[hansvm]

> without ANY indication of what they're up to

They stated in no uncertain terms they're running a remote VSCode instance and nothing else. I've done something similar back in the day just to have a consistent environment (target was a hacked up, cheap, used Android phone I left at home, but same idea -- remote IDE for one reason or another).

These posts aren't that crazy when you think about the level of abuse a service like this probably gets and how few dollars per account are spent from the bulk of users. I've been banned from Digital Ocean before without any crypto mining or heavy workloads or failing to pay bills or hosting porn or any of the other sorts of things you might expect. My best guess is that they flagged the fact I was using a privacy card as an indicator of potential eventual fraud. Or else a new fraud model took into account age and didn't take into account that there was no way for a new account to ever become old enough before being flagged, or some other sort of "data-driven" blunder. No biggie though, there are plenty of operators willing to actually accept my money for their services.

[ngalstyan4]

Added details here[1]. For clarity, I'd just add that I was also running my backend on the instance which could have been buggy and compromised (cannot rule that out). Was not mining crypto, hosting porn or doing anything else that I'd think is clearly against their terms of service.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32323655