 Hey everyone! #vultr just enshittified! They re claiming ownership of all intellectual property you host on their VMs. https://grimgreenfo.rest/notes/9rdle0uyo4d30029 Clear violation of copyright law. [edit: muting this. I got too much to do. Like moving servers. And too many of you don't understand that contracts must be read as a hostile, abusive, manipulative party would interpret them. I've worked with too many bastards who did exactly that and got away with it. Capitalism is not polite.] 169 comments
  @Mirk0dex you back up your systems, power off at the command line, and restore elsewhere without logging into the gui. also use their support page to send a message that you don't accept the new ToS.  @overeducatedredneck @mwl I don't know man, I really don't. I thought maybe Digital Ocean, but it's still proprietary. @Mirk0dex @overeducatedredneck Email can be handled on DO VMs with SES on AWS. @overeducatedredneck @Mirk0dex @mwl We use SES on AWS for email with all our Digital Ocean VMs. Barely costs a thing, easy to setup with Exim or Postfix. @Mirk0dex @mwl Check out the linked reddit thread they have instructions on how to cancel w/o agreeing to the new TOS beforehand (which they try to force you to do )  @Mirk0dex@social.linux.pizza @mwl@io.mwl.io cool, well, it's good that my internet is setup. This is annoying, because it means I'll need to shut down and migrate my instance a lot sooner than anticipated. Thanks for the headache, vultr.  @mwl This is one of the craziest things I have ever read... The funny thing is, by claiming they own any content hosted on their services that does also put them in legal jeopardy in that they also are legally responsible for any hosted content that violates any laws. I realize that they're just saying there that they "have the right to use it any way they want" and would try to argue this doesn't mean responsibility, but the claim of legal ownership will pretty much wreck the argument. @nazokiyoubinbou @mwl Strictly speaking, you’re still the owner, but they are trying to grant themselves a perpetual unlimited license to your data. Lawyers will quibble over the difference, but the headlines of “Licensing CSAM for commercial use” is pretty bad no matter what way you look at it… @eccentric_econ @mwl I did acknowledge this already. What I am saying is that the chief arguments in favor of "not responsible for what users place on their services" starts to weaken severely when they claim that they have full rights to take and use said things -- which, while not technically ownership, is also close enough that their legal rights to claim lack of ownership are almost nil. @mwl Great fucking time to do an emergency migration :/ and idk whereto. Ramnode? @mwl Looks like a TOS copy and paste fuckup that’ll get rolled back. But I quite like ssdnodes.com. @mwl I heavily considered the pros and cons of running a Vultr cloud VM, from an entirely bespoke image managed with Ansible, versus a dedicated albeit pre-fab OpenBSD VM from @OpenBSDAms. The costs were about the same and, ultimately, I decided to try OpenBSDAMS for a bit. Best $70-ish bucks I spent that year. Hands down. Sadly, I install random OS with random options, over and over again... you're more a production provider. @mwl Not to bash @OpenBSDAms at all, they seem quite good, but what about running Proxmox or ESXi on bare metal at <pick your <60msec-latency provider> ? Can confirm OpenBSD and FreeBSD are both content as guests nowadays. There used to be a VPS provider in California that supported OpenBSD, can't remember their name right now. @OpenBSDAms I currently have two tiny VPSes at Vultr. Soon to become "had." This change to terms was not an accident.  @OpenBSDAms @xenotrope @mwl Hah I was just looking for your link, I've been meaning to try out OpenBSD Amsterdam :) @mwl damn that's wild. digital ocean seem roughly equivalent and ok so far, or do they also suck in ways I'm not aware of? [edit: they compare the TOS with DO on the reddit post] @mwl ah damn, and I do send my own mail too so that's good to know. I guess re vultr, practically it means they can use anything they can scrape, right? If they don't have your root login for your VPS surely they can't magically nifty stuff off your machine other than what's published to the web?  @mwl I wonder how well it will work if someone fills their VPS with "legitimately sourced" copyrighted music and video? @mwl This had to be a mistake, some lawyer didn't have enough coffee and fucked up and another lawyer was too busy to read and rubber stamped it. It makes no sense they'd do this, selling user data to AI companies can't be *that* lucrative, they'd have to know customers would just pull out if they looked at it at all? I've had all my non-homeprod shit in Linode because they pool bandwidth/transfer, been going to move it out after they got bought but was too lazy. 😭 That's the simple version. Read the long version. The long version is what we agree to. The simple version is the pretty BS. @ed1conf @mwl however, OVH offers low end bare metal for an amazing price and their stuff mostly just works once you figure out the undocumented limitations. And they have two North American bit barns that are NOT located in the United States of Overreach. Con: adequate network connectivity at best. Very much optimized for cost and it shows. But, cheap. So... @mwl well that sucks. I only have my blog hosted there but I think that's about to move elsewhere, likely over to @OpenBSDAms @mwl hetzner has been hosting my stuff for the last 5 years now and they're great. (€20 credit referral link: https://hetzner.cloud/?ref=bYBhzcC2Vly2) I think some people like Linode's options for BSD VMs better though I can think of a few folks who are quite happy with Hetzner for Free/Open BSD vms. @mwl this is not new. They didn't 'just' enshittify. They've taken another step in the seemingly unavoidable road to enshittification, but that section of the TOS is two years old. @spineless_echidna so I've heard. But I haven't been forced to agree to it before. @mwl Also, my understanding from reading the whole TOS is that your User Content is the content that you generate on their website, i.e. Vultr guides and so on. Both Digital Ocean and Linode seem to manage their claim over your IP in a similar way: user-generated content such as DO guides is licensed to them in perpetuity, whereas the license for your private content is limited to them copying and distributing it (as they would need to in order to host your content so you can make it available to others).  @mwl is ramnode's TOS comparably poor? it doesn't seem so https://clientarea.ramnode.com/tos.php @mwl I think I have reached the Ballmer Peak of amazement and decaf. I wish I had some full strength coffee here.  Sure it is! I make my living licensing IP to many folks. Sublicensing happens all the time. @mwl Surely there must already be one?   Uberspace is great for personal projects, it's currently what I use for everything. They have a "pay what you can" business model I really admire and have (at least in my interpretation) repeatedly shown themselves to actually care about people on the platform.  @mwl oh gods. I guess my websites and mail servers are coming on-prem, occasional power cuts be damned  I mean I don't like the overall clause; that bit indeed does make it better, but some of the things are requesting (for example, the license being "irrevocable") are just widely outside of the scope of what they need.   Wow. I mean, I've lost the ability to be surprised in the tech industries siren song of Venture Capital and flat out theft, but that's a truly stunning example. I guess posession really is 9/10ths of the law.  @mwl FFS, 2012 called and wants its pretend panic back. Wow. You don't understand copyright law at all. Welcome to the block list.  @mwl Wow. My employer does 'private cloud' and vm hosting, I don't think we'd have a single client if we tried to claim their data belonged to us. Would totally and permanently break trust. Their disk contents are sacrosanct.    @mwl@io.mwl.io @mwl It looks like the info on reddit might be old because they added that to their TOS in July of 2021 so anybody whose used Vultr since then has already agreed to the "new" TOS. Just a heads up. https://web.archive.org/web/20210729200233/https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/  @mwl don't know what people are really moving to but https://bsd.amsterdam and https://sdf.org are both thoroughly community based hosting providers that offer VMs. edit: sdf.org does various Linux distros in addition to BSD; bsd.amsterdam is just BSD. @mwl I started testing out Hetzner because I wanted a Arm VPS, and they’ve been pretty good so far. I do need to try installing one of the BSDs on an Arm VPS. The BSDs aren’t tier 1 with images OOTB, but Hetzner lists the latest versions in their ISO list and doesn’t stop people from installing random OSes.   @mwl looks like I'll be bailing to @OpenBSDAms . @mwl Haven’t gone through all your replies to see if this was mentioned before but Hetzner Cloud has been fantastic for me. Cheap, (correction) arm64 available, and most importantly they have a quarantine period before being SMTP enabled so their IPs are clean. @mwl Akamai/Linode seems OK, for now, but now I’m concerned about *every* hosting provider changing terms. I really don’t want to go back to a colo; moving VPSs between providers is enough of a pain.  @mwl I mostly use Oracle Cloud because I manage operations for the compute service. We had a problem with the FreeBSD image but @dch recently got it fixed and has updated images (incl ZFS root) planned. I also have Rocky, OmniOS guests. If Oracle isn’t something you’re comfortable with, I hear great things about Hetzner and OVH for BSDs, and they treated me well at prior employers. (Opinions my own etc)  @mwl been happy with Linode (now Akamai Cloud) for over a decade. Transition to Akamai hasn’t been my favorite thing but it’s better than most such sales I’ve seen lol  @mwl Some lawyers and/or a sloppy corporate counsel are going to get fired over this overly broad wording. @mwl @xyhhx ah well, this makes me feel a little better about those times I forgot to pay my server bill and didn’t pay up till the final warning. jokes on them though, only intellectual property they’re getting from me is the automated bread & grilled cheese factory I built the last time I hosted a minecraft server for friends. @mwl I guess I need to move a few things as well then. Sigh. The IP I have for my email server is so very very clean though, it'll be hard to go somewhere else for that. 😟 @mwl IIRC I mentioned this before, having all my VPS at IONOS (https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps). They offer ESXi as platform but nowadays mostly switched to KVM. All my (cheap) VMs run #OpenBSD.  @mwl The important part is “for purposes of providing the Services to you”. Seems like an overly generic clause for providing CDN-like services. I'm not really alarmed by this.  |
Gregory's Server
@mwl wtf? I use aws but it is a bit of expensive. Maybe it is time to go back to colo options with our own tiny server. Idk