joewest

This reminds me of OceanStore:

  > OceanStore is a global persistent data store designed to
  > scale to billions of users. It provides a consistent,
  > highly-available, and durable storage utility atop an
  > infrastructure comprised of untrusted servers.

http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/info/overview.html

It's not productized and pretty difficult to discern the project's status BUT they do seem to publish interesting papers / update their site every so often.

Agreed. You can buy an unlocked iPhone in Canada, which may be more convenient for you.

You should report the behavior to Amazon:

http://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/co...

In my experience they take it seriously and deal with it promptly.

Amazon previously kept a semi-official list of all netblocks for EC2 in their forum. They've recently moved to posting updates as official announcements, here is the latest:

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=877

It's interesting to see the size of their deployments measured in usable IP space.