Vultr posted their response to the concerns here - https://www.vultr.com/news/a-note-about-vultrs-terms-of-service/
The portion of the ToS that people were worried about had been in place for years and had nothing to do with server intellectual property. They are removing it to avoid future confusion.
I don’t disagree that it was poorly worded, but the amount of people jumping to the worst possible conclusions on this is concerning. What happened to Hanlon’s Razor?
deleted by creator
Many are, but as far as I know, no hosting provider has ever tried something like what was claimed (which is why it made such news).
It seems like many people didn’t even verify that portion of ToS was new (checking web archive), or wait for Vultr’s response before closing their accounts.
Even after the official response, it feels like people stuck to their original assumptions and felt justified moving services?
Companies, and specifically the people in them, make mistakes. What matters is their reaction. I’m scratching my head to think what Vultr could do better in this case (other than creating a time machine to avoid the initial screw up).
deleted by creator
_
What response are you expecting, exactly? There’s lots of competition out there and data privacy is an extremely sensitive topic. It’s not the kind of mistake you can recover from. They screwed up, they lost customers, end of story.
Also personally I don’t believe for a second that it was a mistake. The hell it was. Any lawyer worth their salt would have pointed out the issue right away. Either they wrote it without a lawyer or they wrote it on purpose.
In the EU, it sort of isn’t.
Takes a long time to write a proper response for all the GDPR stuff. The responses surprisingly don’t change all that much whether or not I do, so I might as well save me the trouble.
What happened to Hanlon’s Razor?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
we’re a little traumatised.
Very glad I took a step back and didn’t make a knee jerk reaction to this. I’m responsible for recommending providers to clients and managing their k8s clusters. We use Linode, DigitalOcean and Vultr and had just set up a cluster on Vultr which would have been embarrassing to then have had to recommend moving. And the region we needed that cluster in the other providers don’t cover. The response from Vultr has been good I think. And that goes with the level of support we’ve had from them which has been really good.
Well, they kind of gave it away with the name…
Glad to see I wasn’t the only one thinking this.
Backpedaling in 3…2… oh there it is
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/vultr_content_controversy/
So it sounds like Vultr isn’t doing anything nefarious at all.
Someone apparently actually read the terms and services for the first time a few days ago and misunderstood them since they were saying it was in reference to the Vuktr website not your servers.
And either way, they removed the offended lang to clear it up.
This seems like a knee jerk mob reaction more than anything.
There is no evidence that they’ve done anything with anyone’s data.
deleted by creator
On top of all this you can’t access your account without accepting new ToS. After login web page show full window modal form with one button “confirm” so you can’t reject it. I’m sure most of HN readers can handle this minor obstacle ;-) After I asked vultr for access to my account without acceptance of new ToS they wrote me back legal slur suggesting I may host questionable content:
(…) you take the necessary measures to protect minors from accessing harmful material on your website.
(…) requirements apply to you, including removing any infringing content and safeguarding minors.
and threaten me with “law enforcement agencies”
Bravo, bravo…
Well. I have a few servers there. Suppose I will move them. Nothing that isn’t easy to move. I can probably find something cheaper on LEB. I just like vultr UI. A lot of the cheaper places make it feel like the early 00s.
Holy Brand Damage Batman !
In my experience Vultr is not really selfhosting friendly, I had some credit there, but about to move
deleted by creator
VPS is self-hosted?
self-hosted doesn’t have to mean ‘hosted at home’
Right, it’s just the side-bar makes the distinction between “online services” and “self-hosted” so I wasn’t sure.
A place to share alternatives to popular_ online services_ that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Yes, writing ToS for a Cloud provider is hard. Someone mixed a few documents and this mess happened, get over it, Vultr doesn’t have the size nor the resources to go over your VPS storage looking for interesting data.
Did you really just try to excuse and downplay a company claiming full ownership and rights over all user’s data?
This is the first time there’s an issue with Vultr and their explanation is perfectly reasonable. If this was happening with Oracle or Amazon I would be worried indeed but not with this smaller company that most likely just fucked up without any malicious intent.
