Demon RSL Broadband AUP

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You must comply with the provisions of this Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) at all times. Please note that in this AUP, “we”/ “us” / “our” / “THUS” / “Demon” denotes THUS plc, company number SC 192666, registered office 1-2 Berkeley Square, 99 Berkeley Street, Glasgow G3 7HR, Scotland and “you” / “your” denotes you the customer, or the user of our network. Demon is brand of THUS plc.

GENERAL INFORMATION

This AUP applies to a number of THUS and Demon products and services. For some products and services there are particular points to which you must conform when you are using that product or service. Appendices A through E of this document give further guidance as to how this AUP is applied to specific products and services.

It is your responsibility to ensure your compliance with all applicable provisions of this AUP. If you have any comments or queries, or there is any provision that you do not understand, please feel free to email any enquiry to us at abuse@demon.net or abuse@thus.net

There are certain types of material which infringe UK Law. Some types of material are illegal to possess as well as transmit or publish via the Internet. You should also be careful not to post material which infringes others' copyright or could be considered defamatory, or which imposes liability on us for hosting that material.
Your traffic over the Internet may traverse other networks or use other services which are not owned or operated by us. You must abide by the acceptable use policies and other terms and conditions imposed by the operators of those networks and services.
We may, at our sole discretion, run manual or automatic systems to determine compliance with this AUP (e.g. scanning for open mail relays, open proxy servers or smurf amplifiers). By accessing the Internet via our services you are deemed to have granted permission for this limited intrusion onto your networks or machines.
You are required to accept email addressed to "postmaster" at your address. For example, if you have the hostname "sample" and/or the domain "example.com", then you should accept email addressed to postmaster@sample.demon.co.uk and/or postmaster@example.com respectively. You will be deemed to have read any and all such postmaster-addressed email and we may take action on the basis of this assumption.

It is not possible to codify exactly what constitutes "acceptable use" and "unacceptable use", or abuse, of the Internet. These terms depend upon the many informal understandings which have arisen between the administrators, owners and operators of the computers and networks that together constitute the Internet and of which we are only one participant among many.

However, our relationship with other networks and ultimately our connectivity to the rest of the Internet depends largely upon proper behaviour by the users of our network. We cannot tolerate any behaviour by the users of our network which negatively impacts upon our own equipment or network, or upon the use of the Internet by other users, or which damages our standing in the wider Internet community.

Therefore, it is important that when activity that might constitute abuse occurs, we take appropriate action - if we did not, and such abuse was permitted to continue, we would lose the confidence of the wider Internet community, which in turn would significantly impair the freedom of the users of our network to use the Internet.

This AUP and its day-to-day application by us is as a result of our consideration of both the formal and informal practices of the Internet community.

The Appendices to this AUP are intended to assist users of our network in understanding the types of issues that can arise and what we will consider to be unacceptable behaviour that does not conform to community standards.

We will investigate suspected or alleged breaches of this AUP and in doing so we will endeavour to act reasonably and fairly at all times. If you are found to have breached this AUP or the terms and conditions that apply to your service, we reserve the right in our sole discretion to take whatever measures we deem appropriate and proportionate to the breach. These measures may include a formal warning, suspending or terminating one or more of your accounts with us, making an additional charge for our reasonable costs of investigating and dealing with the misuse, and/or blocking access to any relevant component(s) of our service to you. If we suspend your access then this suspension may be lifted, at our sole discretion, when the reason for suspension has been rectified and upon receipt of a formal written undertaking from you not to commit any future abuse. All cases are, however, considered individually upon their merits.

We have in place a procedure for handling complaints about breaches of this AUP. If you wish to make a complaint, please ensure that you do so via email to abuse@demon.net or abuse@thus.net If you do not use this facility we cannot guarantee that your complaint will be dealt with promptly. If you are reporting email or Usenet abuse, please ensure that you provide us with a copy of the full headers of the message or article in question. If you are reporting Web abuse, please ensure that you include the full URLs you are referring to. If you are reporting access abuse please ensure that you include copies of your log files which highlight the activity in question. In all cases please ensure that you include a short description of why you are making the complaint.

The appendices refer in some cases to external websites. We are not responsible for the content of these websites.

If you need any further information regarding this AUP, then please contact us on:

email:abuse@demon.net or abuse@thus.net

fax: 0870 051 9970

APPENDIX A: GENERAL INTERNET ACCESS

Some material is illegal to possess or transmit. You should also be aware that unauthorised access to computer systems could be an offence. Although many machines are connected to the Internet for general access, it does not follow that you may access any computer system you come across. A list of our service machines, which you may access, is provided at:

http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/faq/config.shtml

Whilst connected to the Internet your system must conform to all relevant IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards. The IETF standards are a subset of the RFC (Request for Comments) collection and can be found at:

ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/mirrors/internic/rfc/std/

You must not send information packets onto the Internet that have forged addresses or which are deliberately constructed so as to adversely affect remote machines.

You may not run "scanning" software which accesses remote machines or networks, except with the explicit permission of the operators of those remote machines or networks.

You must ensure that you do not further the sending of unsolicited bulk email or any other form of email or Usenet "abuse". This applies to both material that originates on your system and also third party material that may pass through it.

Your machine or network must not be configured in such a way that others can exploit it to disrupt the Internet. This includes but is not limited to ensuring that your network cannot be exploited as:

an Open Mail Relay - that is, a machine which accepts mail from unauthorised or unknown senders and forwards it to a destination outside of your machine or network. Useful information on how to secure a wide variety of mail servers can be found at: http://www.mail-abuse.com/an_sec3rdparty.html
an Open Proxy Server - that is, a machine which accepts connections from unauthorised users and forwards their requests to a destination outside of your machine or network
a Smurf Amplifier - that is, a router with directed broadcast enabled. More information can be found at: http://www.netscan.org/broadcast/

APPENDIX B: EMAIL

There are many forms of email abuse. This appendix discusses the more common forms in an informal manner, but is by no means an exhaustive list.

It is usual to describe "abuse" as being abuse of Internet facilities, rather than vulgar abuse sent via the Internet. To qualify as abuse, an act or omission must significantly interfere with the use of the network by an individual or group of individuals in some specific way, for example by consuming resources or wasting others’ time. The term "abuse" also includes activities that are illegal or dishonest.

Generalities aside, due to the practical problems caused by "spamming" we wish to make it clear that we consider the sending of unsolicited bulk email, of any kind, to be unacceptable behaviour. We will always act when such behaviour is brought to our attention. Education, in the form of an email warning, can be the most appropriate response to a first offence, since users of our network can be unaware of contemporary standards. However, it is our policy to terminate the accounts of any user of our network who continues to send unsolicited bulk email.

Chain letters, "Make Money Fast" and other Ponzi pyramid selling schemes

These articles are similar to paper versions, where you add your name at the end of a list and send the message to lots of your friends. The person at the head of the list is typically sent some small amount of money and hopes to become rich. Simple mathematics shows why they do not work in theory, and a little thought about human nature will show you why they do not work in practice either.

These schemes, even where they offer no financial or material reward are unacceptable abuse. They waste resources for Internet service providers and for the users who download them. If they do involve money they are also illegal in many countries - despite common claims to the contrary within their text.

Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE)

Unsolicited Commercial Email is advertising material sent and received by email without the recipient either requesting such information or otherwise explicitly expressing an interest in the material advertised.

It should be noted that a user has not expressed an interest by the mere act of posting a news article in any particular newsgroup, or by visiting a web site, unless of course they have made a specific request for information to be emailed to them.

Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE)

UBE is similar to the above UCE but is not attempting to sell anything.

Mailing List Subscriptions

Mailing lists are schemes for distributing copies of the same email to many different people. It is not acceptable to subscribe anyone, other than a user on your own host, to any mailing list or similar service, unless their explicit permission has been given.

List owners are encouraged to confirm all subscription requests by requesting confirmation from the apparent subscriber before starting to send any list email. They must ensure that unsubscribe requests are handled efficiently. Good mailing list software is available that will automate both these processes.

Many reports of unsolicited bulk email turn out to be from people who were unaware that they had joined a mailing list. It is not acceptable to subscribe people to a list merely because they have visited your web site or used one of your products; the person must make an explicit request to be listed.

However, some reports occur because people have genuinely forgotten that they had made such a request. If you run a mailing list you are strongly advised to keep copies of administrative requests (web logs, or emails including headers) so that you may demonstrate that subscription requests were genuine.

Further information on operating opt-in mailing lists can be found in the Best Current Practice document, available at:

http://www.linx.net/noncore/bcp/mailinglist-bcp.html

Forged Headers and/or Addresses

Forging headers or messages means sending email such that its origin appears to be another user or machine, or a non-existent machine.

It is also forgery to arrange for any replies to the email to be sent to some other user or machine.

However, in either case, if prior permission has been granted to you by the other user or the administrators of the other machine, then there is no problem, and of course "null" reverse paths can be used as defined in the relevant email standards, such as section 4.5.5 of RFC 2821:

ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/mirrors/internic/rfc/rfc2821.txt

Mail Bombing

Mail bombing is the sending of multiple emails, or one large email, with the sole intent of annoying and/or seeking revenge on a fellow Internet user. It is wasteful of shared Internet resource as well as serving no value to the recipient.

Due to the time taken to download it, sending a long email to sites without prior agreement can amount to denial of service, or denial of access to email at the receiving site. Note that adding binary attachments to email may increase its size considerably. If prior arrangement has not been made, the email may be extremely unwelcome.

Denial of Service Attacks

Denial of Service is any activity designed to prevent a specific host on the Internet making full and effective use of its facilities. This includes, but is not limited to:

Mail bombing an address in such a way to make their Internet access impossible, difficult, or costly.
Opening an excessive number of email connections to the same host.
Sending email designed to damage the receiver's systems when interpreted; for example, sending malicious programs or viruses attached to an email.
Using a smarthost or email relay without authorisation to do so.

APPENDIX C: USENET (sometimes called "news")

There are many forms of Usenet abuse. This appendix discusses the more common forms in an informal manner, but is by no means an exhaustive list.

Chain Letters, "Make Money Fast" and other Ponzi Pyramid-Selling Schemes

These schemes, even where they offer no financial or material reward are unacceptable abuse. They waste resources for Internet service providers and for the users who download them. If they do involve money they are also illegal in many countries despite common claims to the contrary within their text.

Excessive posting

Excessive posting, commonly referred to as "spamming", means the posting of lots of substantively similar news articles, usually to a large number of newsgroups.

It is irrelevant whether the articles can be considered "on-topic" within the newsgroups or not. The problem caused by spamming is that Usenet resources are needed to store the articles and the cost to readers of the newsgroups to download duplicates of the same message.

The Usenet community determines whether an article has been duplicated too often using the Breidbart Index (BI). This index measures the breadth of any multi-posting, cross-posting, or combinations of the two by calculating the sum of the square roots of the number of newsgroups each article was posted to. If that number reaches 20, then the postings are extremely likely to be cancelled by automatic systems that detect this type of abuse.

More information on the Breidbart Index can be found at:

http://www.killfile.org/faqs/spam.html

Binary articles in Non-Binary Newsgroups

Binary articles contain information that is in a form not directly readable by humans, usually in "base64" or "UUENCODE" sections. These are usually "attachments" of images, executable files, sounds, or proprietary format documents such as Microsoft Word or Excel. Even if the attachment within the article was originally simple text or a web page (HTML), if it has been encoded before posting it is still considered to be a "binary".

Articles posted to "non-binary" newsgroups should contain only simple text that is immediately readable without special tools. The size of any encoded section is irrelevant, the fact it is encoded is what makes it unacceptable. The only exception allowed to this blanket ban is the use of cryptographic authentication signatures, such as PGP.

Binaries are only allowed in special binary newsgroups because this allows them to be specially handled by the "newsmasters" who run Usenet's servers. The size of binaries, in particular, means that many systems will not wish to use their bandwidth to receive them, or will expire articles more quickly to prevent them from using excessive space.

In order to make things straightforward for newsmasters the binary newsgroups are all grouped together into hierarchies. Almost all binary newsgroups are to be found in alt.binaries.*, alt.sex.pictures and comp.binaries.* hierarchies.

There are also a small number of local binary hierarchies such as de.alt.binaries.*, as well as a handful of newsgroups with special rules for particular types of binaries such as rec.games.bolo. This handful of groups is specially treated because they have gone through recognised processes to gain their limited exemptions. You should not assume that binaries are acceptable in other groups because "everyone posts them" or "nobody objects". In particular you should note that binaries are not acceptable in any alt.fan.*, uk.* or demon.* newsgroup.

Ensuring that binary articles only appear in binary newsgroups is not just a matter of convenience for the newsmasters but is also important for individual Usenet readers. The appearance of a binary in a text-only newsgroup is usually extremely unwelcome. Besides the size of the article, which will take extra time to download, special tools will be needed to decode and handle the contents.

Forged Headers

There are several types of unacceptable behaviour involving the forgery of article headers or article addresses.

It is abuse to post articles with headers that would mislead recipients into believing that some other system or user had created the articles. Our systems will add header lines to try and foil such forgery, but articles will still be treated as abuse even if our actions make the attempted forgery apparent.

It is abuse to post articles with headers which would cause responses to these articles, solicited or otherwise, to be delivered to unwilling third parties, or to inappropriate or unreasonable newsgroups. In particular, it is abuse to arrange for email replies to be delivered to an email address that you do not have permission to use.

Objectionable content

Usenet is a robust medium that is intended for use by adults. Articles may be posted that offend or annoy other users. These may contain foul language or controversial viewpoints.

The Internet community does not generally consider it appropriate for content-based decisions to be made by anyone except by an individual on their own behalf. Therefore we do not consider this sort of article to be "abuse" and directly actionable under the Usenet AUP. If you are offended by articles made by one of the users of our network then you should arrange not to read them in the future, by using facilities provided within your newsreading software such as "killfiles".

However, none of the above is to be taken as any suggestion that you may publish material that is prohibited under local obscenity or indecency laws. For example, it is a criminal offence to even possess child abuse images in the U.K., and other content may give rise to civil actions. We do not condone the presence of this type of content anywhere on the Internet.

APPENDIX D: WEBPAGES

This Appendix is applicable to all web hosting services provided by us. There is a further Appendix applicable to the Homepages service below.

You are responsible in all respects for the content of your web site and must ensure that no applicable law is violated.

You must obtain any necessary legal permission for any works that your website may include.

You will be held responsible for and accept responsibility for any defamatory, confidential, secret or other proprietary material available via your website.

We reserve the right to remove any material from a website at our sole discretion, without prior notice and without explanation.

A website may not be used to offer, advertise or distribute any of the following types of material:

software for sending 'spam' (bulk emails, excessive news postings, etc.);
illegal material;
lists of email addresses, except where all the owners of the addresses have given you explicit permission;
any collection of personal data other than in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998.

You must comply with the Data Protection Act 1998 (and any amendments or re-enactments of them together with any regulations pertaining thereto) regarding all information received, stored or communicated through the use of your website.

If your web site contains material that may cause general offence, a clearly readable warning page must be shown before any such offensive material is displayed.

To avoid doubt, this means that your top-level web page (usually index.htm or index.html) must not contain any adult material or other material that may generally offend. Where part of a web site forms an independent area that is not linked to by a topmost page, it will be considered as a site in its own right when considering whether appropriate warnings are present. Warnings are also required where the material is referenced directly from a web site, with no intervening pages, or where the use of frames makes the material appear to be part of a web site.

If your website is used for "distance selling" then you must ensure that it fully conforms to the requirements of The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 (as amended from time to time) and in particular to the necessity under some sections of these laws to provide geographic contact addresses.

All of the web pages on a website are considered to be publicly visible and may be downloaded by any person, whether or not they are linked from any central contents or home page. However, specific mechanisms are available as part of some services to prevent unauthorised access. Pages protected in such a manner will not be considered to be public.

Websites must not be advertised by you, or by another person, using techniques that would be classified as "abuse" if they were carried out from a Demon or a THUS account. This includes, but is not limited to, bulk emailing and excessive news posting. Such action will be treated under this AUP as if it had been done from the Demon or the THUS account, as appropriate.

Websites must display a valid, up-to-date email contact address for the person responsible for the site. The use of the generic address of "webmaster" is acceptable for this purpose. This address must appear on the top-level page or be easily locatable from the top-level page.

APPENDIX E: HOMEPAGES SERVICE

Appendix D, above, sets out guidance for the use of all web-hosting services. This Appendix gives further guidance about the use of the Homepages service.

The Homepages service is a website hosting service provided as part of other services. Termination of that other service will automatically result in termination of the corresponding Homepages service.

You are required to accept email addressed to "webmaster" at your address. For example, if you have the hostname "sample" then you should accept email addressed to webmaster@sample.demon.co.uk. You will be deemed to have read any and all such webmaster-addressed email and we may take action on the basis of this assumption.

You must maintain an index page called "index.htm" or "index.html" in the root directory of your Homepages space.

We will require sites that are considered to show excessive use to be modified or to be moved to a different server. Excessive use is currently defined at:

http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/producthelp/homepages/bwusage.html

We reserve the right to vary the definition of “excessive use” at our sole discretion at any time without prior notice.

We reserve the right to make a charge for any assessment of suspended sites.

Commercial use of your Homepages space is permitted. This is an explicit exemption to anything in the terms and conditions for your service referring to selling on or sharing use of the service.

Support from the helpdesk is only available for uploading, downloading and viewing pages. No support will be given for HTML authoring or page design.

You will be responsible for retaining copies of your own data. We will not keep backups of your pages.

We accept no responsibility for loss of data, information in any form or other matters whatsoever that result from the use of this service.

We shall not be held liable for any loss however occasioned as a result of the suspension, removal or unavailability of a Homepages site or material stored within it.