AWS AUP Breach | Hacker News Reader

AWS AUP Breach

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16 pointsrudolph9 comments

The real line we need to explore here is why was the user banned, since it sorta hits on both points:

1) Banned for having multiple (presumably aws-free) accounts?

2) Running mining nodes which will definitely be 100% CPU usage

The former I can agree with completely but the latter, if that's the case, is really questionable territory for Amazon to try and manage. I have a feeling it's most likely #1 though.

> Running mining nodes which will definitely be 100% CPU usage

They would be mining Litecoin, which is GPU and CPU based. You can't mine this in a free instance, which rules out them abusing the free tier. Likely a lot of heat and power for Amazon, but what else would they sell GPU instances for except for heavy computation?

Link to the AUP in question: http://aws.amazon.com/aup/

This does not immediately look authentic. Why would a letter like this be "signed" by the CEO instead of a member of Amazon's legal department?

It really doesn't, does it. It's quite rare to see all the text properly embedded in what appears to be a scanned paper document.

Also curious that it specifically mentioned 'jhprotominer', a miner for 'protoshares', which appear to be related to 'bitshares'; yet another cryptocurrency that's about 2 months old. Interesting that of all the articles mining LiteCoin on AWS, there's been no such issues.

I can't decide if someone's trying to get protoshares into the news, or scare miners off them. But I do have a hard time taking this one at face value.

This is either fake or TIL Jeff Bezos is bad at grammar but an amazingly detailed CEO.

The address and phone numbers are real [1]. But the letterhead logo seems to be an outdated one.

[1]: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help?topicID=200626000

The obvious move here for Amazon is to release "ASIC Altcoin Miner" or A2M (I'm trademarking this BTW): ASIC miners you can spin up instantly without worrying about peripheral infrastructure costs or crooked ASIC vendors delaying shipments.

Well, this better only be for the multiple free accounts despite the wording seemingly indicating more. Otherwise AMZ needs to update their ToS to let everyone know they don't support bitcoin mining; which makes no sense because I'd think they'd be okay running rendering processes[1] which would also hold the CPU at 100%. However, now that I think about it, holding the CPU at 100% is a problem[2] for all cloud providers. Perhaps AMZ is against any CPU intensive work on anything other than dedicated systems.

1. http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2014/en_us/inde...

2. http://www.clubcloudcomputing.com/2012/06/bad-neighbors-in-t...

Without full details, we can only speculate which ends up with drama here on HN. And what is the intent of sharing this to the Internet community?

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