Oracle Suspended My Account(batin.sh)
batin.sh
Oracle Suspended My Account
https://batin.sh/blog/oracle-suspended-my-account/
301 comments
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.
You should probably disclose when commenting on this thread that you are an Oracle employee.
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.
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.
I think if you do pay Google money now (for Google One) they do have support. Or at least I think they do.
They do. But for Google one and Workspace customers.
[deleted]
> you are an Oracle employee
No I’m not.
No I’m not.
Apologies, I didn't realize you'd left to work at Shopify.
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.
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?
That pleasant demeanor doesn't always translate into getting immediate results, but how could it really?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
They laid off all of those people who used to help you and outsourced support.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cloud-layoffs-support...
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cloud-layoffs-support...
I pay $50/mo for basic GCP support and they’ve been fantastic thus far. That’s just my experience using it in the last few months.
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.
A "societal" problem that somehow mainly manifests in big tech?
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.
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.
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.
If they "create an oppressive, centralized, and corrupt authoritarian regime", then they were never socialists to begin with, contrary to what a considerable number of people have been conditioned to believe such that they may continue to be endlessly exploited.
Sounds like No True Scotsman to me. Can we name a single time they've taken power and not created an even more oppressive, centralized, and corrupt authoritarian regime than the one they wanted to replace? But sure, this time it'll be different because we'll have the Right People in charge.
> Sounds like No True Scotsman to me.
When someone claims to be a Scotsman despite having never set foot in Scotland, having nothing so much as even acquaintances (let alone ancestors) who've ever set foot in Scotland, and having open disdain for anything pertaining to Scotland, it's worth questioning whether that someone is indeed a Scotsman.
> Can we name a single time they've taken power and not created an even more oppressive, centralized, and corrupt authoritarian regime than the one they wanted to replace?
Rojava and the EZLN come to mind as contemporary examples. Not to mention, you know, the very existence of credit unions, cooperatives, labor unions, and other forms of economic democracy (i.e. literally the definition of socialism, right here in capitalist economies).
When someone claims to be a Scotsman despite having never set foot in Scotland, having nothing so much as even acquaintances (let alone ancestors) who've ever set foot in Scotland, and having open disdain for anything pertaining to Scotland, it's worth questioning whether that someone is indeed a Scotsman.
> Can we name a single time they've taken power and not created an even more oppressive, centralized, and corrupt authoritarian regime than the one they wanted to replace?
Rojava and the EZLN come to mind as contemporary examples. Not to mention, you know, the very existence of credit unions, cooperatives, labor unions, and other forms of economic democracy (i.e. literally the definition of socialism, right here in capitalist economies).
Ohh staap. Then there never ever were socialists to begin with in history, because 100% of the time they tried it ended up the same. But of course these all were wrong socialists and next time, surely, it would be different. One must be extremely deluded or extremely ignorant to believe that.
Gosh those brainwashed, exploited masses! If only they let people like you brainwash and exploit them instead.
I suggest you watch this presentation from someone who fled a socialist country in their youth and now spends their time warning America of what could happen should it fall to socialism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyR6QK0igN0
I suggest you watch this presentation from someone who fled a socialist country in their youth and now spends their time warning America of what could happen should it fall to socialism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyR6QK0igN0
Right, it's totally the fault of "socialism" for the shitshow that is the Venezuelan political and socioeconomic climate and not, you know, the neverending merry-go-round of military dictatorships, corruption, and civil unrest going on for more than a century and counting - i.e. long predating Venezuelan "socialism" (more like social democracy at best).
I suggest you base your understanding of geopolitics on something other than random anecdotes from people who just so happen to reinforce your own confirmation biases.
I suggest you base your understanding of geopolitics on something other than random anecdotes from people who just so happen to reinforce your own confirmation biases.
It totally is, you're right. Dictatorship and corruption is the socialism and there never existed and never will exist any other.
Yeah these companies are so large and so automated that they find it hard to interact with individuals.
I'd argue that's due to scale and scale alone.
Its a good reason to choose Open Source, thats what it is.
And that’s fine with me. This problem is caused by big tech companies money grab trying to force everyone into the cloud and charge subscription fees. I never have this problem with on-prem software because I have control over what it does.
If a big ban list is what’s needed to remind people that cloud isn’t the only way to do things, then I’m all for it.
If a big ban list is what’s needed to remind people that cloud isn’t the only way to do things, then I’m all for it.
At least Hacker News isn't randomly suspending accounts without notice...I think.
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.
Shadowbanning definitely happens on HN.
In a couple pretty well-defined cases, where it makes sense. Otherwise we tell people we're banning them, and why.
This is all discussed at length in past comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If you or anyone has a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to answer it - but please familiarize yourself with the past answers first, because as far as I know it's all pretty thoroughly explained. Certainly that's the intention.
This is all discussed at length in past comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If you or anyone has a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to answer it - but please familiarize yourself with the past answers first, because as far as I know it's all pretty thoroughly explained. Certainly that's the intention.
They are.
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.
I always surf with "showdead" on. IME, around 98% of the "dead" posts are dead for good reason - either really obvious spam, or low-effort hostile snark in places where it's nowhere near being an appropriate response.
They really shouldn't. People don't get randomly shadowbanned. Turning it on just shows a whole lot of vile, aggressive, hysterical rubbish.
Most dead comments are rubbish. Some are only unpopular. 1 dead comment is enough to shadow ban a new account apparently.
> 1 dead comment is enough to shadow ban a new account apparently.
That's definitely not so.
That's definitely not so.
You would know. But I look at old comments when I see good comments dead for no clear reason. I lost track of how many had a few live comments, 1 dead for obvious reasons comment, and all dead comments after.
What are some examples? You might be seeing accounts that we banned, especially if the first dead comment is dead for obvious reasons.
If you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it by clicking on its timestamp, then clicking 'vouch' at the top of its page. There's a small karma threshold (> 30) before vouch links appear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch
If you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it by clicking on its timestamp, then clicking 'vouch' at the top of its page. There's a small karma threshold (> 30) before vouch links appear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch
> What are some examples?
I didn't keep records. I'll let you know the next time I see it if I remember.
> You might be seeing accounts that we banned, especially if the first dead comment is dead for obvious reasons.
1 comment was enough to ban some accounts? Did you think I meant automatically?
I didn't keep records. I'll let you know the next time I see it if I remember.
> You might be seeing accounts that we banned, especially if the first dead comment is dead for obvious reasons.
1 comment was enough to ban some accounts? Did you think I meant automatically?
I think I am shadow banned, any idea why?
Please email [email protected] with this kind of question. That's in the site guidelines btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It would be nice if I could privately message you on this board since my email account is not associated with my HN account... feels like a violation of privacy.
It means you’ve been banned if you start having dead comments
Do any social networks use GPT3 autogenerated replies to deceive the shadowbanned into thinking that they are not shouting into the void?
maybe get dall-e to make some trolling comments to even siphon off some of that vitriol into the void
"vile, aggressive, hysterical rubbish."
Also known as "wrongthink".
Also known as "wrongthink".
Thank you, I would have never known about this.
bob29(1)
yeah it's getting a bit tough
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
It is not an industry standard. ONLY Google does it. And now oracle. So if you decide oracle, remember to deride Google too.
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.
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.
There is some criteria you have to meet first. I believe your project must have monitoring in place for billing alerts.
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.
He should be thankful he was just banned and not served with a lawsuit - Oracle's typical move.
Knew what that link was without clicking.
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.
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.
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.
That is so incredibly short-sighted of them. The same thing happened to me. Twice. I guess there was no way for Oracle to know that I was 'kicking the tires' in my personal time, to see if it might be worth migrating some of my previous company's millions in cloud spending to them.
Oh, well.
Oh, well.
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...
> they just shut down non-paying accounts to cut costs if they don't foresee them converting into paying customers any time soon
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophesy.
[deleted]
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.
* 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.
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.
* 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.
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.
I always forget step 4 and 5 - the most important steps as its the only thing that helps the user.
That does not work for Oracle because they are not on these forums to the extent of say Stripe or FAANG engineers.
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]
I tried that for my Tumblr account termination. But because Tumblr is not Google, nobody cared.
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.
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.
Apparently Oracle cares enough to down your comment. I get that they gotta keep their lawyers busy but sockpuppetry is kind of a low blow even for them ;)
There is probably enough people who anthropomorphize Oracle and think that Oracle is somehow about something else than making Larry Ellison a shitton of money.
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?)
* 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?)
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.
Too bad. Tell them anyway, unless you want regulations to be passed that work like habeas corpus rights for users of your service.
Companies with abusive ToS enforcement policies can do the right thing of their own volition, or they can be forced to do so by law. It's up to them. Continuing with their current policies under the delusion that being accountable to their users somehow "helps the bad guys" won't be sustainable in the long run.
Companies with abusive ToS enforcement policies can do the right thing of their own volition, or they can be forced to do so by law. It's up to them. Continuing with their current policies under the delusion that being accountable to their users somehow "helps the bad guys" won't be sustainable in the long run.
Yes. Exactly. Telling people what they've done wrong enables them to behave better in future. Isn't that what we want... rehabilitation?
"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.
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.
Dedicated abuser can find this limit experimentally via binary search.
If you don't tell them which one of many rate-limiters they've tripped, it's going to take them a lot more effort than a simple binary search.
The only secure system is one that doesn't work, perfect security isn't the goal. Good enough security is.
The only secure system is one that doesn't work, perfect security isn't the goal. Good enough security is.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 confrontations with police. (And if you ever do, I'd strongly advise against trying to 'defend yourself' from them.)
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. In reality, it's neither fair, nor deterministic.
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 confrontations with police. (And if you ever do, I'd strongly advise against trying to 'defend yourself' from them.)
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. In reality, it's neither fair, nor deterministic.
> 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.)
And I'd hope you agree that such behavior is bad and shouldn't be tolerated. "Cops are capricious unaccountable douchebags therefore it's okay for tech companies to be capricious unaccountable douchebags" is hardly a convincing argument.
And I'd hope you agree that such behavior is bad and shouldn't be tolerated. "Cops are capricious unaccountable douchebags therefore it's okay for tech companies to be capricious unaccountable douchebags" is hardly a convincing argument.
> The police can and absolutely do arrest, intimidate, harass, and violently assault people for unspecified, fabricated or utterly bullshit reasons
I was going to include a sentence on police corruption in the original response but decided to leave it out. Yes, that happens, far more often than it ever should. But an important point is that it is corruption. It is not how the system is supposed to work. It's not much consolation to the victims of said corruption, but it is an important distinction in how society is built. Given that it is corruption it's at least possible to fight it. Maybe not personally (unless you're rich) but via organizations such as the ACLU and (some of) the press.
> Unfortunately, access to a rented VM doesn't quite rise to that level of seriousness.
In today's world, it does.
Just this week there was a discussion here on how the unjustified account blocks impact the poor with the least resources.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320
I was going to include a sentence on police corruption in the original response but decided to leave it out. Yes, that happens, far more often than it ever should. But an important point is that it is corruption. It is not how the system is supposed to work. It's not much consolation to the victims of said corruption, but it is an important distinction in how society is built. Given that it is corruption it's at least possible to fight it. Maybe not personally (unless you're rich) but via organizations such as the ACLU and (some of) the press.
> Unfortunately, access to a rented VM doesn't quite rise to that level of seriousness.
In today's world, it does.
Just this week there was a discussion here on how the unjustified account blocks impact the poor with the least resources.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320
> But an important point is that it is corruption.
It's only corruption if they are doing it for the benefit of someone in particular (Say, a politician that uses them for a personal vendetta).
Most of the time, they aren't, they are just doing it because their mentality is to treat the citizenry as the enemy. It's not corruption, nobody benefits from it, it's just plain banal evil.
> It is not how the system is supposed to work.
According to who? You and me? Sure, but we're a minority opinion on this question. The public is overwhelmingly opposed to us on this.
> In today's world, it does.
> Just this week there was a discussion here on how the unjustified account blocks impact the poor with the least resources.
Strong disagreement. All of these problems are nothing compared to what one bad cop (Or landlord, or employer, or boss, etc, etc, etc) on a power trip can do to you, especially if you are poor. And, as I said, they are one of the more 'accountable' institutions you get to interact with. You have (in theory) legal and constitutional protections against abuse by them.
It's only corruption if they are doing it for the benefit of someone in particular (Say, a politician that uses them for a personal vendetta).
Most of the time, they aren't, they are just doing it because their mentality is to treat the citizenry as the enemy. It's not corruption, nobody benefits from it, it's just plain banal evil.
> It is not how the system is supposed to work.
According to who? You and me? Sure, but we're a minority opinion on this question. The public is overwhelmingly opposed to us on this.
> In today's world, it does.
> Just this week there was a discussion here on how the unjustified account blocks impact the poor with the least resources.
Strong disagreement. All of these problems are nothing compared to what one bad cop (Or landlord, or employer, or boss, etc, etc, etc) on a power trip can do to you, especially if you are poor. And, as I said, they are one of the more 'accountable' institutions you get to interact with. You have (in theory) legal and constitutional protections against abuse by them.
> > It is not how the system is supposed to work.
> According to who? You and me?
No, not you and me; the law as written.
Sure the police often ignore the laws and too often get away with it, but because there are laws written down there is at least an opportunity to challenge the injustices in court.
In contrast with the cloud companies who don't reveal any of their rules and just ban people left and right for no discernible reason and there is no possibility to challenge these arbitrary rulings anywhere.
> According to who? You and me?
No, not you and me; the law as written.
Sure the police often ignore the laws and too often get away with it, but because there are laws written down there is at least an opportunity to challenge the injustices in court.
In contrast with the cloud companies who don't reveal any of their rules and just ban people left and right for no discernible reason and there is no possibility to challenge these arbitrary rulings anywhere.
No, the goal is to identify problematic humans and blacklist them forever
Don't forget the assumption of guilt unless proven innocent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This happened to me with my Amazon (non AWS) account.
I live in Europe, and when shopping on Amazon, sometimes the thing I want is in The UK or the US, I'll always try to get it from Europe first so it saves on carbon. But after Brexit, using Amazon UK was no good since getting anything out of the UK was painfully slow.. so I started to use Amazon Germany.
Suddenly my account was flagged as fraudulent, i was banned, and I've tried multiple times to get it unbanned.... To no avail.
I was told by one of the customer support people the real reason why it was banned... You're not supposed to hop from one Amazon country to another.
So why have a universal login?
So all my books on Kindle were gone, my movies and tv shows I digitally bought through Prime Video were gone... Everything, all because i committed the crime of not always buying from the same country.
So now i make throw away accounts one for each country, and hop between them, refuse to subscribe to prime, and refuse to give Amazon anymore money.
I live in Europe, and when shopping on Amazon, sometimes the thing I want is in The UK or the US, I'll always try to get it from Europe first so it saves on carbon. But after Brexit, using Amazon UK was no good since getting anything out of the UK was painfully slow.. so I started to use Amazon Germany.
Suddenly my account was flagged as fraudulent, i was banned, and I've tried multiple times to get it unbanned.... To no avail.
I was told by one of the customer support people the real reason why it was banned... You're not supposed to hop from one Amazon country to another.
So why have a universal login?
So all my books on Kindle were gone, my movies and tv shows I digitally bought through Prime Video were gone... Everything, all because i committed the crime of not always buying from the same country.
So now i make throw away accounts one for each country, and hop between them, refuse to subscribe to prime, and refuse to give Amazon anymore money.
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.
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
* 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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
In general, this point of view has some merit; but this is Oracle.
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.
Maybe someone here knows a fitting alternative? 1GB is not much data, but it might be over the limit for free tiers.
The author is apparently in Turkey, so I can tell myself maybe it won't happen to me...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
[deleted]
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.
Once there is the infrastructure to make it as practical as cloud (or more), the change will happen.
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.
> Once there is the infrastructure to make it as practical as cloud (or more)
Or once cloud providers make the cloud less practical, which seems to be their mission in life.
Or once cloud providers make the cloud less practical, which seems to be their mission in life.
"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.
I left a client last year because the job seemed to be nothing but cloud infrastructure management. God damned constant nightmare.
What's worse than managing infrastructure you own? Managing infrastructure you don't.
Even worse: managing infrastructure "managed" by someone else who doesn't own it.
True story, probably-not-coincidentally involving Oracle Cloud. Why we didn't just "self-host" on AWS in the first place (or just do on-prem like most other similarly-sized customers of that particular software product) continues to elude me.
True story, probably-not-coincidentally involving Oracle Cloud. Why we didn't just "self-host" on AWS in the first place (or just do on-prem like most other similarly-sized customers of that particular software product) continues to elude me.
I think people will just continue to roll the dice. When your competitors stay on the cloud, and you have higher expenses because you don't, they'll out-compete you unless they get knocked down by this. But not all of them will and you're competing from behind against whoever is left. It's like not listing on Uber as a restaurant, many individual owners say they hate it but have to do it because everyone else is.
Regulation mightn't be the answer but it serves well in such situations, by removing some of the risk of engaging in risky behaviour because profit always wins. Something very basic like a right to explanation so you can argue your day in court and so on.
Regulation mightn't be the answer but it serves well in such situations, by removing some of the risk of engaging in risky behaviour because profit always wins. Something very basic like a right to explanation so you can argue your day in court and so on.
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
> 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
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.
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/doceo/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.
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/doceo/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.
[deleted]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
egress is usually metered.. Oracle could simply put a limit on their free egress. no need to ban
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.
> Even if I try to upgrade and manage payment it says I don't have access to perform that operation
So no.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Good luck winning any kind of lawsuit against Oracle also. Their legal dept (like their sales dept) is famously aggressive and well-staffed.
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.
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.
> 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
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
> Their legal dept (like their sales dept) is famously aggressive
Just like their support, apparently!
Just like their support, apparently!
Many consumer protection laws streamline resolution specifically to unbog the courts.
There is no valid contract here. Consideration is one of the elements of a valid contract.
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.
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...
Well, EU banks hate dealing with USA exporting their laws to their (states') citizens abroad, regarding reporting etc.
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!
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!
Did they give you your money promptly? How?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This is actually my approach: move things to "self hosted in the cloud", then move to on-prem (hopefully timed to when I finally get a house after the housing slump gets worse in a year or so fingers crossed).
Although the costs aren't monumental, it does add up more than using basic hardware at home (I live in an area with fairly cheap electricity). I also work for one of the major cloud providers, so it kinda pains me to know how fat the margins are and how much I'm getting "ripped off".
Although the costs aren't monumental, it does add up more than using basic hardware at home (I live in an area with fairly cheap electricity). I also work for one of the major cloud providers, so it kinda pains me to know how fat the margins are and how much I'm getting "ripped off".
Yeah, but a lot of that margin is from scale, no? The numbers aren't quite the same when it's just you working on your homelab. Definitely agree with self-hosting when it makes sense, but cost alone might not be a good reason.
Yes, scale is a huge factor creating the margin. I'm actually on a team that is responsible for guiding the cloud part of the company in what hardware to buy (among other things), and I've seen the purchase orders; it is indeed incredible the deals one can cut when one buys hundreds of thousands of things.
However, whatever deal one may be able to cut there must be accounted for in terms of the rest of COGS, including salaries, taxes, and everything else. The company charges well above COGS in order to turn a sizable profit, and to give some room to compress the profit margin should another cloud provider decide to pressure them on prices.
Basically, the cost would be comparable if you invoiced yourself for your time setting up your homelab, and had to pay your spouse a fee for taking up a perfectly fine closet with noisy blinking lights.
However, whatever deal one may be able to cut there must be accounted for in terms of the rest of COGS, including salaries, taxes, and everything else. The company charges well above COGS in order to turn a sizable profit, and to give some room to compress the profit margin should another cloud provider decide to pressure them on prices.
Basically, the cost would be comparable if you invoiced yourself for your time setting up your homelab, and had to pay your spouse a fee for taking up a perfectly fine closet with noisy blinking lights.
I guess we should expect our isp to start banning us without giving reason in the future too.
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.
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.
- 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.
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 )
> 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 )
>- 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.
Lots, I think. Dirty money goes in and clean bitcoin comes out.
>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.
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.
Definitely reads as a KYC or fraud flag of some sort. You'll never get any information about those.
I had a similar experience with Cash App. The app refused to allow me to add funds via any method; it would error out every time. A never-ending parade of "multiple" customer service agents with probably-fake names (Different name every time y'all reply? Yeah, that ain't suspect at all!) decided not that they couldn't identify the issue, but that they could but were "unable" to provide that information to me; apparently I was not allowed to know why they refused to take my money.
Long story short, that's why I don't use Cash App and never will.
Long story short, that's why I don't use Cash App and never will.
Dealing with the customer support agents of these companies in cases like this is when the technological dystopia becomes obvious and unavoidable.
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.
Kafka would be proud of this dialog.
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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?
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?
It's hard to vote with your wallet on a free tier, to be fair.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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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.
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.
Why would being from Turkey have an effect in this situation?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
(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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[^1]: https://data.ovdinfo.org/anti-military-events-report
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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.
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.
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".
Companies find it easier to simply block or restrict access from certain countries because it's "more hassle than it's worth".
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.
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.
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> Turkey (author spells it that way)
... that's the correct way to spell it:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey
... that's the correct way to spell it:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey
Recent change:
The Republic of Türkiye 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
The Republic of Türkiye 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
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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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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/
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.
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.
> 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
yes, this is exactly it! nailed it
This didn't happen to my single ARM VPS instance, so it might depend on what you were using.
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.
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.
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!"
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!"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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).
I don’t understand how Oracle can convince companies to sign with them considering their behaviour.
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".
Maybe the Oracle of old, but this strategy isn't common for any cloud vendors these days.
Can’t a CTO say « no »?
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.
Because it integrated with OracleDB.
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.
If someone is "stuck with OracleDB" then it sounds like they don't make the purchasing decisions.
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.
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.
This is a good story!
Maybe the wave wasn't ready to be caught in 1996, hypervisors like VMWare and Xen weren't a thing yet (IIRC Amazon leveraged Xen to get AWS started in the late 00s).
Maybe the wave wasn't ready to be caught in 1996, hypervisors like VMWare and Xen weren't a thing yet (IIRC Amazon leveraged Xen to get AWS started in the late 00s).
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
"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
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?
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.
Yes. 24GB of RAM and 4 OCPU.
Source: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free
Source: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free
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).
Disclaimer - I don’t work for Hetzner.
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...
Yes: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ . But keep backups and switch to e.g. hetzner if oracle doesn't want you leeching.
The caveat is that you must be able and willing to use an ARM processor. Their x86 based always free offering is only 2GB. GCP'S always free x86 is only 1GB.
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.
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.
Maybe they could let me prove that I'm not the guy who used to live at my address. I could prove that really easily, they just don't care.
Actual KYC so they don't base guilt on spurious associations based on dynamic IP or physical addresses that someone else might have used?
Fair, although given their global reach and the relatively low value of most transactions there, it’s understandable why that isn’t an easy solution.
Meaningful KYC as fraud prevention on eBay would probably practically result in them limiting service to a handful of countries. Global banks don’t find it financially worthwhile to serve the entire world with KYC for customers with millions of dollars of deposits.
Meaningful KYC as fraud prevention on eBay would probably practically result in them limiting service to a handful of countries. Global banks don’t find it financially worthwhile to serve the entire world with KYC for customers with millions of dollars of deposits.
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.
My related experience on Oracle Cloud from 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507846
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.
Tech companies will slowly put themselves out of business with fraud detection algorithms.
Why is the cloud still so popular even though stories like this one are so common now?
Because it's free and provides some what of a convenience. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oracle is the epitome of rug-pulls.
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
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
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.
Want proof: Ask them if you can convert to a paid service to make your "TOS violation" magically disappear.
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.
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.
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
1: https://zenn.dev/shinshin86/scraps/022e44712274fd
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.
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.
Their free tier is 10 TB of outbound traffic. Hard to reach.
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
But hey, maybe Facebook does favors. And maybe it’s all just one big dumpster fire.
Who’s to say
[deleted]
Free tier is for evaluation purpopses, what do you expect otherwise?
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.
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.
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.
I have never trusted Oracle with anything important.
If you want a VC-funded "free" PostgreSQL db (500MB, 2GB egress/mo, paused after 1 week inactivity), check out Supabase.
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.
This makes no sense to me.
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?
I would not expect any rights to the storage unit if I didn’t pay anything for it. “Consideration” is an important element of a contract; I am not sure a $0 lease is even a valid legal instrument.
> Why do people who pay nothing feel entitled to service
Because the service was offered for free...
Because the service was offered for free...
Why would anyone use Oracle Cloud? The company has proven themselves to be incompetent and useless time and time again.
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.
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.
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.
[deleted]
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.
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.
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
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
Free tier user and no statement if he had a payment method attached to his account.
in order to sign up you have to provide credit card details, so you automatically have a payment method attached to your account
Google did the same to me recently. Face it, Cloud was a stupid idea all along
Why not just host your own? Why rely on Oracle for anything at this point?
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
Seems like the coke and women got to Larry Ellison's head and he's not really focused anymore
joke's on you! my card gets debited and reversed but never gets validated to even get started lol
Oracle who?
> 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.
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.
The TOS says they will provide advance warning. Oracle is in breach of their own contract.
> 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.
Not in cases of suspected fraud, they won't. Connecting these services with a VPN is the very definition of shady.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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
For reference, most of your link is about their time-limited Free Trial when OP is trying to use their Always Free offering - two separate things, and as noted at the top of your link, the Always Free offerings do not have a time limit.
Confusing these two offerings is entirely understandable. But coupling that confusion with insulting me, overlooking or condescendingly mischaracterizing most of my arguments, making unsubstantiated statements about what Oracle would do that are either overconfidently overgeneralized or coming from inside knowledge without proper disclosure, and claiming that your link somehow ends our discussion - now that, all of that taken together is what ends our discussion.
I don't intend to reply further to this sub-thread.
Confusing these two offerings is entirely understandable. But coupling that confusion with insulting me, overlooking or condescendingly mischaracterizing most of my arguments, making unsubstantiated statements about what Oracle would do that are either overconfidently overgeneralized or coming from inside knowledge without proper disclosure, and claiming that your link somehow ends our discussion - now that, all of that taken together is what ends our discussion.
I don't intend to reply further to this sub-thread.
Where in the TOS does it say this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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