21 ms·

Vultr is now claiming full perpetual commercial rights over all hosted content

• hattchett 3y ago
  This passage is a clause from a legal agreement, typically found in the terms of service for a platform or service provider like Vultr. It outlines the rights you, as a user, are granting to Vultr regarding any content you create or upload while using their services. Let's break it down for clarity: Non-exclusive: Vultr does not have exclusive rights to your content. You can grant similar rights to others. Perpetual: The rights you grant are everlasting. Irrevocable: You cannot take back these rights once they are granted. Royalty-free: Vultr does not have to pay you for the use of your content. Fully paid-up: No future payments will be required from Vultr to you for the use of your content. Worldwide license: Vultr can use your content anywhere in the world. Right to sublicense through multiple tiers: Vultr can grant these rights to other parties, who can then grant them to further parties, and so on. To use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit, and distribute your content: Vultr can do just about anything with your content, including modifying it and sharing it, in any current or future media or format. In any way that Vultr deems appropriate: Vultr has the discretion to use your content however it sees fit. Without any further consent, notice, and/or compensation to you or to any third parties: Vultr does not need to ask for your permission, inform you, or pay you or anyone else to exercise these rights. For purposes of providing the Services to you: The clause often stipulates that these rights are granted to Vultr so they can operate, improve, and promote their services effectively. This type of clause is common in the terms of service for online platforms and services. It essentially allows the service provider to operate their platform efficiently, showcase user-generated content, and adapt and improve services without needing to seek permission from users each time they need to handle content. It’s important for users to understand these terms, as they significantly affect how one's content can be used and shared by the service provider.
  • red-iron-pine 3y ago
    legal discovery software, man. we'll see if those lawyers can still demand 400/hr in the future. ChatGPT may eat those legal disco companies, too
    • hattchett 3y ago
      Yup
  • donmcronald 3y ago
    > typically found in the terms of service for a platform or service provider like Vultr > showcase user-generated content What? Am I unaware of some service they offer? I don't want an infrastructure provider doing anything with my content. They shouldn't even have access to anything that's not publicly accessible unless someone needs one-off access to help with a support incident. It's not "content" for a lot of customers. It's private, proprietary information. What if someone is using Vultr to host an app for a company that requires an NDA from the webdev? Are they stuck in limbo as of right now? The Vultr account owner might not even be the owner of the data hosted in the account. The whole thing is crazy. How are there people here defending this as "normal"?
  • groestl 3y ago
    [typically found in the terms of service] [Let's break it down for clarity] [This type of clause is common in the terms of service for online platforms] [It’s important for users] This comment reeks like ChatGPT generated content, tbh.
• pull_my_finger 3y ago
  Everyone (maybe rightfully) up in arms, but I imagine you would need an agreement like this is they were finally getting on board with something like elastic compute. Everytime they spin up a new machine on your behalf they're essentially redistributing all the files on that machine. I understand everyones gun shy, but I've been using Vultr for years and I'm much less suspicious of them than the likes of google/amazon. I've personally never had an issue with them, but I definitely think it's a healthy response to go fight or flight when you're essentially signing all your rights away.
  • jasonjayr 3y ago
    Sure, but "Irrevocable?" That's a hard no.
  • boutell 3y ago
    "prepare derivative works"? Also a hard no.
  • thecodeassassin 3y ago
    This is not boilerplate, otherwise every cloud provider would have this and they do not. This problem can be solved by much less broad terms.
  • YeBanKo 3y ago
    > commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate How does this maps to adding another node in the compute Also, why perpetual? They are essentially data processor, they act on your behalf and should not do things with data that you have not asked for.
• 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
  Let's do one thing, host Nintendo content and since vultr now has commercial rights over "my uploads" let's see how Nintendo bites them in the ass. This can be done and dusted in a few days given enough traction
  • mekster 3y ago
    Why would Nintendo do anything unless Vultr deliberately makes money from those contents.
    • 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
      Uh ... Nintendo is historically pretty litigious. Remember the time when a man built a paper Mario for his son and Nintendo tried to sue him?
• hattchett 3y ago
  I look at it like this, if your data is on the internet, anyone can do anything they want with it, period.
  • groestl 3y ago
    Not legally.
  • mekster 3y ago
    Time to go back hosting your own hardware.
• hobotime 3y ago
  This is a standard clause so you can't sue them for providing pirated stuff when you our your users placed it on their servers. That's why is proceeded by "for purposes of providing the Services to you" Nothing here... move away from the fake outrage.
  • Havoc 3y ago
    > This is a standard clause so you can't sue them for providing pirated stuff Rubbish. That wouldn’t require an explicit and broad right to commercialise and profit from your content The small portion dealing with piracy isn’t what the uproar is a out
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
    So are they afraid that Warner uploads Dune 2 torrent to their servers and immediately sues them for distribution? And to protect against that, they reserve the right to create Dune 3 out of it using Sora and distribute that themselves?
• lincm83hey 3y ago
  I mean, if anybody's surprised, their name is literally a dehydrated version of the word "vulture"
• retox 3y ago
  The language seems have been added mid-2021, so it's not new.
• not-duckie 3y ago
  i just migrated to vultr cause of minial api and interface. really hate it when stakeholders make founders take foolish decision :/. guess I'll use linode or something now
  • VonNaturAustre 3y ago
    I agreed!
• cozzyd 3y ago
  Keep calm and carrion
• supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  I wish people stopped posting threads from Reddit, because they are either full of unverifiable claims (like a post from some time ago that claimed a coworker was messing around with their computer for the last five years), or in this case, outrage sought for the sake of outrage and disregarding the context due to which it has arisen. In this case, I believe this is due to the introduction of their CDN product, though it would also apply to their object storage product as well.
  • soraminazuki 3y ago
    And while we’re at it, people should automatically disregard what others say because human beings are known to be dishonest. See the problem? Your blanket claim regarding unverifiability is especially astounding because this one is easily verifiable. The evidence is right here, for everyone to see. https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/ https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/ Speaking of unverifiable claims, > In this case, I believe this is due to the introduction of their CDN product That’s pure guessing. More importantly, it doesn’t change the egregiousness of this ToS is even if that’s the case. Also, > disregarding the context due to which it has arisen There is absolutely no context in which screwing over customers like that is okay.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• adamredwoods 3y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, I don't know what that means, but it is disturbing enough to make me leave. If they don't want me to leave, they should clarify their intent. Part 12.1: User Content https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/ https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/
  • gruez 3y ago
    It is clarified >You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known or developed, and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties, for purposes of providing the Services to you. Emphasis mine. They have a perpetual license, but only for the purpose of providing services to you. This is a clause and many TOS, presumably to avoid copyright suits.
    • maronato 3y ago
      Services is a very generic term for anything they offer. They can, for example, offer a free non optional AI tool that allows you to ask questions about the data in your database. My non-lawyer understanding of the policy is that, for the purpose of providing you with this service, they have the right to use your entire database to train and test the tool. They can even make a contract with OpenAI and sell your data to them for the purposes of building the AI service. And it’s perpetual and irrevocable, so they can keep their models trained with your data if you decide to leave.
    • adamredwoods 3y ago
      I could not find anything similar in Linode (Akamai) TOS: https://www.linode.com/legal/ https://www.linode.com/legal/ Nor does AWS, that I could find, except with the PartyRock created apps: https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/
• maronato 3y ago
  “You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known or developed, and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties, for purposes of providing the Services to you.” Section 12, https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/ https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/
• YeBanKo 3y ago
  Why is this submission flagged?
  • dang 3y ago
    We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I'd guess it was because the submitted link (https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/s/3CgRd01Ypw https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/s/3CgRd01Ypw) just redirects to a login screen: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/login/?dest=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fselfhosted%2Fsubmit%3Furl%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252F3CgRd01Ypw https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/login/?dest=https%3A%2F%.... Googling the title leads to https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning_vultr_a_major_cloud_provider_is_now/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning..., which I guess is the same content? We can change the URL to that above. Edit: oh, and I see several other commenters in the thread were already linking to that URL.
    • YeBanKo 3y ago
      Maybe it’s too late, but I think it would make sense to update the link.
      • dang 3y ago
        Yes, I did.
    • mindslight 3y ago
      That new URL still just goes to a login screen. I believe this is due to recent reddit policy change. > whoa there, pardner! Your request has been blocked due to a network policy. Try logging in or creating an account here to get back to browsing. It seems that reddit has now followed Xitter with requiring logins to drive engagement numbers, effectively rejecting the open web. Extractive screw turning was probably inevitable with the naive central-server design of webapps, but going through the destruction part of creative destruction still sucks.
      • 3y ago
• adamredwoods 3y ago
  I could not find anything similar in Linode (Akamai) TOS: https://www.linode.com/legal/ https://www.linode.com/legal/ Nor does AWS, that I could find, except with the PartyRock created apps: https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ Both of the above TOS explain intent, for example, to monitor data services for metrics. Vultr's clause (12.1) does not explain intent. The phrase "for purposes of providing services" is a vague intent.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    7.3 of Linode might be it. Cloudflare #2 certainly is it: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/ https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/
    • adamredwoods 3y ago
      Someone else noted Cloudflare: >> You and your End Users (as such term is defined in the Privacy Policy) will retain all right, title and interest in and to any data, content, code, video, images or other materials of any type that you or your End Users transmit to or through the Services (collectively, “Customer Content”) in the form provided to Cloudflare. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, you hereby grant us a non-exclusive, fully sublicensable, worldwide, royalty-free right to collect, use, copy, store, transmit, modify and create derivative works of Customer Content, in each case to the extent necessary to provide the Services. but doesn't state as Vultr did: "and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate" and Cloudflare uses the term "to the extent necessary" which to me seems more specific than a vague wording of "for providing services". I'm not a lawyer, I'm interpreting this to the best of my abilities. In general, if something feels odd, it's best to back away.
      • kijin 3y ago
        Cloudflare's license grant is quite appropriate because the whole point of a CDN is to make copies of your content and cache them closer to your users. Cloudflare also provides numerous tools that modify, and create derivative works of, your code and images on the fly. Vultr on the other hand is just a bunch of compute/storage resources hooked up to pipes. They have a rudimentary CDN offering, but that's about it.
• whalesalad 3y ago
  What are the best VPS' these days who stay out of your hair and protect users?
  • jamesnorden 3y ago
    BuyVM (Frantech) is a good one, you can get a lot of cheap storage "blocks" even on the lowest plan, if you wish.
    • Havoc 3y ago
      Think he recently sold the company
• edgoode 3y ago
  If you’re looking for a new GPU cloud because of this, we’ve put all these providers in on place, console, and API so you can find a new one for your needs at https://shadeform.ai https://shadeform.ai * I’m one of the founders
• stackskipton 3y ago
  Worth noting that Vultr has responded and modified their TOS to remove those terms. https://www.vultr.com/news/A-Note-About-Vultrs-Terms-of-Service/ https://www.vultr.com/news/A-Note-About-Vultrs-Terms-of-Serv...
  • neoecos 3y ago
    So... it was a legalese
    • willio58 3y ago
      We need regulation around this sooo bad. Nobody reads TOS, or at least 99.9999% of people don't because it's simply too much. It's unreasonable to expect people to read these long documents and understand what they mean. We need requirements of high-level overviews in very plain language. Slimming this stuff down and removing BS lawyer fluff is the only way in my eyes.
      • Terr_ 3y ago
        In a way it's a failure of precedent rather than regulation, since ideally the judge would throw some of these contracts out the same as if they had special clauses in microscopic font.
      • SkyPuncher 3y ago
        I agree. It honestly feels like these could be boiled down to about 30 “standard” options.
      • squarefoot 3y ago
        > Nobody reads TOS, or at least 99.9999% of people don't because it's simply too much. Huge opportunity for a service using AI that does, then reports on a public site businesses using shady language or hiding traps, possibly assigning a score.
        • ahaseeb 3y ago
• barryfarling 3y ago
  Would anyone work with these people after they did this? They pivoted because they got caught, not because they are trust worthy. They clearly thought a lot, in concert with counsel, about how they could try to steal people's IP. Geniuses thought no one would read the TOS.
• fsck_vultr 3y ago
  If you have a valid API key, this still works. If you delete node in the dev tools, you can see the page behind it - but it still comes back on the next page.
• fabianholzer 3y ago
  Nomen est omen, it seems?
• timetraveller26 3y ago
  We are in the kind of future that the fear of being trained by AI makes people abandond services if they show any suspicion
• ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  Update: Cloud host Vultr rips user data ownership clause from ToS after web outrage https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/vultr_content_controversy/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/vultr_content_controv... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39857680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39857680)
• joshxyz 3y ago
  i also opened a ticket about it and support rep responded about it being addressed. it's still hilarious and absurd for them to lose some customers on something like this, they provide top notch service that competes very well with digitalocean linode scaleway etc.
  • rezonant 3y ago
    Seems to be a chicken-with-its-head-cut-off outrage day on HN today. There's tons of other places to spend your outrage, especially since their blog post is right, my first reading of the passage in question ending in "for the purposes of delivering the Service to you" was enough to understand it was a limited license. I mean hey, could it be more clear and more ironclad that they aren't trying to steal your content? Yeah. But this is a customer service complaint, not a sensational news story.
    • mort96 3y ago
      I'm more comfortable using hosting providers which won't suddenly give them permission to re-sell everything I put on there, thanks
      • rezonant 3y ago
        Good for you. But that's not what the terms say. Read them closer, and make sure to read the end of the sentence.
        • mort96 3y ago
          If they decided that re-selling is necessary for providing the service (for cash flow reasons, for example), what would stand in the way of them doing that?
          • rezonant 3y ago
            Because the law doesn't care about your cash flow, and a reasonable person would expect that the fee you pay to upkeep your server is sufficient, since that's how it works in general. Trying to claim an extraordinary right to hosted works would require extraordinary language in the agreement so that it would not be debatable that they could use the content for whatever they want. Just the fact we disagree about what it means puts it on a bad legal footing if their intent is to have unlimited license to everything in a VM. And that's not a position any company should put itself in. But if they don't do what you worry about, they are on perfectly fine legal footing.
• osmsucks 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • janandonly 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • xandrius 3y ago
    To be fair to vultures, they are majestic creatures who serve an important part in many ecosystems and they are some of the most endangered birds (often due to habitat loss and/or persecution, poisoning). They should not be seen as negative (as owls and crows are in many cultures) but as the nature cleaners that they are. /end-of-rant but I love vultures :D
• Animats 3y ago
  Not only are those terms overreaching, they are copied from elsewhere. Search with Google for "a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers)" and you get quite a few hits. Mostly from small businesses. Primrose Schools, Rita's Ice, Small's Sliders, Transom Capital, and quite a few other small companies use exactly those words. The first three are franchisors, and the last one is a private equity company. None are in the social media business, for which that clause is clearly intended. Do all those companies use the same low-budget legal drafting service?
  • weikju 3y ago
    > Do all those companies use the same low-budget legal drafting service? Yes. Boilerplate rules the legal world as far as I can see. As well as always sneaking in things in the hopes that people will fail to notice and not notice.
    • _petronius 3y ago
      Part of the reason for legal boilerplate, however, is that in case of litigation specifics do matter. A "known good" phrasing, therefore, will always be preferred by a lawyer giving you good advice, rather than an original and untested one. In some juristictions (such as Germany), the courts even _require a specific phrasing_ (even if it is bad/confusing for the lay person) in order for something to be legally effective. This is not laziness on the lawyers' part, it is them doing what is correct, given the priorities they have been given.
      • Animats 3y ago
        There's nothing wrong with using standard clauses. Lawyers who use the wrong standard clauses, though, didn't do their job.
    • fmajid 3y ago
      Or lazy lawyers using ChatGPT and hoping no one will notice. I think it’s clear Vultr noticed now.
• berkut 3y ago
  I mean, it does read badly, and maybe the worst should be assumed, but at the same time: > You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, worldwide and royalty-free license to copy, make derivative works, display, perform, use, broadcast and transmit on and via the Internet Your Content, solely for the benefit of You and to enable Vultr to perform its obligations under these Terms. Given Vultr has a distributed CDN service, could not the "copy", "display", "broadcast" and "transmit" parts be charitably interpreted as part of that agreement? i.e. them serving your content via the CDN? Edit: it looks like they've updated it already from what the blog post quotes it as?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• gamesbrainiac 3y ago
  [flagged]
• alpha123123 3y ago
  > A Reddit post incorrectly took portions of our Terms of Service out of context, which only pertain to content provided to Vultr on our public mediums (community-related content on public forums, as an example) for purposes of rendering the needed services – e.g., publishing comments, posts, or ratings. This is separate from a user’s own, private content that is deployed on Vultr services. > In order to simplify and further clarify our ToS, we are removing the following sentence from Section 12.1(a) of our ToS https://www.vultr.com/news/A-Note-About-Vultrs-Terms-of-Service/ https://www.vultr.com/news/A-Note-About-Vultrs-Terms-of-Serv...
  • rendaw 3y ago
    What exactly was out of context? Per https://web.archive.org/web/20240203121820/https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240203121820/https://www.vultr... > The Terms explain how you are permitted to use the services provided by and through our platform and.... Platform = hosting. There's no small text, there's no restrictions, there's no qualification. It said nothing about "public mediums" or "for purposes of rendering the needed services".
    • _petronius 3y ago
      The relevant section is taken from part 12 (User Content) where User Content is specifically and narrowly defined as stuff you upload to the website services. I actually think there is an attempt in the ToS as written to keep the definition narrow in the way that the parent comment quotes, but it is unfortunately not super well drafted, because there is a partially-explicit distinction between "platform" and "services" that may make sense to a legal person, but is not sufficiently clear for a technical person. So not quite good enough, IMO, but a distinction is being made in the relevant section, and this can be seen if you read the paragraphs in question.
      • Aeolun 3y ago
        That section as written is still insane. They’re taking ownership of anything you or your users do on their platform.
• juped 3y ago
  Sometimes I feel like I'd be okay with all terms of service and privacy policies changing to "We can do what we want, and you can do nothing, forever" just so we never have to deal with Reddit's finest legal minds attempting to read them. That's a silly exaggeration, of course. But you've certainly lost your right to make fun of admiralty-fringe style legal theories if you give things like this any credence.
  • Eisenstein 3y ago
    Do you think people should be accepting contracts that are difficult to understand? Is it people's duty to default to 'I'm sure its fine' if they don't understand the wording, even if it reads to a normal person as if it is doing something against their interests? If the default is 'assume good intentions' why have a contract at all, or why does the company not make it less far reaching and more accessible? This 'blame the victim for being to dumb to understand what they must agree to, without being give notice or a chance to option out without being locked out of their account' is kind of misanthropic.
• ugjka 3y ago
  Vultr is way too expensive
  • TheSmiddy 3y ago
    How so? They're in the same ballpark as digital ocean and linode who would be their primary competitors, each of which are roughly a 3rd of the cost of AWS/GC/Azure.
    • ugjka 3y ago
      Compared to Hetzner
      • LightHugger 3y ago
        Hetzner is miserable though
        • ugjka 3y ago
          paying 3x less for 2x more compute and 5x more bandwidth allowance and with the EU protections
• bradley13 3y ago
  I hadn't heard of Vultr before, so out of curiosity I had a look. I am actually in the market for some lower-end cloud services. - On their homepage, they list "Cloud Compute - starting at $2.50/month". However, you can't actually look at any details without creating a "free" account. Annoying. - So I created an account. The first thing that pops up is "enter a payment method". What was that about being a "free account"? - You can click away from that and go to "Deploy New Instance". Choosing the cheapest options and disabling all the automatically selected extras, the lowest possible price seems to be twice that advertised "starting at" price. Ok, I looked around. Now I would like to delete that account I had to create. No such option. Asking Google, apparently you can only delete an account by submitting a support ticket. My first impressions are not particularly positive...
  • arcanemachiner 3y ago
    - They're a pretty large cloud services provider (frequently spoken of in the same breath as Digital Ocean and Linode, last I checked). - Dark patterns are bullshit but are hardly unique to them. - They probably require a credit card to cut down on scams. - Your loss as a potential customer will certainly go unnoticed, and life will go on for all parties involved.
    • karolist 3y ago
      For what it's worth, they lost me as a potential customer too, having read the parent post, so there's at least 2 of us.
      • selcuka 3y ago
        > they lost me as a potential customer too They probably lost a sizable percentage of those who read these comments as well.
        • gassiss 3y ago
          not trying to be facetious or anything, but I doubt their product team is worried about customers that are mad they have to click a few extra buttons to save 1 or 2 dollars per month
• louwrentius 3y ago
  [flagged]
• ahaseeb 3y ago
  There's no way this can get enforced
• rezonant 3y ago
  "Betrayed"? This is so sensational for what amounts to a misunderstanding of a sentence in legal terms that is just long enough for customers (well, Reddit at least) to lose the context. But not for a court, "for purposes of providing the Services to you" is an important part that you shouldn't gloss over just because it's at the end of the sentence. "Just"? A blog post written this week for terms that have been there since 2021?
  • mort96 3y ago
    A hosting provider suddenly gave themselves a license to do anything they want with the stuff you put on their server. How is that not a betrayal? You trusted them to host your stuff without, for example, re-selling it. They broke that trust.
    • rezonant 3y ago
      They didn't do that, that's the rub. Even if Services included the actual hosting service (it doesn't in this case, see tons of other commenters quoting the definition for Services in this agreement), it still wouldn't give them a license to use your stuff beyond what's necessary to provide hosting to you.
      • mort96 3y ago
        And anything they do with the content can be explained away as "necessary to provide the service". That's the problem: they're not constraining themselves in any way. They need money to provide the service, so why couldn't they decide that taking art I put on my server and selling it to people is "necessary to provide the service"? It seems like they could at any time decide that their pricing is unsustainable, so monetising customer content is "necessary to provide the service". And what if they, say, introduce a new generative machine learning feature into the Service which necessitates training on customer content? If this was truly just about giving themselves the right to do what's technically necessary to provide the service, then 1) doesn't that mean that they were operating illegally before? and 2) they would've just given themselves the rights to do the specific things they need, not literally anything they could want as long as it can be argued to be "necessary to provide the service"
• tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  The good thing about this outrage is that it creates a downside to just slapping piles of bullshit into your ToS. Hopefully, this will make companies more careful with what they write there, leading to shorter, more understandable, and less user-hostile terms.
• sph 3y ago
  This entire saga could be reframed as "5-day old Reddit account wildly misinterprets Vultr ToS, causing drama-thirsty social media users to spread it far and wide, generating the company a ton of negative press." — Vultr has released a statement explaining, they clarified their point yet the news is still going around the block. Here's a moderator comment on the original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning_vultr_a_major_cloud_provider_is_now/kwz7zih/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning... Those Terms and Conditions could have been clearer, but no one has betrayed anybody, no one is stealing your hosted content and nobody would have said anything if its was not for a redditor with far too much time in their hands trying to interpret legalese, badly. Disclaimer: I have never used Vultr, I do not care what happens to them because of this, but everybody would benefit from taking every drama-du-jour with a pinch of salt, especially when it comes from a new reddit account.
  • petesergeant 3y ago
    > generating the company a ton of negative press I mean, I've heard of them now, and hadn't before, and had assumed by the name it was some dumb Buzzfeed-like site. Possibly they'll get some extra business out of it.
    • sph 3y ago
      Fair enough, though it would be a VERY risky marketing strategy to create a sockpuppet Reddit account to scare senseless their most naive customers, just to generate some publicity :)
      • renonce 3y ago
        While I don’t expect the company to do such PR themselves, from my experience in China it is indeed the case that many major public figures or products began their explosive growth from negative comments like this
  • Freak_NL 3y ago
    From the article in The Register: > "It's clearly causing confusion for some portion of users. We recognize that the average user doesn't have a law degree," Kardwell said. Making a mistake by stuffing their terms of use with vague boilerplate legalese which could apply to anything is one thing, not taking responsibility for that mistake and clearly stating "we made a mistake" instead just means they ended up rubbing in the stain. People are forgiving of mistakes; hubris, not so much. As others have pointed out: that line of text was not harmless, and whether you have a law degree or not is not the issue there. It was not malicious in intent, but it was wrong and overreaching nonetheless.
• auggierose 3y ago
  Don't know anything about the topic, but the name of the service is "Vultr". When people tell you who they are, believe them.
• keepamovin 3y ago
  This is caused by a misunderstanding of legalese. Unfortunately there's no easy cure for this. But I do suggest a dose of ChatGPT to provide perspective (tho, in a nod to pedants and pearl-clutchers, I must concede that you should not sell everything you own, abandon your worldly cares and trust your entire legal stack to ChatGPT, just in case you were instigated to do so by my prior sentence). The quoted sentence is literally just licensing Vultr to actually serve your content. It may seem baroque but this is the reality of engineering back-translated into legalese to comply with centuries of common law precedent. So, excuse our byzantine APIs but that's how we've always done things around here, so sayeth the lawyerfolken. My experience with Vultr has been excellent. Very affordable pricing for on demand PAYG VMs and bandwidth. Good service, and as responsive service as you can expect from a small customer team. Abundant reliability (not to conflagrate any Linodials, but the reliability of their systems appears better than that now-spawn-of Akamai).
• Gud 3y ago
  I was a vultr user for years. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on their services. When I was setting up my email server I requested to have port 25 opened, but instead of getting it opened I got some copy pasta reply from some senior director, how it can’t be done… I moved to Hetzner, after 1 month and after the first bill was paid, I requested the same port opened and immediately it was opened.
  • extraduder_ire 3y ago
    When was this? My request to get outgoing port 25 opened was approved without questions in a couple of hours back in 2017-ish. (since re-blocked because I changed server) I assume you submitted the ticket after seeing their support page, and mentioned why you were sending email.
    • Gud 3y ago
      Two three months ago. Yes I followed the Vultr procedure
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• codetrotter 3y ago
  > I am now investigating alternatives for hosting FreeBSD and OpenBSD systems. Preferably that take custom installs. Hetzner. I am a customer of them. I run FreeBSD on the servers I rent. The way that I got it installed was I did the following on each of the servers: 1. I booted the Hetzner Linux based recovery image on each of the servers. You can do this from the “Robot” web ui that Hetzner gives you access to for managing your servers. 2. Then I used dd to write an mfsBSD image to one of the HDDs and then rebooted 3. I then sshed into the server now running mfsBSD and then I used that to install FreeBSD.
• HelloNurse 3y ago
  Section 15c in the ToS seems different from the quote in the article: As between You and Vultr, Vultr acknowledges that it claims no proprietary rights in or to Your Content. You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, worldwide and royalty-free license to copy, make derivative works, display, perform, use, broadcast and transmit on and via the Internet Your Content, solely for the benefit of You and to enable Vultr to perform its obligations under these Terms.
• Zetobal 3y ago
  Well at least the name is fitting.
• yesbut 3y ago
  Gross
• rchaud 3y ago
  Way too many companies see hosted content from paying customers as free real estate they can copy and sell to others training AI datasets. Vultrs indeed.
• hacker_88 3y ago
  The Name
• Jolliness7501 3y ago
  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...
• dang 3y ago
  Follow-up: A Note About Vultr's Terms of Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865941
• jenkstom 3y ago
  My law professor told me to never sign a contract I didn't modify in some way, so I usually change these to be something I like better before hitting accept.
• makerdiety 3y ago
  The ramifications implied by a certain interpretation (often uncharitable or dishonest) of this terms of service are startling. Imagine a mere virtual server hosting company using the data of small business owners for unintended activities. If that is the case, then the best businessmen must resort to encrypting the code and data they upload to the Internet. Life gets harder for those trying to survive with a startup. So much for a lot of dreams and aspirations... I disclaim that "the Services" referred to in the Vultr hosting service's terms of service are mostly about social media forum data. It's therefore not really part of an alarming trend of sleazy business practices and scams of, basically, stealing enterprise user data. But what if? Then the neo-hacker reaction I introduced seems like a good lifestyle to embark on.
• RadixDLT 3y ago
  wrong link
  • meblum 3y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning_vultr_a_major_cloud_provider_is_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning...
• throwaway1o24 3y ago
  They appear to be appropriately named
  • exe34 3y ago
    Nominative determinism. Unlike OpenAI. I suppose it's a form of carcinization for corporations.
• progbits 3y ago
  https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning_vultr_a_major_cloud_provider_is_now/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning...
• dig1 3y ago
  You are probably looking for this summary [1]: https://www.vultr.com/legal/tos/ Section 12: You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known or developed, and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties, for purposes of providing the Services to you. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning_vultr_a_major_cloud_provider_is_now/kwrjq40/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning...
  • amluto 3y ago
    I find text like this especially odd — it’s entirely implausible that Vultr’s customers actually have the right to grant this license. Imagine the copyright infringement case Getty Images v. Vultr: “Your honor, Joe Shmo LLC gave us an eternal right to do anything we want with this image that is watermarked ‘Getty Images’, so Getty can’t sue us.” Maybe we need a provision in context law that directly penalizes anyone who writes a ludicrous provision into a contract.
  • singleshot_ 3y ago
    > perpetual > without compensation Truly exquisite contract drafting, gentlemen.
  • juitpykyk 3y ago
    > for purposes of providing the Services to you This seems the key part
    • Terr_ 3y ago
      "Selling copies of your genome to partners enables us to affordably provide the service, therefore you agreed to it."
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• tedeh 3y ago
  I'm guessing they're about to make some kind of generative-AI play and need access to more data.
  • Havoc 3y ago
    It was added before data for AI became big
  • itronitron 3y ago
    I could see a company claiming they need AI in order to provide their service to their users.
  • groestl 3y ago
    Or they used AI to generate their new TOS and didn't proofread...
    • itronitron 3y ago
      ... and the AI was trained on data belonging to Vultr users, who happen to be lawyers...
• GrumpySloth 3y ago
  How does it apply to VPS instances? Do they snapshot them and scan the filesystem for content? I’ll be migrating to Hetzner in any case.
  • arcastroe 3y ago
    If this is the case, is there a way to protect against it? Is there a way to keep the data encrypted? Thinking along the lines of bitlocker on windows.
    • GrumpySloth 3y ago
      No. VM snapshots include RAM as well, so the decryption key can be copied from there. The decrypted data can also be intercepted when you decrypt it. Without the pipe dream of efficient homomorphic encryption you can’t protect your data from a hostile VPS provider.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
    I once asked Hetzner, do they have protections in place against a rogue employee peeking at data inside my servers, as I was worried about some sensitive data stored in there. Their response was: "If you are asking that question, you are probably mining crypto, so we'll ban you".
    • yogorenapan 3y ago
      Similar experience with Hetzner. They seem to be extremely ban-happy. I get banned when I first sign up for no particular reason other than I tend to have my VPN on. After emailing support and providing identification, I still got banned after changing my billing to use privacy.com
      • aitchnyu 3y ago
        Yikes. How do we make an informed choice for a not ban-happy provider, especially since Indian id cards seem to be rejected?
• traceroute66 3y ago
  I'm not seeking to defend Vultr here, but perhaps people need to think about this in a sensible manner. Given the way of today's internet, with GPT-bots crawling your stuff without your permission to use in their services, and with search-engines crawling and generally providing means of content removal that have limited effect .... what else are Vultr supposed to do ? If you are granting them permission to, for example, "display" your content. Then there's not much they can do if you cancel your Vultr account but your content remains part of the GPT training material ?
  • citruscomputing 3y ago
    I run my private nextcloud server on vultr. Everything is behind a login wall. They absolutely do not have my permission to use my years of notes, legal documents, calendar information, and photos (most of which have never been posted publicly) in any way! > what else are Vultr supposed to do ? Continue providing the services they do, with reasonable terms, or die. No, you can't just up and take all my photos and sell them to some AI training dataset because you wanted more money. Sorry!
    • neoecos 3y ago
      What are you planning to do? I'm in the same situation, but without accepting the terms i'm no even able to "delete" my server/account. (already backing up things to move away)
    • mekster 3y ago
      Maybe it's time that basement servers should be the norm for self hosters. I bought a HardKermel x64 servers and happy that I have no ToS to worry about. I can send encrypted back ups to utilize any cloud out there without a concern. Could've tried Pi but some docker packages don't run on Arm.
  • groestl 3y ago
    "commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate" is not at all related to CYA wrt crawlers.
• madsbuch 3y ago
  From one of the Reddit commenters: > Edit: As an EU customer, and having called my lawyer really quickly, we don't even think that this is legal / would hold up in court in the EU. Also they'd have been required to summarise the TOS changes as by our local law. While companies can write whatever they want in their TOS, I would wary using the rights I just gave to myself. It can be devastating.
  • sam_goody 3y ago
    If Vultr thinks they have the rights, they will use my data. The odds that they will ever be found out, that if found out they will be successfully sued, and that if that happens I will be made whole for whatever damage I have suffered, are slim. The clause implies it is in their mind that they can play these games. Better use a competitor that explicitly claims that you are renting the server for .. yourself. I don't use Google Compute, but wonder if their terms are better. It would not surprise me at all if you allow Google to crawl all of your Compute instances and combine that with data from their many other sources (Chrome, Chrome OS, Android services, DNS servers, analytics, usage on their properties such GMaps/Youtube, etc.)
  • vsnf 3y ago
    I'm conflicted on comments like that. On one hand, companies make mistakes otherwise they'd never lose in court, but they do from time to time. On the other hand, Vultr has their own lawyers, presumably higher paid and better armed than an individual would have access to, so how confident can one be that their personal lawyer has a better legal theory than the corporate lawyers?
    • lompad 3y ago
      Happens a lot, mostly when US Companies with a majority of their customers in the US make changes without thinking about other countries/ taking them seriously. Additionally, ToS really don't count for much in the EU, they're usually not enforcable anyway, if there's anything out of the ordinary at all. There's a whole lot of stuff in ToS nobody is ever going to be able to enforce at all. They probably expected to fly under the radar, without making sure it's even okay everywhere. Well, that's not going to happen I guess.
• lompad 3y ago
  That particular Vulture certainly won't fly in the EU. Without a simple summarization for end users you can't just hide "unexpected" things in ToS-updates. And, well, a cloud-hoster deciding randomy to own your content hosted on servers you pay for is certainly neither expected nor typical. Good luck enforcing anything of that, vultr.
• doctor_eval 3y ago
  That’s remarkable. I’m a huge fan of vultr and I don’t want to believe that this has been done in bad faith, but of course long experience sadly suggests otherwise. That said, due to the type of service they provide, vultr customers like myself don’t necessarily even have the right to grant them the rights that they claim here. If I run a SaaS and people are uploading photos for work (eg photos of property damage for the purposes of identifying and repairing it), those photos are not my property and must not become public. The idea that this could ever be OK is batshit insane. So I hope/suspect this policy is going to be reverted pretty quickly, since it seems quite incompatible with their core business. No way can I risk my customers data being “publicly displayed”!
• chrisjj 3y ago
  Corrected link: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning_vultr_a_major_cloud_provider_is_now/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning...
  • VonNaturAustre 3y ago
    Thanks!
• Havoc 3y ago
  That’s one way to ensure your company only hosts worthless shit. I doubt the random blogs etc had much AI training value in the first place so this very much feels like an own goal
• lcnmrn 3y ago
  I need new hosting service for Subreply. Any good providers?
  • 65 3y ago
    DigitalOcean App Platform is pretty good. Easy to use.
  • richin13 3y ago
    I've been using linode without any issues.
    • bravetraveler 3y ago
      Do they still demand control over disk layouts? I left because I couldn't use LVM, the fact they need to know disk geometry for a VM never sat well with me. I'm under no illusion, I know the host needs to be trusted, but this is a weird/gross implementation.
• diggan 3y ago
  Not sure it says what you think/want it to say: > You are responsible for the information, text, opinions, messages, comments, audio visual works, motion pictures, photographs, animation, videos, graphics, sounds, music, software, Apps, and any other content or material that That's the prefix to your first paragraph, meaning you as the user is responsible for that, not that Vultr is responsible for that. Your second paragraph is explicitly about "for purposes of providing the Services to you" which it'd be really hard to argue that "using your user's uploaded photo for Vultr's marketing promotion" is for the purpose of providing a service to you, so I don't think you have to be afraid of that. I'm sure Vultr's terms and conditions contain horrible shit, just like any other terms and conditions. But I don't think those two paragraphs highlight anything more nefarious than usual.
  • TomSwirly 3y ago
    You missed the "in any way that Vultr deems appropriate" clause. This is a classic weasel phrase which means they can do as they please. "Why did you sell my data to an AI company?" "We deemed it appropriate." There is also the sublicensing clause, which means they can sell it to anyone, and "process, adapt, [...] modify, prepare derivative works", which has nothing to do with hosting, but allows them to change your data and reuse it for any purpose they "deem appropriate".
    • diggan 3y ago
      > You missed the "in any way that Vultr deems appropriate" clause. This is a classic weasel phrase which means they can do as they please. No, I didn't, but you again missed the full context. Neither of those terms can be considered in isolation, so again: > You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive [...] in any way that Vultr deems appropriate [...] for purposes of providing the Services to you So unless it's for the purpose of providing you the service, it doesn't matter what Vultr "deems" appropriate. Feel free to check this with a lawyer if you feel unsure.
      • TomSwirly 3y ago
        I did not miss the full context. "Deemed" in particular doesn't require any sort of reasoning or argument for the company to make any decision it likes. And "appropriate" is not a synonym for "necessary". "Why did you sell my data?" "We deemed it appropriate for the purposes of providing the Services to you." What's your legal refutation to this under US law? (In the EU, this whole clause would possibly be unenforceable from the start, but I know a lot less about EU law.)
• j16sdiz 3y ago
  The cause is retrained by "... for purposes of providing the Services to you." if you take the narrowest read, it would allow them to store or cache them. That's it.
  • SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
    To speak Laconically: If.
  • TomSwirly 3y ago
    The phrase "in any way that Vultr deems appropriate" does not encourage a narrow read. It is a wildcard that allows them to do whatever they want with the data and then argue, "We deemed it appropriate."
• vxxzy 3y ago
  Well, time to move away from Vultr. Luckily I don't have too much over there other than some small projects.
• freitzkriesler2 3y ago
  Fitting for a company named vulture.
• yakorevivan 3y ago
  [dead]