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.

I did some research into this, and seems like Hong Kong and Singapore are the least expensive. Canada is not too bad if you're in the USA (I'm in Australia.)

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.