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.
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.
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 dang…
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…
> 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…
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.
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? Tha…
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).
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.
A "societal" problem that somehow mainly manifests in big tech?
Yeah these companies are so large and so automated that they find it hard to interact with individuals.
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…
> 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.
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…
"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.
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 service…
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…
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.
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 upgr…
Dealing with the customer support agents of these companies in cases like this is when the technological dystopia becomes obvious and unavoidable.
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.
A "societal" problem that somehow mainly manifests in big tech?
