[jkaplowitz]

> Connecting these services with a VPN is the very definition of shady.

I don't think OP mentioned using a VPN.

But even if they had: really, managing a cloud infrastructure via VPN is so far from shady that it's often recommended or required by many tech companies' security policies for people working from public wifi locations among other circumstances, as an added layer of protection against local eavesdropping and sometimes also for specific predictable networking routing within a cloud network perimeter.

I realize that OP is acting as a student/hobbyist, but there's no inherent reason why someone immersed in best-practice tech culture would necessarily be shady if they applied this VPN recommendation to their own personal tinkering. Many of the benefits of using one still apply.

It would, of course, be shady if Oracle intends to deny service to people in Turkey and the VPN use is to circumvent that restriction. But I don't believe that there is such a restriction on place.

[throw_m239339]

> But even if they had: really, managing a cloud infrastructure via VPN is so far from shady that it's often recommended or required by many tech companies' security policies for people working from public wifi locations among other circumstances, as an added layer of protection against local eavesdropping and sometimes also for specific predictable networking routing within a cloud network perimeter.

We're talking about 2 different kind of VPN here, and you know it, please don't spread confusion on that topic. Nobody needs to connect to his own database service using some B2C service like North VPN to obfuscate where the actually queries come from.

> It would, of course, be shady if Oracle intends to deny service to people in Turkey and the VPN use is to circumvent that restriction. But I don't believe that there is such a restriction on place.

They probably don't, problem fixed. I'm not siding with Oracle, but Oracle owes absolutely nothing to a free tier user suspected of fraud.

[jkaplowitz]

> We're talking about 2 different kind of VPN here, and you know it, please don't spread confusion on that topic. Nobody needs to connect to his own database service using some B2C service like North VPN to obfuscate where the actually queries come from.

Honestly, a student/hobbyist from Turkey who is trying specifically to defend against a local eavesdropping or censorship threat, or to work around restrictive firewall configurations on public WiFi networks, might very well use exactly the same types of VPNs you're describing, for some of the same legitimate purposes as any professional would use their corporate VPN. After all, they don't have a corporate IT department to maintain their own private VPN. These types of companies probably have more friendly pricing for a student/hobbyist from Turkey than the VPN companies whose marketing material focused on corporate use cases instead of circumventing Netflix geo blocks.

You're right that it would not be the ideal type of VPN for database access control, but I can imagine it being an element of viable defense-in-depth strategies where one is in a country where most inbound local traffic other than your own would be malicious. Imagine coupling a restriction on source IP range with TLS + IAM credentials, or something like that. Requiring a presence on the specific chosen VPN company's netblock drastically shrinks the threat model vs allowing connection attempts from 0.0.0.0/0.

> I'm not siding with Oracle, but Oracle owes absolutely nothing to a free tier user suspected of fraud.

I agree that they don't owe anything to such a user, but equally we don't owe it to Oracle to refrain from criticizing these kinds of false positives in their fraud detection with no avenue for redress. Anyone who either experiences or hears about these kinds of outcomes is justified both in criticizing Oracle and in being less likely to recommend or choose Oracle for their or their employer's cloud computing needs.

In turn, Oracle owes it to themselves to at least consider that possible consequence, and to allow at least enough redress to keep the severity of this reputational impact within whatever range they deem acceptable.

[throw_m239339]

Oracles owes absolutely nothing to someone using their free tier. Oracle doesn't care why would anybody use a public VPN and would certainly mark any person who does that as a fraudster.

Finally, here is their pitch for their free tier.

That ends that inane discussion with your misplaced moral arguments(also known as entitlement) quite clearly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32322140

[jkaplowitz]

For reference, most of your link is about their time-limited Free Trial when OP is trying to use their Always Free offering - two separate things, and as noted at the top of your link, the Always Free offerings do not have a time limit.

Confusing these two offerings is entirely understandable. But coupling that confusion with insulting me, overlooking or condescendingly mischaracterizing most of my arguments, making unsubstantiated statements about what Oracle would do that are either overconfidently overgeneralized or coming from inside knowledge without proper disclosure, and claiming that your link somehow ends our discussion - now that, all of that taken together is what ends our discussion.

I don't intend to reply further to this sub-thread.