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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

I was doing the same here, trying to set up a Hertzner account. Getting away from US companies and buying European and all that. But after I had made the account (and wasting a lot of time on back and forth with their buggy sign-up flow), I got told that I needed to upload a picture of my passport to do anything.

Fuck no. I too decided to stick with DO.

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Nice work from DO marketing team! Prices are completely not comparable and Hetzner was fighting scammers and kiddies, because low prices worked like a magnet for those.

Russian spies? WOW, the earth got really flat these days. Seeing what US is doing with citizens and private companies I would love some Russian spy to be interested in exactly mine, boring passport.

I encourage you to read about WireCard. It wasn’t just a normal sham company, it was able to fool auditing firms (one of the big 4) and the executives got away with it and are in Russia hiding. I’m trying to dig up the video also I can link it. There is no connection between WireCard and Hetzner outside of both being German companies.

And they're not just hiding, Jan Marsalek is allegedly actively managing FSB operations against European states.

> It wasn’t just a normal sham company, it was able to fool auditing firms (one of the big 4) and the executives got away with it and are in Russia hiding

I was an early wirecard customer, just using their prepaid debit cards, but I cancelled in 2017 because I didn't even trust them to keep a balance of 30€ safe.

Sorry, but anyone who didn't see that scam coming from 10 miles away was either gambling, complicit, or an idiot.

Look I'm just a dude who happened to land on DO a decade ago due to podcast ads and now wants to move away from it. Not due to prices but because I would prefer a European alternative. I didn't bring up Russian spies and I don't know if there's any validity to that story, I just don't want to upload passport pictures to random services. Their competitors don't require it.

I'll probably find the time and energy to move to OVH or something some time.

DO gave students $100 credit. Then required me to upload my passport, which they rejected. Then required me to pay $5 via PayPal just to verify me. Two weeks later they removed all the credit they had provided, without any warning period. I emailed them and explained that if something was provided without any stated validity period, EU law requires at least 3 years before it can expire. They suggested I delete my account if I don't like it.

After that experience (I've written about it multiple times in the past on HN), I really don't understand why people still defend DO.

That sounds pretty bad.

I don’t “defend DO”, I just use it for now; but as someone whose opinion on DO is at least neutral-to-positive, it is that way because I have never experienced what you did nor even read about similar experiences before. Your experiences don’t automatically impact my opinions without any form of communication.

Time to dust off the Whataboutism Is Bad speech again: but don't glaze over yet, because I might say something new. Not only is it still as rhetorically fallacious as it has ever been to treat complaints about third parties like they are responsive to first order concerns, but also (wake up! here comes the new part!) the deeper problem with whataboutism is that it assumes people can't consistently object to both.

I don't expect this to persuade, to be clear. I don't believe that people engaging in whataboutism are unable to understand why it's wrong so much as they have a different approach to language that detaches it from accountability to any sort of conceptual coherence that people are normally searching for when testing integrity of arguments; commenting on it is more about revealing a difference in which background values inform the way you choose to communicate.

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