231–240 of 302 posts
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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.
They really shouldn't. People don't get randomly shadowbanned. Turning it on just shows a whole lot of vile, aggressive, hysterical rubbish.
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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.
You should probably disclose when commenting on this thread that you are an Oracle employee.
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.
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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.
They really shouldn't. People don't get randomly shadowbanned. Turning it on just shows a whole lot of vile, aggressive, hysterical rubbish.
Also known as "wrongthink".
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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…
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.
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.
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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…
> 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 s…
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cloud-layoffs-support...
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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…
> 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…
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.
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…
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.
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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?)
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.
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.
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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…