211–220 of 302 posts
Want proof: Ask them if you can convert to a paid service to make your "TOS violation" magically disappear.
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…
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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.
Yes. Exactly. Telling people what they've done wrong enables them to behave better in future. Isn't that what we want... rehabilitation?
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.
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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 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.
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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 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.
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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.
At least Hacker News isn't randomly suspending accounts without notice...I think.
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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.
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…
Why would being from Turkey have an effect in this situation?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes. Exactly. Telling people what they've done wrong enables them to behave better in future. Isn't that what we want... rehabilitation?
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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.