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Oracle Suspended My Account

batin.sh

61–70 of 302 posts

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#62
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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#63
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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#64
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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would being from Turkey have an effect in this situation?

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.)

> 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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#66
post #32

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?

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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#68
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

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