Is the cloud provider getting money off of this arrangement? => Yes, obviously they're getting paid here.
Is the cloud provider getting that money as a result of deception? => Yes, by selling ex. the use of 1 CPU core when they actually have no intention of letting you use that core. Now, I'll grant that in an actual legal case it might well be possible to get away with this by burying it in the ToS, but this is HN, not a court room, so I'm comfortable setting the bar at "would most actual users expect that to happen based on marketing?", conclude that no, most users would consider that surprising even if there's something buried in the ToS claiming that it's allowed, and call a spade a spade.
the problem is that the terms of service say "don't mine crypto", and I'm not.
they've set up an imperfect detection mechanism and I'm one of the false positives but have no meaningful way to prove my innocence.
the worst part is that there's somebody in a GCP office somewhere that might secretly believe that I'm actually a cryptobro. shudder
> Any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved and/or unlawful gain.
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fraud#Noun)
Is the cloud provider getting money off of this arrangement? => Yes, obviously they're getting paid here.
Is the cloud provider getting that money as a result of deception? => Yes, by selling ex. the use of 1 CPU core when they actually have no intention of letting you use that core. Now, I'll grant that in an actual legal case it might well be possible to get away with this by burying it in the ToS, but this is HN, not a court room, so I'm comfortable setting the bar at "would most actual users expect that to happen based on marketing?", conclude that no, most users would consider that surprising even if there's something buried in the ToS claiming that it's allowed, and call a spade a spade.