traffic. Hard to reach.
| petilon wrote:
| The ironic thing about Oracle and Larry Ellison in particular, is
| that they invented both cloud computing and chromebooks back in
| 1996. They called it Network Computing and Network Computer
| respectively. Ellison talked about centralizing complexity (what
| we today call the cloud) and having simple end-user computers
| that he called network computers (realized today as chromebooks).
| Back in 1996 this was an outlandish idea.
|
| All this should have given Oracle a tremendous lead. Oracle
| squandered away that lead, and today they are a nobody in cloud
| computing. Ellison recently appeared in a joint video with Satya
| Nadella where they announced a collaboration to make Oracle RDBMS
| available on Azure.
| dontbesquare wrote:
| Why not just host your own? Why rely on Oracle for anything at
| this point?
| kouteiheika wrote:
| It's interesting to see that they also adopted the current
| industry standard of automatically banning people at random, not
| telling them why and not giving them any way to rectify it. But
| then, well, I mean, it's Oracle. What did you expect?
|
| Normally something like this would put them on my "will never use
| any of their products nor work with them" shitlist, but it's
| Oracle, so they were already there since, like, ever.
|
| Also, obligatory:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
| capkutay wrote:
| It's a free cloud service. If you rely on someone else to host
| your compute/storage at no cost, prepare for getting little or
| very delayed support. Ask all the YouTube creators or Instagram
| users that had their accounts randomly shut off and had to do a
| lot of work to get it back. This isn't specific to Oracle at
| all. Or try AWS and get a surprise $10k bill that they won't
| refund.
| supermatt wrote:
| Have you had a surprise 10k AWS bill they wont refund? My
| understanding is that they are (or were) pretty good at
| writing those off.
| mywittyname wrote:
| There is some criteria you have to meet first. I believe
| your project must have monitoring in place for billing
| alerts.
| jerf wrote:
| Oracle being Oracle, I imagine that A: they're annoyed they
| didn't get to invent the process and B: they're _very very_
| annoyed that there 's no way to ban people at random, not tell
| them why, not give them any way to rectify it, _and_ keep their
| money, since it 's free tier. That apex post-capitalism there.
| wombatpm wrote:
| He should be thankful he was just banned and not served with
| a lawsuit - Oracle's typical move.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Yeah I'm not happy to read this, but this is basically what all
| big tech does nowadays. And small tech companies, even if they
| have better customer service will probably break your service
| by accident. In this case though he seems to be using the free
| tier which, if you need to use professionally, you shouldn't be
| using
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I think if you're making a list of big tech companies that will
| sometimes randomly shut-out customers due to automated
| monitoring, then that's all of them isn't it? I've seen a story
| about every one of them I'm sure. It's not a problem with
| individual companies, it's a general societal problem.
| kragen wrote:
| You should probably disclose when commenting on this thread
| that you are an Oracle employee.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| True. But he's also not wrong. I've lost track of how many
| companies have been on HN for doing this. Google
| especially. (I'm employed by neither oracle nor google.)
|
| Some automated system just cancels you, and somehow these
| big tech companies often just...don't have customer support
| phone lines so you can't talk to an employee unless you go
| to the office.
|
| It's a deliberate cost savings on their part that they seem
| to have just...gotten away with. I think there's a need for
| some sort of regulation here where if someone gives you
| money, you should be entitled to a phone number to call
| them at.
| [deleted]
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Its a good reason to choose Open Source, thats what it is.
| superchroma wrote:
| yeah it's getting a bit tough
| Closi wrote:
| Eh, even if it happens everywhere it's frequency is different
| and some companies are easier to resolve it than others - I
| much prefer my chances with Microsoft than with Google for
| example.
| rch wrote:
| I've found that both are pleasant to work with, on the
| cloud side at least.
|
| That pleasant demeanor doesn't always translate into
| getting immediate results, but how could it really?
| tedivm wrote:
| I found working with Google people impossible, which
| includes on the account side. They are rude and
| unhelpful.
|
| I had an issue where the domain verification system
| Google uses was broken. There was a backend issue on
| their side where the Google Webmaster Verification worked
| fine but their Cloud Run product couldn't read it. Rather
| than help me their product manager said that Cloud Run
| was a preview service so it was my fault for using it-
| and then he preceded to recommend another service
| instead, although that service was also in preview.
|
| This is just one example of many. GCP is the only service
| I've used where product managers will straight up insult
| and lie to users, and they'll do it publicly too
| (following their accounts on twitter is almost hilarious
| for how rude they are). Unless your company has nine
| figures in revenue GCP will happily crap all over you.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| > I found working with Google people impossible, which
| includes on the account side. They are rude and
| unhelpful.
|
| I ran a business on GCP and paid for the $150/month
| support option. I was honestly pretty amazed at how good
| the support was (like, multiple google engineers stepping
| through my code line by line to find the root cause of an
| issue). For $150 a month (and only a few thousand a month
| total GCP spend) this seemed like a really good deal and
| included 24/7 4-hour response times.
|
| This was at least five years ago however - no idea if
| they still offer this plan today.
| tedivm wrote:
| They laid off all of those people who used to help you
| and outsourced support.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cloud-layoffs-
| support...
| lenkite wrote:
| Having experience on both MS and Google platforms for our
| multi-cloud product, I can confidently state that
| Microsoft is far more responsive than Google.
| bhk wrote:
| A "societal" problem that somehow mainly manifests in big
| tech?
| deltree7 wrote:
| Tell me how you have never worked at a firm that works at
| scale without mentioning it.
|
| Big Tech companies have 3,000,000,000 customers.
|
| You are not special. If you want special treatment, use
| mom-and-pop services or pay premium.
|
| Economics 101 and oh Math 101
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Yeah these companies are so large and so automated that
| they find it hard to interact with individuals.
| mpol wrote:
| Yes, the US is designed around the idea of a rich minority
| that is protected against the poor majority. How will that
| get fixed, what do you think? ;) The rich majority has
| their arm up in the government, the poor majority only gets
| the illusion of democracy and justice and freedom.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| It will get fixed just as soon as the socialists and neo-
| marxists obtain power, and then ... create an oppressive,
| centralized, and corrupt authoritarian regime, just like
| everywhere else they gain power? Like, seriously, what
| are you talking about? The US is designed that way as
| compared to what other society?
|
| In every society under the sun, money translates to
| power, and people with more money tend to have more
| power. The trick is to try to balance freedom to make
| money and spend it how you choose with limiting bribery
| and corruption, and no country gets that perfect because
| it's a hard problem with serious tradeoffs.
| philjohn wrote:
| I'd argue that's due to scale and scale alone.
| vintermann wrote:
| At least Hacker News isn't randomly suspending accounts
| without notice...I think.
| kevinh wrote:
| Shadowbanning definitely happens on HN.
| bowsamic wrote:
| You must be new here
|
| HN offers personal service, but it comes at the cost of
| appeasing to a petty tyrant
| bob29 wrote:
| datavirtue wrote:
| See. ^^
| mrtksn wrote:
| HN is actually exceptionally good. They have an e-mail
| address that will respond to your requests promptly,
| explain what happened and why it happened and if you are
| reasonable they will be reasonable with you too.
| bt4u wrote:
| They are.
| dingleberry420 wrote:
| HN has a rich history of shadowbanning unwanted users.
| Everyone should turn on "showdead" on their profile,
| which, to be fair, is at least an option.
| Bayart wrote:
| They really shouldn't. People don't get randomly
| shadowbanned. Turning it on just shows a whole lot of
| vile, aggressive, hysterical rubbish.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| "vile, aggressive, hysterical rubbish."
|
| Also known as "wrongthink".
| namecheapTA wrote:
| I have had many posts on here flagged. I usually know
| they will be flagged but I want to see just how leftist
| and hivemind this place is so I know how much to reduce
| the value of the posts I read by.
| robocat wrote:
| Do any social networks use GPT3 autogenerated replies to
| deceive the shadowbanned into thinking that they are not
| shouting into the void?
| thrownblown wrote:
| maybe get dall-e to make some trolling comments to even
| siphon off some of that vitriol into the void
| theta_d wrote:
| Knew what that link was without clicking.
| rustqt6 wrote:
| It is not an industry standard. ONLY Google does it. And now
| oracle. So if you decide oracle, remember to deride Google too.
| zorg42 wrote:
| It's always the same: you get what you pay for. No company offers
| something for free: If it doesn't cost anything, you're the
| product:
|
| They will use usage-data to optimize their commercial offerings,
| they will try out features in non-critical (aka: free) accounts
| first - so not to offend the paying customers.
|
| In some cases (e.g. free web-mailers like gmx, Instagram, FB etc)
| the free versions are mainly vehicles for advertising.
|
| Why should Oracle be any different? I cannot see their motivation
| to offer anything for free... they are *only* money-driven.
| bombcar wrote:
| The free tiers are marketing (and quite powerful at that) - I'm
| surprised Amazon doesn't match it, but AWS is the big fish in
| the pond.
|
| If you start playing with a free tier cloud and decide to "go
| big" you're almost certain to keep using that cloud and begin
| to pay. (This is the reason that Google will give out nearly
| infinite "credits" to startups for their cloud, I hear).
| xuki wrote:
| > I cannot see their motivation to offer anything for free.
|
| Oracle is not alone. AWS/Google Cloud also have free tiers.
| They want you to get to know the system and might grow out of
| the free tier. But Oracle's offer is significantly more
| generous than Amazon's or Google's.
| sneak wrote:
| Why do people who pay nothing feel entitled to a) service and b)
| customer support (neither of which is free to provide)?
|
| This makes no sense to me.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Imagine someone offers you a free 1-year lease of a storage
| unit. You accept and go put some stuff in it, Six months later,
| you go to get something, and find that they put an extra lock
| on it and now you can't get to your stuff anymore. Should you
| just accept that your stuff is gone now, since the unit was
| free in the first place?
| jjnoakes wrote:
| > Why do people who pay nothing feel entitled to service
|
| Because the service was offered for free...
| sswaner wrote:
| One constant in my 20+ year tech career is: Never trust Oracle,
| work to eliminate their presence wherever possible. They
| consistently prove themselves to be predatory and extortionist in
| all transactions.
|
| Want proof: Ask them if you can convert to a paid service to make
| your "TOS violation" magically disappear.
| upupandup wrote:
| I tried to use their free tier but when I tried to provision a VM
| it would say not allowed.
|
| Seems like the coke and women got to Larry Ellison's head and
| he's not really focused anymore
| iameli wrote:
| Oracle sales has been all over us for many months to try and move
| over to their cloud offering but all I ever hear are stories like
| this. Pass.
| tomrod wrote:
| Oracle offers worse products than open source and gives you
| that privilege you pay for and can never use fully.
|
| I'm bitter about their KB documentation being paywalled. Their
| community ecosystem is nightmare fuel. Burleson Consulting is
| right until they are deprecated or were wrong to begin with --
| but at least it is accessible. AskTom is retired.
|
| And for the past several years their attempts at "us too!"
| cloud offerings look like the slow recognition that its best
| days are far behind it.
|
| Hard pass with all the invective thoughts I can muster.
| miniwark wrote:
| > Burleson Consulting
|
| Still most of the time they are the one stop solution to my
| Oracle database problems. Tanks to them!
| tomrod wrote:
| Right? What a wonderful maven trap. I love their stuff for
| when I face the Oracle dragon!
| rexreed wrote:
| The more this keeps up, the more we'll be back to where we were
| in the 1990s - self-hosted apps on non-cloud infrastructure that
| are owned and managed by the companies and orgs who build on
| them, and not held hostage by cloud companies who have built
| rent-seeking businesses and eliminated any sort of human support
| while automating functions with unaccountable and flawed
| algorithmic decision-making systems.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I see the economic benefit of the cloud and
| the freedom of not having to manage your own infrastructure, but
| increasingly the cost and risks associated with being beholden to
| an organization's arbitrary behavior with lack of recourse is not
| something you can depend on for the long-term. We're coming back
| full cycle to decentralized systems.
| moreira wrote:
| > We're coming back full cycle to decentralized systems.
|
| You say this as if it's something that's happening, but it's
| not. There's a few pockets of self hosted bits here and there,
| but that's not new. We are not coming back to decentralised
| systems, and we will -never- go back to that in any significant
| number.
|
| Most people are not going to give up the cloud to go back to
| bare metal. Most people are not going to give up their zero-
| maintenance SaaS app to go self-host something. All of it is
| just too convenient, and you then also have the inertia working
| against you; there's a whole generation of developers now that
| has grown up without ever administering a server. They're not
| gonna give up their Lambdas and drop down to a lower level,
| just like I'm not gonna give up my interpreted languages and
| drop down to C, even though it'd perform a hell of a lot
| better.
|
| I'm with you - I like self-hosting, and I run everything I can
| on bare metal, and I hate everything costing money every month.
| But there's no future in which people decide "oh I'll give up
| the convenience and the extra money I can make from this" and
| go back to the old way of doing things.
| rexreed wrote:
| Of course nothing is inevitable. Things never go back to the
| old way, but things do revert. Just look at some of the
| replies here and you'll see comments such as
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319989 and others. Is
| decentralization an inevitability? No. But as I said above,
| the _more_ that cloud companies do these sorts of customer-
| adverse actions, the more we 'll see this movement to
| decentralization.
| [deleted]
| csomar wrote:
| Using this logic, we'd be still using landline phones. The
| reason decentralized/baremetal is not popular is the same
| reason why cloud is: It's not as practical.
|
| Once there is the infrastructure to make it as practical as
| cloud (or more), the change will happen.
| rexreed wrote:
| Landline phones are an example of centralized
| infrastructure. You don't own anything but your phone, and
| the landline company owns and manages the rest, and you can
| be cut off at any time. Landline vs. mobile isn't as
| different as you might think. The business model is the
| same (monthly subscription). The only difference is the
| lack of being physically tethered to your voice connection
| and of course the addition of data services.
| jjav wrote:
| > We are not coming back to decentralised systems, and we
| will -never- go back to that in any significant number.
|
| In the 70s when mainframes (effectively same as cloud, remote
| access to someone else's computer) were king and small
| personal computers and workstations were just a toy, it
| seemed ridiculous to think centralized mainframes could ever
| be replaced.
|
| So I will hold hope that things will swing back the other way
| at some point. As the cloud companies become more and more
| powerful they will inevitably become ever more abusive, so at
| some point enough people will look for better ways.
| Krisjohn wrote:
| If you don't think that flipping back and forth between
| centralise and decentralize is a cycle that will repeat
| forever, then you haven't been in computing long enough.
| datavirtue wrote:
| "not having to manage your own infrastructure"
|
| I left a client last year because the job seemed to be nothing
| but cloud infrastructure management. God damned constant
| nightmare.
| rexreed wrote:
| What's worse than managing infrastructure you own? Managing
| infrastructure you don't.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| OP, I would suspect you have been flagged by some US agency for
| investigation. In these cases the vendor does not have much
| leeway in telling you what is going on, as revealing the details
| of an ongoing investigation is likely forbidden.
|
| What kind of content is in the app? Do you have any user
| generated content like comments, etc.? Could be a user of yours
| posted something that flagged your app.
| kube-system wrote:
| Unlikely, unless OP is lying about doing sketchy stuff. Free-
| tier services are notoriously abused, and notoriously
| unsupported. It's more likely that it tripped up some
| compliance/fraud business rule. Front line support at any large
| corp will stone wall you in this case.
| helpfulmandrill wrote:
| Got the same thing with Ebay. I created an account. I attempted
| to sell a Linguistics textbook. I was immediately banned. They
| wouldn't tell me why. My account will still let me BUY from ebay.
| But I'm not going to.
| kube-system wrote:
| eBay is really aggressive with fraud prevention for sellers
| because there's a bunch of scammers making fake listings trying
| to make a quick buck and eBay will always reimburse the end
| customer. I know that if you share any address/payment
| method/IP address/etc with someone who previously flaked out as
| a seller, they'll ban your account. It sucks but I don't really
| know what they could do to improve it.
| FateOfNations wrote:
| Actual KYC so they don't base guilt on spurious associations
| based on dynamic IP or physical addresses that someone else
| might have used?
| beefee wrote:
| I was never even able to sign up. "Customer service" just repeats
| the same thing on a loop.
|
| Tech companies will slowly put themselves out of business with
| fraud detection algorithms.
| ivlivs wrote:
| This happened to me too, earlier in the year. Fortunately I
| wasn't doing anything important with the single instance in my
| account. It was comically impossible to find any information
| about what had happened. And then a few weeks later, the account
| re-activated - again, without explanation.
|
| I don't think you unknowingly violated some ToS. The best I could
| figure, there's a periodic automated internal process that
| accidentally sets some accounts to an invalid state. Accounts
| with paid support can complain and get fixed manually. The rest
| of us need to just wait for some other automated sweep to come
| along and fix all the broken accounts.
|
| Needless to say, I wouldn't use OCI free tier for any kind of
| production workload. And I'm not sure I'd trust that this type of
| issue is limited to free tier accounts. It seems like stuff in
| OCI... just breaks sometimes.
| bityard wrote:
| I host personal stuff on the OCI always free tier and did a lot
| of research on this before deciding to go down this road because
| we know what kind of reputation Oracle has.
|
| From what I found, people using the free tier often get their
| instances terminated and other resources removed and reclaimed.
| The suspicion is that there are some automated systems that when
| capacity falls below a certain threshold, they will take back
| resources from the "freeloading" users. (For the humor-impaired,
| that is tongue-in-cheek.)
|
| This is well within their right and ToS say they can do this.
| Nobody should be surprised or annoyed that they do.
|
| I've read reports that entering your billing details to sign up
| for a pay-as-you-go account will reduce but not eliminate the
| likelihood of this happening. You still get the always-free
| resources but Oracle's systems see you as a paying customer, on
| paper at least. This is what I did and I haven't seen any
| disruptions in the 6 months I've done so.
|
| In this case, however, since the whole account was suspended it
| sounds like the author probably got caught as a false positive in
| some kind of automated fraud-prevention system.
| benedicthw wrote:
| I can also testify that upgrading my account to pay-as-you-go
| has resulted in no issues for the last 6 months. One minor
| issue: I had to use my older email to pass through their fraud
| detection (cybersource?) to successfully upgrade the account. I
| was even able to get Oracle Support to unblock port 25 for me!
|
| Use a declarative management system, setup billing alerts, and
| be very very cautious about the "always free" database
| offering. The latter is the real faustian bargin in my humble
| opinion. If we're talking compute only, OCI's pricing is very
| attractive.
|
| I sympathize that combating abuse -- made worse by just how
| much Oracle's free offering trumps anything else out there --
| while generating goodwill must be a very thin line to walk.
| Condolences for the Turkish student as well; once bitten ,
| twice shy.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Free tier is for evaluation purpopses, what do you expect
| otherwise?
| mfkp wrote:
| My related experience on Oracle Cloud from 5 months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507846
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