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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

Most of the times you hear people complaining about Hetzner shutting down someone's servers, it's because they were hosting content going against their ToC or similar.

But this seems to be about Kiwix (which in short is "offline Wikipedia" in various ways) and doesn't seem to be about questionable content in any way.

Eventually I guess we'll get Hetzner's perspective on this, as they tend to start writing publicly about issues once the other side starts writing publicly about it as well.

Personally I've been a happy user of Hetzner for many years, with no issues that weren't my own doing. But reading about people having their servers deleted in the middle of the night on a Sunday (Berlin time) and all data wiped immediately, with no recurse, does sound a bit aggressive. Luckily it seems like both me and Kiwix has mirrors for the data we care about.

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"hosting content going against their ToC or similar"

Or hosting content that Hetzner misclassified as against their ToC. Or that they decided was because of a string in a random file name. Or, in one Mastodon instances case recently, because Hetzner saw that users could upload their own images and decided that was risky (nevermind that this is common and they have moderation and a strategy for if someone tries to host anything illegal, but that one employee reviewing it was twitchy that day and there is no recourse), etc.

Employee? I'm sure it's an "AI" script to reduce costs.

Good point, I wonder if you even can get a real person instead of an idiot stochastic parrot to review it anymore?

To the end user getting screwed it doesn't matter if your usage gets misclassified by an AI bot or a clueless human bot in an Asian bodyshop. Your account is still banned by that corporation either way, it doesn't matter to you why and who at the provider did it.

With these kinds of things on the rise, I'm sure "not driven by AI" is going to be a unique selling point, soon enough. Right? Or is this just wishful thinking?

Hi everyone, Our teams who review such cases do so on a case-by-case basis. We do not use AI or automated systems for these situations, but review them manually. As a general rule of thumb, we try to avoid commenting about these cases publicly. We do that so we can protect the affected customers' personal data. But this doesn't mean that we're not in contact with the customer, which we are in this case. --Katie

    Or, in one Mastodon instances case recently, 
    because Hetzner saw that users could upload their own images

Wait, what? Yikes. I'm planning a project like that. Do you have a link to more information?

https://woem.men/notes/9r86xd69cu89052m

Also shoutout to Cloudflare for showing off what a diverse company they are in this one /s

https://woem.men/notes/9r5bwnci8x2204it

“Actually, they’re 1000 years old”

Careful, sharing that link is illegal in some jurisdictions

The alt description doesn't do it any favours either.

<https://www.butajape.com/comic/new-girlfriend/>

Why is that image worse than this one?

https://files.catbox.moe/bt4j9j.png

Damn, thank you thank you thank you. That is ultra messed up.

I don't understand - Cloudflare forwarded the report on as usual, what would you want them to do instead?

That wasn't even the one I was thinking of; sounds like this has been happening a lot.

> Besides Wikipedia, content from the Wikimedia Foundation such as Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity are also available for offline viewing in various different languages. [0]

> Users first download Kiwix (or a browser extension), then download content for offline viewing with Kiwix. [1]

> Our main storage backend became entirely unreachable. For the average user that meant not being able to access the library and download files, and for us that meant not being able to connect to it and see what was wrong. [2]

Maybe some odd photos landed on WikiMedia which then got automatically synced to Hetzner's servers and then triggered some alarms.

I can't judge about Hetzner deleting the data, but them not attempting to really get in touch with the Kiwix team -- after all they should know that they are trying to do some good in this world -- is a really horrible move. In the same category as Google blocking access to user's accounts without any word, or German companies suing security researchers for notifying them about a security flaw in their systems.

Shame on Hetzner.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwix#Available_content

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwix#Description

[2] https://mastodon.social/@kiwix/113622081750449356

keep in mind the source for "they did not reach out" is a random guy on the internet, who has to find an excuse why his service was down for 3 days.

"the hoster deleted my stuff without warning" is up there with "the dog ate my homework"

My experience is the opposite. They are completely deaf when it comes to reports about ToC violations. You need a lawyer to get them to take anything illegal down.

That's an interesting perspective for sure, thanks for sharing that.

On one hand you have these comments in this submission, saying Hetzner is too trigger-happy and takes down things too quickly. On the other hand, you have people like you using the process from the other side who feel like nothing is being done and it takes forever to get through them when needed.

I feel like it's very hard to have a balanced perspective unless you have experience of both sides of the process, which unfortunately I'm guessing most people are missing. I certainly am, as I've never tried to get someone else's servers taken down on Hetzner, so I have no idea how that process works, I've only ever been on the receiving side.

These perspectives are not opposing. Sounds very much like they have AI or unqualified humans manking final decisions on abuse reports/scans and then refuse to reevaluate when the customer complains. So just like most tech companies.

>But reading about people having their servers deleted in the middle of the night on a Sunday (Berlin time) and all data wiped immediately, with no recurse, does sound a bit aggressive.

There are several comments under this thread from people reporting essentially that happening to them.

maybe read again: the other posts mention accounts being denied before anything is created, or customers being informed up front and given lead time to move.

OP claims everything got immediately wiped without warning. That would be against Hetzner's own TOS.

OP also doesn't elaborate further, and is posting this in a position where he has to explain his own downtime of multiple days. Make your own judgmenent what is realistic here

Why did you create an account just to defend Hetzner?

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