* 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.
* 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.
* 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