

AWS AUP Breach - rudolph
http://pdfcast.org/pdf/aws-aup-breach

======
meritt
The real line we need to explore here is why was the user banned, since it
sorta hits on both points:

1) Banned for having multiple (presumably aws-free) accounts?

or

2) Running mining nodes which will definitely be 100% CPU usage

The former I can agree with completely but the latter, if that's the case, is
really questionable territory for Amazon to try and manage. I have a feeling
it's most likely #1 though.

~~~
nwh
> _Running mining nodes which will definitely be 100% CPU usage_

They would be mining Litecoin, which is GPU and CPU based. You can't mine this
in a free instance, which rules out them abusing the free tier. Likely a lot
of heat and power for Amazon, but what else would they sell GPU instances for
except for heavy computation?

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westernmostcoy
Link to the AUP in question:
[http://aws.amazon.com/aup/](http://aws.amazon.com/aup/)

This does not immediately look authentic. Why would a letter like this be
"signed" by the CEO instead of a member of Amazon's legal department?

~~~
soneil
It really doesn't, does it. It's quite rare to see all the text properly
embedded in what appears to be a scanned paper document.

Also curious that it specifically mentioned 'jhprotominer', a miner for
'protoshares', which appear to be related to 'bitshares'; yet another
cryptocurrency that's about 2 months old. Interesting that of all the articles
mining LiteCoin on AWS, there's been no such issues.

I can't decide if someone's trying to get protoshares into the news, or scare
miners off them. But I do have a hard time taking this one at face value.

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rasengan
This is either fake or TIL Jeff Bezos is bad at grammar but an amazingly
detailed CEO.

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ewang1
The address and phone numbers are real [1]. But the letterhead logo seems to
be an outdated one.

[1]:
[https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help?topicID=200626000](https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help?topicID=200626000)

------
libria
The obvious move here for Amazon is to release "ASIC Altcoin Miner" or A2M
(I'm trademarking this BTW): ASIC miners you can spin up instantly without
worrying about peripheral infrastructure costs or crooked ASIC vendors
delaying shipments.

------
smtddr
Well, this better only be for the multiple free accounts despite the wording
seemingly indicating more. Otherwise AMZ needs to update their ToS to let
everyone know they don't support bitcoin mining; which makes no sense because
I'd think they'd be okay running rendering processes[1] which would also hold
the CPU at 100%. However, now that I think about it, holding the CPU at 100%
is a problem[2] for all cloud providers. Perhaps AMZ is against any CPU
intensive work on anything other than dedicated systems.

1\.
[http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2014/en_us/inde...](http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2014/en_us/index.html?url=files/Command_line_renderer_Render_from_the_command_line.htm,topicNumber=d30e771764)

2\. [http://www.clubcloudcomputing.com/2012/06/bad-neighbors-
in-t...](http://www.clubcloudcomputing.com/2012/06/bad-neighbors-in-the-
cloud/)

------
yeukhon
Without full details, we can only speculate which ends up with drama here on
HN. And what is the intent of sharing this to the Internet community?

