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Oracle Suspended My Account

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Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#201

Post by petilon »

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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#202

Post by kube-system »

helpfulmandrill wrote: post #78

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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#203

Post by kube-system »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #97

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.

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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#204

Post by mark_l_watson »

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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#205

Post by jsmith45 »

dessant wrote: post #75
thrtythreeforty wrote: post #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 upgr…

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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#206

Post by kube-system »

mpol wrote: post #82
dessant wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

There is no valid contract here. Consideration is one of the elements of a valid contract.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#208

Post by ensignavenger »

chrisseaton wrote: post #37
kouteiheika wrote: post #9

It's interesting to see that they also adopted the current industry standard of automatically banning people at random, not telling them why and not giving them any way to rectify it. But then, well, I mean, it's Oracle. What did you expect? Normally something like this would put them on my "will never use any of their products nor work with them" shitlist, but it's Oracle, so they were already there since, like, eve…

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.

Its a good reason to choose Open Source, thats what it is.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#209

Post by supermatt »

capkutay wrote: post #184
kouteiheika wrote: post #9

It's interesting to see that they also adopted the current industry standard of automatically banning people at random, not telling them why and not giving them any way to rectify it. But then, well, I mean, it's Oracle. What did you expect? Normally something like this would put them on my "will never use any of their products nor work with them" shitlist, but it's Oracle, so they were already there since, like, eve…

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.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#210

Post by benedicthw »

bityard wrote: post #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…

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.

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