Oracle Suspended My Account
batin.sh
batin.sh
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, ever.
Also, obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
That pleasant demeanor doesn't always translate into getting immediate results, but how could it really?
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 my fault for using it- and then he preceded to recommend another service instead, although that service was also in preview.
This is just one example of many. GCP is the only service I've used where product managers will straight up insult and lie to users, and they'll do it publicly too (following their accounts on twitter is almost hilarious for how rude they are). Unless your company has nine figures in revenue GCP will happily crap all over you.
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 seemed like a really good deal and included 24/7 4-hour response times.
This was at least five years ago however - no idea if they still offer this plan today.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cloud-layoffs-support...
Also known as "wrongthink".
That's definitely not so.
If you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it by clicking on its timestamp, then clicking 'vouch' at the top of its page. There's a small karma threshold (> 30) before vouch links appear.
I didn't keep records. I'll let you know the next time I see it if I remember.
> You might be seeing accounts that we banned, especially if the first dead comment is dead for obvious reasons.
1 comment was enough to ban some accounts? Did you think I meant automatically?
This is all discussed at length in past comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If you or anyone has a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to answer it - but please familiarize yourself with the past answers first, because as far as I know it's all pretty thoroughly explained. Certainly that's the intention.
In every society under the sun, money translates to power, and people with more money tend to have more power. The trick is to try to balance freedom to make money and spend it how you choose with limiting bribery and corruption, and no country gets that perfect because it's a hard problem with serious tradeoffs.
I suggest you watch this presentation from someone who fled a socialist country in their youth and now spends their time warning America of what could happen should it fall to socialism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyR6QK0igN0
I suggest you base your understanding of geopolitics on something other than random anecdotes from people who just so happen to reinforce your own confirmation biases.
When someone claims to be a Scotsman despite having never set foot in Scotland, having nothing so much as even acquaintances (let alone ancestors) who've ever set foot in Scotland, and having open disdain for anything pertaining to Scotland, it's worth questioning whether that someone is indeed a Scotsman.
> Can we name a single time they've taken power and not created an even more oppressive, centralized, and corrupt authoritarian regime than the one they wanted to replace?
Rojava and the EZLN come to mind as contemporary examples. Not to mention, you know, the very existence of credit unions, cooperatives, labor unions, and other forms of economic democracy (i.e. literally the definition of socialism, right here in capitalist economies).
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.
No I’m not.
If a big ban list is what’s needed to remind people that cloud isn’t the only way to do things, then I’m all for it.
To me it looks like Oracle isn't being honest about their "always free" tier and they just shut down non-paying accounts to cut costs if they don't foresee them converting into paying customers any time soon. If it were a bug / mistake, then I would have expected better support (restoring the account or providing a new account if that's not possible), but being ghosted by a big corporation when you know for a fact that you did nothing wrong is pretty frustrating.
I have not had such a bad experience with any cloud company ever. I sincerely hope Oracle changes, but as it stands I will never spend a dime with Oracle and I will dissuade anyone from using their services, because of how unreliable they have demonstrated themselves to be.
Oh, well.
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophesy.
* 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.
* User posts on HN (or reddit or someplace else)
* If post gets attention, issue is resolved via manual, backchannel efforts. If post doesn't get attention, issue remains unresolved.
If OP wants the issue fixed, the most likely solution is to drop affiliate links in the comments, as a positive revenue flow might get one of Oracle's sales-lawyers to investigate the commotion and see if more monetary sources are available to be cracked open.
* HNers, redditors and TikTokers somehow always believe the user's side of the story even though they have absolutely no clue about the context or the integrity of the complainer because pitchfork and anti-corp is always the default stance rather than due process on social media
That said - I would only state that myself, and more than a few users here I imagine, have been in situations where we did nothing untoward and were banned, suspended, had a corporate automatic system take negative action for us that was undeserved.
I think most folks are willing to assume a corporate "banality of evil" because they have seen it.
You are 100% right though, this could be warranted.
Oracle should absolutely out the guys whom they suspend because they have kiddie porn or did illegal transactions on their site or break terms of services.
Seeing Musk and Trump's success, one bold company will do it and will be enormously successful in deploying an army of cults against the Karens of the world. As they say, you can't bring a knife to a gun's fight
* 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?)
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 parties are operating in good faith, which is why it is done with threat of prison, fines, revocation of parole, etc. It can't be done when the 'rehabilitated' party can just reneg on the agreement with zero consequences.
The point of anti-abuse rules isn't the letter of the rules, it's the intent behind them. 'There's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball' only works in children's fairy tales.
There's a reason why no large firm or financial institution will tell you the why. It's not because they think you have good intentions, and they hate you. It's because they are afraid you have malicious intentions, and they aren't interested in holding your hand as you defraud them.
Of course, people in category one get burnt by this, and then complain on Twitter/FB/HN.
[1] If you want to live in a world where anti-abuse systems tell you which rule you broke, you'll probably need to also live in a world where there are very serious consequences that are - with high consistency - inflicted on people breaking those rules in bad faith. We don't live in that kind of world, things like the CFAA are at the same time, both overly broad and draconian and largely toothless.
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 you with a specific crime and the laws that define those crimes are written down and you can look them up. And then they need to present evidence and you do get a chance to defend yourself.
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.
And I'd hope you agree that such behavior is bad and shouldn't be tolerated. "Cops are capricious unaccountable douchebags therefore it's okay for tech companies to be capricious unaccountable douchebags" is hardly a convincing argument.
I was going to include a sentence on police corruption in the original response but decided to leave it out. Yes, that happens, far more often than it ever should. But an important point is that it is corruption. It is not how the system is supposed to work. It's not much consolation to the victims of said corruption, but it is an important distinction in how society is built. Given that it is corruption it's at least possible to fight it. Maybe not personally (unless you're rich) but via organizations such as the ACLU and (some of) the press.
> Unfortunately, access to a rented VM doesn't quite rise to that level of seriousness.
In today's world, it does.
Just this week there was a discussion here on how the unjustified account blocks impact the poor with the least resources.
It's only corruption if they are doing it for the benefit of someone in particular (Say, a politician that uses them for a personal vendetta).
Most of the time, they aren't, they are just doing it because their mentality is to treat the citizenry as the enemy. It's not corruption, nobody benefits from it, it's just plain banal evil.
> It is not how the system is supposed to work.
According to who? You and me? Sure, but we're a minority opinion on this question. The public is overwhelmingly opposed to us on this.
> In today's world, it does.
> Just this week there was a discussion here on how the unjustified account blocks impact the poor with the least resources.
Strong disagreement. All of these problems are nothing compared to what one bad cop (Or landlord, or employer, or boss, etc, etc, etc) on a power trip can do to you, especially if you are poor. And, as I said, they are one of the more 'accountable' institutions you get to interact with. You have (in theory) legal and constitutional protections against abuse by them.
> According to who? You and me?
No, not you and me; the law as written.
Sure the police often ignore the laws and too often get away with it, but because there are laws written down there is at least an opportunity to challenge the injustices in court.
In contrast with the cloud companies who don't reveal any of their rules and just ban people left and right for no discernible reason and there is no possibility to challenge these arbitrary rulings anywhere.
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.
The only secure system is one that doesn't work, perfect security isn't the goal. Good enough security is.
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.
The next level of abuse is that the same abusers will use all the same escalation methods as legit accounts. They want to figure out why they got blocked so they can evade the blocking.
It takes a lot of work to separate the legit accounts from the abusers.
I live in Europe, and when shopping on Amazon, sometimes the thing I want is in The UK or the US, I'll always try to get it from Europe first so it saves on carbon. But after Brexit, using Amazon UK was no good since getting anything out of the UK was painfully slow.. so I started to use Amazon Germany.
Suddenly my account was flagged as fraudulent, i was banned, and I've tried multiple times to get it unbanned.... To no avail.
I was told by one of the customer support people the real reason why it was banned... You're not supposed to hop from one Amazon country to another.
So why have a universal login?
So all my books on Kindle were gone, my movies and tv shows I digitally bought through Prime Video were gone... Everything, all because i committed the crime of not always buying from the same country.
So now i make throw away accounts one for each country, and hop between them, refuse to subscribe to prime, and refuse to give Amazon anymore money.
Maybe someone here knows a fitting alternative? 1GB is not much data, but it might be over the limit for free tiers.
Don't get me wrong, I see the economic benefit of the cloud and the freedom of not having to manage your own infrastructure, but increasingly the cost and risks associated with being beholden to an organization's arbitrary behavior with lack of recourse is not something you can depend on for the long-term. 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 up their zero-maintenance SaaS app to go self-host something. All of it is just too convenient, and you then also have the inertia working against you; there's a whole generation of developers now that has grown up without ever administering a server. They're not gonna give up their Lambdas and drop down to a lower level, just like I'm not gonna give up my interpreted languages and drop down to C, even though it'd perform a hell of a lot better.
I'm with you - I like self-hosting, and I run everything I can on bare metal, and I hate everything costing money every month. But there's no future in which people decide "oh I'll give up the convenience and the extra money I can make from this" and go back to the old way of doing things.
Once there is the infrastructure to make it as practical as cloud (or more), the change will happen.
Or once cloud providers make the cloud less practical, which seems to be their mission in life.
In the 70s when mainframes (effectively same as cloud, remote access to someone else's computer) were king and small personal computers and workstations were just a toy, it seemed ridiculous to think centralized mainframes could ever be replaced.
So I will hold hope that things will swing back the other way at some point. As the cloud companies become more and more powerful they will inevitably become ever more abusive, so at some point enough people will look for better ways.
I left a client last year because the job seemed to be nothing but cloud infrastructure management. God damned constant nightmare.
True story, probably-not-coincidentally involving Oracle Cloud. Why we didn't just "self-host" on AWS in the first place (or just do on-prem like most other similarly-sized customers of that particular software product) continues to elude me.
Regulation mightn't be the answer but it serves well in such situations, by removing some of the risk of engaging in risky behaviour because profit always wins. Something very basic like a right to explanation so you can argue your day in court and so on.
> 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 upgrade and manage payment it says I don't have access to perform that operation :(
> Agent: thank you for waiting. Unfortunately, we are unable to .resolve this issue Sorry, this is all the information we can provide. thank you for contacting us
> Customer: Wait, who can help me? Please, provide me at least another way to contact the proper support team.
> Agent: we would be the correct department for this issue, but unfortunately we are unable to help further with this issue
> Customer: But why? You didn't tell me what was the problem, or what I did wrong... This is very disappointing
> Agent: I am afraid I am unable to advise you further. Thank you for contacting us . bye
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 of money on a court case and they will just drag it out and bleed you dry. The court system is designed to protect the rich minority from the poor majority.
Also, do not throw away the baby with the bathwater. A shop owner should have ways to get rid of a bad customer. And yes, even if it is just based on a face that you don't like.
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 services, because naive algorithms were allowed to go rampant, without any checks and balances.
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 free tier is meant as a teaser for migrating to a paid account - not a perpetual production workload.
> 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.
Good luck winning any kind of lawsuit against Oracle also. Their legal dept (like their sales dept) is famously aggressive and well-staffed.
They don't always win, but it can be hard to see if the case does not go to trial. Settlements typically include confidentiality provisions to prevent publication of the result. [0]
[0] https://www.upcounsel.com/confidential-settlement-agreement
A valet crashed my car, I sued for diminished value for 9999.99 dollars. Their attorney told me I would never see a penny, told me they would move for change of venue and tie me up in civil court. I went to court, won, they appealed, I won again. About 5 days later I had a check in the mail for 9999.99. I paid 100 bucks to file and serve them through the police department and had to take two days off, but I won and it was kind of easy.
They can bring an attorney to represent them, didn't seem to help them in my case with zero legal expertise.
Just like their support, apparently!
My employer (a tiny company) sued another company because they owed them a bunch of money. We are in the right, legally and ethically. The amount of time, stress and money it takes to sue someone, even if you are 100% in the right, even when the law is 100% on your side - it is insane.
The only real winners are the lawyers. It is better to just avoid companies with shitty service than go to the courts.
So I had about a week's warning and I was able to transfer my money out to other accounts. Had I not done that, they would presumably have held on to it until I'd gone in and personally told them where to send it, which would have locked me out of my money had I been abroad -- it was my primary account, held in good standing for 13 years.
Leaving aside my annoyance at the first bank's behavior, it was a definite learning moment, in that I had assumed a "normal" bank could not just kick you out because they feel like it. In Germany, indeed they can!
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.
- 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? That's concerning. Or actual law enforcement? (See points 1 and 2.)
Rather I bet it's some internal sweep that Oracle thinks needs similar treatment as money laundering. Whatever process managed to flag these accounts clearly casts way too wide a net.
> 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).
The person is into cryptocurrency and NFTs ( https://batin.sh/blog )
Lots, I think. Dirty money goes in and clean bitcoin comes out.
The atuthor could have been a false positive
>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?
Buying cryptocurrency mining compute or something else with stolen commit cards is not a remotely new concept.
>Who's doing the flagging
It could be an internal system.
Although the costs aren't monumental, it does add up more than using basic hardware at home (I live in an area with fairly cheap electricity). I also work for one of the major cloud providers, so it kinda pains me to know how fat the margins are and how much I'm getting "ripped off".
However, whatever deal one may be able to cut there must be accounted for in terms of the rest of COGS, including salaries, taxes, and everything else. The company charges well above COGS in order to turn a sizable profit, and to give some room to compress the profit margin should another cloud provider decide to pressure them on prices.
Basically, the cost would be comparable if you invoiced yourself for your time setting up your homelab, and had to pay your spouse a fee for taking up a perfectly fine closet with noisy blinking lights.
Long story short, that's why I don't use Cash App and never will.
People keep repeating "vote with your wallet", and almost nobody does. It's already hard to make peace with that, but we learned to.
However if most of the IT community place billboards saying "don't go into the bear cage" for years, and you still do, what can we do?
It doesn't have to be literally banknotes out of your wallet. Not spending your attention or time or future on Google / Oracle / abusive digital platform of the day counts too.
I'm with BiteCode_dev here: if people manifested their business preferences clearly and consistently, by such peaceful but proactive "voting", the world would be a better place. Once you accept you have no power, you truly don't.
Actions speak louder than words, and companies listen. "Do as I say, not as I do" is not a successful recipe in general.
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 danger.
(My point is those two tend to go hand and hand: higher percentage of unwanted traffic originates from authoritarian lands still engaging in 19th century style barbarism.)
Companies find it easier to simply block or restrict access from certain countries because it's "more hassle than it's worth".
When you as a company (especially financial one) is serving thousands or millions of customers you must have/rely on statistics with a heuristic to detect fraudulent or an abusing customers. Also you have to decide whether you will have any troubles by giving a loan to a particular person. Such heuristic systems are scoring using hundreds (if not thousands) parameters like age, marriage status, sex, whether you believer or not, what is your smartphone (e.g. according to bank's statistics Android users are tending to not return credits more ofter) and so on…
What’s most important: banks will never disclosure what has lead them to their decision like to decline in a credit line. Just to avoid further cheating with their heuristic systems.
I believe the author had become a victim of such heuristic which is likely had detected something unusual, then it considered his profile + recent connections (perhaps he had specified a different country than Turkey), and finally «free tier» had added some alarming amount to scoring. Otherwise I can't explain why support had wrapped up a chatting so quickly and unfriendly. For me everything points out on that there was a distinct reason for them to cease his account and they won't like to disclosure it in any way.
Just imagine living in America in 2003 with 9/11 fresh on everyone's minds. Were you there? Do you remember the mindset of adult Americans in 2003? What did the US military do in 2003? What did the average CNN-watching American feel and want? I remember well. We wanted to bulldoze Saddam Hussein and his "Axis of Evil" because terrorism. We wanted to raze Iraq to the ground as revenge for "harboring terrorism" and "WMDs" which were about to be unleashed upon our friends. Americans were in a complete frenzy, psychosis, and out for blood. Do you remember? I remember soldiers wanting nothing more than to "take out those stupid rag heads." Did the occupation ever end? Did Iraq have anything to do with 9/11? Did anyone suffer the consequences of the invasions back in America besides the Americans killed overseas? Do you think Russians are not actively being brainwashed by their government to support a war like the Americans were for their wars? Think again. The media is more powerful than ANY WMD because it perpetually and incessantly corrupts the minds of its viewers.
There was a lot of support for that war, but that support was far from unanimous, especially on the grassroots level. I do not remember any supporters of the war who I knew personally who wanted to raze Iraq to the ground and, as I recall, the antipathy was more directed at the Saddam regime and not the Iraqi nation.
Your overall point is valid, whitewashing enter nations with a single brush is inaccurate and unfair. However, you are doing the exact thing you are trying to criticize.
Whataboutism aside, those events are not 1:1 relevant to what is going on today. Turkey maintains an indefensible invasion of Cyprus, and engages in acts of wargames by frequently flying fighter jets over Greek airspace, constantly taunting them and threatening to take more of their land, laying baseless claims to Aegean seas, and Russia maintains an indefensible invasion of Ukraine, and followed a very similar plot.
Missing in either of these two situations was 16 other nations imploring the country soon to be invaded to comply, and the largest act of terrorism in the modern world.
Many years back, a guy who worked where I worked at the time (we'll say, Company A) left and formed a competing company (Company B). It was OK, nobody really considered it real competition. He was a colorful individual, and so his official company blog contained a lot of screeds about personal gripes. This gentleman was Turkish, which becomes important in a second.
One such a saga came when a Turkish company (Company C) tried to buy their product. They refused to process the transaction, and a company representative literally over email told them to go F themselves, saying it's company policy to not do business with Turkey or Turkish people (again, the founder being Turkish) because of the huge amounts of fraud from that country. The spurned customer posted their version of events on their company blog too.
It was a great time to work at Company A. This saga was our Friday cafeteria chatter.
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.
I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, I assume this wasn't the tone you were aiming for, but this sounds a little like you think that's okay. Which, to be clear, it absolutely isn't.
... that's the correct way to spell it:
The Republic of Türkiye changed its official name from The Republic of Turkey on 26 May 2022 in a request submitted to the Secretary-General by the country's Minister of Foreign Affairs.
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 back resources from the "freeloading" users. (For the humor-impaired, that is tongue-in-cheek.)
This is well within their right and ToS say they can do this. Nobody should be surprised or annoyed that they do.
I've read reports that entering your billing details to sign up for a pay-as-you-go account will reduce but not eliminate the likelihood of this happening. You still get the always-free resources but Oracle's systems see you as a paying customer, on paper at least. This is what I did and I haven't seen any disruptions in the 6 months I've done so.
In this case, however, since the whole account was suspended it sounds like the author probably got caught as a false positive in some kind of automated fraud-prevention system.
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.
I'm bitter about their KB documentation being paywalled. Their community ecosystem is nightmare fuel. Burleson Consulting is right until they are deprecated or were wrong to begin with -- but at least it is accessible. AskTom is retired.
And for the past several years their attempts at "us too!" cloud offerings look like the slow recognition that its best days are far behind it.
Hard pass with all the invective thoughts I can muster.
Still most of the time they are the one stop solution to my Oracle database problems. Tanks to them!
I don't think you unknowingly violated some ToS. The best I could figure, there's a periodic automated internal process that accidentally sets some accounts to an invalid state. Accounts with paid support can complain and get fixed manually. The rest of us need to just wait for some other automated sweep to come along and fix all the broken accounts.
Needless to say, I wouldn't use OCI free tier for any kind of production workload. And I'm not sure I'd trust that this type of issue is limited to free tier accounts. It seems like stuff in OCI... just breaks sometimes.
They have two free tiers, the expanded initial time based and the always free tier. As far as I can tell, when your time runs out on the expanded free tier they turn everything off and you have to re provision into always free or do an account upgrade.
They deny a lot of credit cards they should accept. I have been unable to upgrade on any of my cards.
Since provisioning always free tier a second time I've not had any issues with them turing off resources.
AWS has three free tiers - https://aws.amazon.com/free/
MS Azure has two free tiers - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-services/
Google Cloud has two free tiers - https://cloud.google.com/free
OCI has two free tiers - https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
Despite my always free having been up a year now I'm still reluctant to put production critical resources on it because of the experience.
I'd be more willing if they would take one of my cards for an account upgrade as I otherwise generally like the service.
yes, this is exactly it! nailed it
When the initial free credit expired, poof it all disappeared.
Luckily the boot volume was still there so I reprovisioned with the same block storage and worked.
I was a stressful morning though, I had no backups.
It would be nice if they didn't trigger that for admin accounts, because that only adds to the annoyance when you're trying to figure out what has gone wrong. It's just a lazy way of saying "we haven't bothered to figure out exactly what's gone wrong here; we've just hit a generic try/catch, so we're going to pass the buck! Good luck searching through our inadequate documentation and guessing what's wrong, sucker!"
They will use usage-data to optimize their commercial offerings, they will try out features in non-critical (aka: free) accounts first - so not to offend the paying customers.
In some cases (e.g. free web-mailers like gmx, Instagram, FB etc) the free versions are mainly vehicles for advertising.
Why should Oracle be any different? I cannot see their motivation to offer anything for free... they are *only* money-driven.
Oracle is not alone. AWS/Google Cloud also have free tiers. They want you to get to know the system and might grow out of the free tier. But Oracle's offer is significantly more generous than Amazon's or Google's.
If you start playing with a free tier cloud and decide to "go big" you're almost certain to keep using that cloud and begin to pay. (This is the reason that Google will give out nearly infinite "credits" to startups for their cloud, I hear).
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.
Maybe the wave wasn't ready to be caught in 1996, hypervisors like VMWare and Xen weren't a thing yet (IIRC Amazon leveraged Xen to get AWS started in the late 00s).
"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 and will have a grace period of 30 days, starting from the expiration date, to upgrade to paid. You will no longer be able to create new paid resources, but your account will remain active. Your resources will continue to exist for a few days, allowing you to upgrade your account and keep your resources before they're reclaimed by Oracle. If you do not upgrade to paid by the end of the grace period, your Free Trial service instances and data will be deleted."
Which is reasonable enough.
I can't find their terms of service or EULA. Most web sites have a "legal" or "terms" link at the bottom of pages, but Oracle does not. Google can find their web site terms of service.[3] But that's for the web site only, not their cloud services.
[1] https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
Meaningful KYC as fraud prevention on eBay would probably practically result in them limiting service to a handful of countries. Global banks don’t find it financially worthwhile to serve the entire world with KYC for customers with millions of dollars of deposits.
Tech companies will slowly put themselves out of business with fraud detection algorithms.
Interestingly, I just tried to log into my IBM cloud account and it was successful. I don't know how and when I was un-banned. I received the email about the ban but not the unban.
Oracle is the epitome of rug-pulls.
Unlike my other cloud accounts it doesn’t have a billing card so has utility in the billing footgun sense - but build anything on top of it hahaha nope
Oracle is really harming their rep with the seemingly random closures and killing all the goodwill created via the exceptionally generous allowances
Want proof: Ask them if you can convert to a paid service to make your "TOS violation" magically disappear.
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.
But hey, maybe Facebook does favors. And maybe it’s all just one big dumpster fire.
Who’s to say
I was reading a book when it suddenly said that my kindle had a critical problem, and gave me 3 choices: 1. Unpair my Amazon account with the kindle. 2. Sign out my account 3. Contact customer service
I tried choice 2 but it didn't work. I contacted customer service and they told me their engineers will investigate the issue.
Then I got a phone call from Amazon. They told me their engineers had fixed the problem and I only need to reboot it.
I rebooted it. The "critical problem" gone. Still don't know what's wrong with my kindle.
This makes no sense to me.
Because the service was offered for free...
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.
What's odd in this post is that he goes into detail on what steps he did. Too much detail on something that's irrelevant.
So I'm not making any assumptions about OP or Oracle.
Nice in principle, free gets no support or nobody to shout at and it's Oracle so, yeah, sucks if you put anything important on it :P
Seems like the coke and women got to Larry Ellison's head and he's not really focused anymore
End of the discussion, Oracle suspended your free tier and while it sucks, it's a free tier and Oracle can suspend it as they wish, it's in their TOS (edit: in case of suspected fraud).
Do not rely on free tier for anything important, free tiers are here to test the service sure, not to build an app that is important to you.
They will probably never tell you the real reason for legal reasons.
Not in cases of suspected fraud, they won't. Connecting these services with a VPN is the very definition of shady.
I don't think OP mentioned using a VPN.
But even if they had: really, managing a cloud infrastructure via VPN is so far from shady that it's often recommended or required by many tech companies' security policies for people working from public wifi locations among other circumstances, as an added layer of protection against local eavesdropping and sometimes also for specific predictable networking routing within a cloud network perimeter.
I realize that OP is acting as a student/hobbyist, but there's no inherent reason why someone immersed in best-practice tech culture would necessarily be shady if they applied this VPN recommendation to their own personal tinkering. Many of the benefits of using one still apply.
It would, of course, be shady if Oracle intends to deny service to people in Turkey and the VPN use is to circumvent that restriction. But I don't believe that there is such a restriction on place.
We're talking about 2 different kind of VPN here, and you know it, please don't spread confusion on that topic. Nobody needs to connect to his own database service using some B2C service like North VPN to obfuscate where the actually queries come from.
> It would, of course, be shady if Oracle intends to deny service to people in Turkey and the VPN use is to circumvent that restriction. But I don't believe that there is such a restriction on place.
They probably don't, problem fixed. I'm not siding with Oracle, but Oracle owes absolutely nothing to a free tier user suspected of fraud.
Honestly, a student/hobbyist from Turkey who is trying specifically to defend against a local eavesdropping or censorship threat, or to work around restrictive firewall configurations on public WiFi networks, might very well use exactly the same types of VPNs you're describing, for some of the same legitimate purposes as any professional would use their corporate VPN. After all, they don't have a corporate IT department to maintain their own private VPN. These types of companies probably have more friendly pricing for a student/hobbyist from Turkey than the VPN companies whose marketing material focused on corporate use cases instead of circumventing Netflix geo blocks.
You're right that it would not be the ideal type of VPN for database access control, but I can imagine it being an element of viable defense-in-depth strategies where one is in a country where most inbound local traffic other than your own would be malicious. Imagine coupling a restriction on source IP range with TLS + IAM credentials, or something like that. Requiring a presence on the specific chosen VPN company's netblock drastically shrinks the threat model vs allowing connection attempts from 0.0.0.0/0.
> I'm not siding with Oracle, but Oracle owes absolutely nothing to a free tier user suspected of fraud.
I agree that they don't owe anything to such a user, but equally we don't owe it to Oracle to refrain from criticizing these kinds of false positives in their fraud detection with no avenue for redress. Anyone who either experiences or hears about these kinds of outcomes is justified both in criticizing Oracle and in being less likely to recommend or choose Oracle for their or their employer's cloud computing needs.
In turn, Oracle owes it to themselves to at least consider that possible consequence, and to allow at least enough redress to keep the severity of this reputational impact within whatever range they deem acceptable.
Finally, here is their pitch for their free tier.
That ends that inane discussion with your misplaced moral arguments(also known as entitlement) quite clearly.
Confusing these two offerings is entirely understandable. But coupling that confusion with insulting me, overlooking or condescendingly mischaracterizing most of my arguments, making unsubstantiated statements about what Oracle would do that are either overconfidently overgeneralized or coming from inside knowledge without proper disclosure, and claiming that your link somehow ends our discussion - now that, all of that taken together is what ends our discussion.
I don't intend to reply further to this sub-thread.
Oracle dropped the ball big time, and they should go out of their way to fix this ASAP. If I were their customer, which I am not and will never be, I'd be migrating my shit right now.
Additionally they make no promises of informing the user.
>When reasonably practicable and lawfully permitted, we will provide You with advance notice of any such suspension.
I think people are confusing billing payment notices with termination.
But it's not likely to happen. All the tech companies have virtually all these slimeballs (both parties) in their pockets. Plus many of the pols and their staff are rotating in and out of positions at these companies as employees or lobbyists.