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It seems that you fully understand what's going on and don't like it. At the same time, you're only looking at it from one side. To recap: - moved to a locatio

It seems that you fully understand what's going on and don't like it. At the same time, you're only looking at it from one side. To recap: - moved to a location where available internet connection is unreliable - set up your own proxy with AWS - many services don't work (well) Using a proxy (in another country) with some of those services may break the ToS in the first place. Since you've already embarked on this, you could try a less well known addresses than AWS. I suspect you know this but would prefer if you didn't have to. Looking at it from the other side, services are trying to deal with a lot of things including providing service to those who they are allowed to provide service for. To do this they have to take measures to stop misuse. Using an AWS proxy is probably a common workaround of those who are misusing the service. Now if you are in a country that should receive service and only using the AWS proxy to improve reliability, you could be clear of any wrongdoing in a court, IANAL. At the same time you can see how the service can't tell the difference. Your internet connection was unreliable to begin with, and initial workaround bumped into mitigations for misuse. Understand that and do something else, don't expect the internet to change for you. And rather than posting a rant here, try contacting the services you pay for. Raise awareness of the problem and maybe they can have proxies that you can authenticate and use for more reliable connections IDK, but at least you're talking to someone who actually could change the services you use. Edit: Sorry if that seems harsh. I have been in similar situations and it does suck. I got by with some workarounds that worked (until it didn't) and lived without some services. Cloud VMs by their very nature are not end-users' machines. Another route might be cloud desktop services that do try to specifically work like an end-user machine.

peelle 4y ago
While I agree businesses have to mitigate against bots and hacking, I'd like to push back a bit. I'm an American living abroad. I have the same types of issues as OP, even with my reliable internet. The current methods of mitigation vary from annoying to outright discriminatory. One example is that my home state's IRS portal(along with all the other state gov sites) straight up block access from the overseas democracy I live in. I assume they block almost all overseas access but I haven't tried to verify it. Like OP, I need to use a SOCKS proxy, or VPN to bypass this heavy handed tactic. While I'd love for it to not be so, Americans living abroad still have to file their taxes. An NPR article said there's probably close to 5 million of us expats. Lastly with the Cloud VMs, it doesn't seem that this sort of ban is evenly distributed. I've proxied/tunneled through Linode, a well known Torrent VPN, and Digital Ocean, without raising any red flags, but Amazon, ViperVPN, and NordVPN have been flagged. I could go on and argue that with the learn to code movement I could see a cloud instance being the new geocities homepage, but that may never come to pass.

peelle 4y ago

While I agree businesses have to mitigate against bots and hacking, I'd like to push back a bit. I'm an American living abroad. I have the same types of issues as OP, even with my reliable internet. The current methods of mitigation vary from annoying to outright discriminatory. One example is that my home state's IRS portal(along with all the other state gov sites) straight up block access from the overseas democracy I live in. I assume they block almost all overseas access but I haven't tried to verify it. Like OP, I need to use a SOCKS proxy, or VPN to bypass this heavy handed tactic. While I'd love for it to not be so, Americans living abroad still have to file their taxes. An NPR article said there's probably close to 5 million of us expats. Lastly with the Cloud VMs, it doesn't seem that this sort of ban is evenly distributed. I've proxied/tunneled through Linode, a well known Torrent VPN, and Digital Ocean, without raising any red flags, but Amazon, ViperVPN, and NordVPN have been flagged. I could go on and argue that with the learn to code movement I could see a cloud instance being the new geocities homepage, but that may never come to pass.