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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

It should be noted that it is against their rules and you might get worse instances if they somehow detect it

https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html#limitation...

I think they’re just trying to fight abuse. You can do everything from colab that you can do from ssh anyway. It’s just faster to enter commands.

Good catch though. I didn’t know that.

When I originally figured out how to ssh in, I kept it a secret figuring that it’d be a matter of time till they clamped down. Guess it took a few years, or I just missed it. Bunch of us in the ML scene used to do it regularly, since it’s way easier to monitor a training run via tmux.

I think they do shut you out if you try to spin any process through "unauthorised" means. There have many projects that offer automated setup of SSH/VNC/VSCode on a colab instance, and my experience has been that colab somehow is able to manage to shut off the connections soon after I start them.

But their other docs explain how to use SSH tunnels to connect to local runtimes: https://research.google.com/colaboratory/local-runtimes.html

Not quite the same thing I guess.

I would imagine their threat model pretty much assumes anyone can do anything on that host :-)

Doesn't Pro allow SSH?

I looked at the license agreement, and it says under "5. Restrictions"

> circumvent, reverse-engineer, modify, disable, or otherwise tamper with any security technology that Google uses to protect the Paid Service or encourage or help anyone else to do so;

> access the Paid Service other than by means authorized by Google; or

I'm not sure what exactly they mean by "means authorized by Google".

https://colab.research.google.com/pro/terms/v1

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