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Comment by nikcub

1 day ago

This is the conflict at the center of running a hosting company - make it easy to signup and you get a lot of new users but also a lot of abuse.

Implement anti-abuse measures and you will hit some loud false positives (this may be the case with GCP here).

I don't envy anybody running a hosting co - the internet is a really ugly place under the surface.

edit: to add - AWS are really good here. Must be the ~30 years of retail fraud and abuse experience.

6 comments

nikcub

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duckmysick  20 hours ago

Hetzner is famously aggressive with their KYC (Know Your Customer) requirements, often locking new sign-ups and asking for photos of ID.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

edelbitter  1 day ago

I continue to receive phishing via AWS pretending to be Amazon. And not even the Unicode-lookalike shenanigans that my spam filter refuses for excessive mixed scripts, no; literally claiming to be Amazon as in: the company that operates the relay.

swyx  20 hours ago

i wonder if DID or World (various ways of Proof of Human) can help solve this issue.

  • nikcub  16 hours ago

    This just incentivizes market for bio-mules, which already exists with world[0] - where prices stay low because it was rolled out to low-income countries.

    Then there's the platform game theory. If you adopt you add friction which reduces signups, and there will always be a competitor who would risk the 10x fraud increase in order to capture 100x the market. Railway has seen hyper-growth because it's so easy to run from, and is recommended by, coding agents[1].

    The solutions are here already just not well implemented or understood - probabilistic fraud detection, resource limits, service and automation limits, standard gov identity verification as a signal, enterprise sales channels with human relationships, etc.

    There are tradeoffs with each platform choice that just aren't well understood. Most users shop on price and DX and don't see the abuse infra or problem until it hits them.

    Google and GCP have a problem where they completely cook users who get flagged in their automated fraud net (this isn't news - or shouldn't be)

    [0] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/05/24/black-market-for-...

    [1] and the problems that come with providing that simple interface, like sometimes dropping prod