Slashdot Mirror

Compliance with Law

Customer shall not post, transmit, re-transmit or store material on or through any of Services or Products which, in the sole judgment of the Company (i) is in violation of any local, state, federal or non-United States law or regulation, (ii) threatening, obscene, indecent, defamatory or that otherwise could adversely affect any individual, group or entity (collectively, "Persons") or (iii) violates the rights of any person, including rights protected by copyright, trade secret, patent or other intellectual property or similar laws or regulations including, but not limited to, the installation or distribution of "pirated" or other software products that are not appropriately licensed for use by Customer. Customer shall be responsible for determining what laws or regulations are applicable to its use of the Services and Products

Suspension and Cancellation

Company will use reasonable care in notifying the Customer and in resolving the problem in a method resulting in the least amount of service interference as reasonably possible. Company reserves the sole right to suspend service to any Customer located in our datacenter for violation of the AUP without notice. Company reserves the right to terminate service without notice for any violations of the AUP.

Violations of the AUP will result in the following:

A warning notification via email, Orbit trouble ticket or telephone with 72 hours notice for resolution.
72 hours is the standard notification; situations involving law enforcement, phishing, fraud, password harvesting, network interference, Denial or Disruption of service, IRC mis-use, or other malicious activity can reduce the notification time frame.

Here's the link to the T&Cs. http://www.theplanet.com/legal/terms.html

I think you're assuming you know what's in said contract. That contract might very well have a clause in it stating that the ISP reserves the right to deny service to anyone posting what the ISP's owners/directors consider objectionable material. If that is in fact the case (most service contracts have similar stipulations with some detail as to what might be considered objectionable) the the ISP was within every right to shut down the site.

You can freely enter into any contract you so choose, but be sure to read that contract. As a business owner, you're right... I do appreciate contracts being enforced. But contracts are rarely short, and usually very specific. I do make sure to read the fine print, and quite often make corrections to a contract before I sign it... it's the nature of business deals.

The real point is there is no detail as to what happened. I was merely providing a view from the other side. It is quite possible the ISP was within their rights to shut this site down, but we won't know until more details are released.

You might want to read here, here, and here if you're curious about The Planet's policies, especially the part that says threatening, obscene, indecent, defamatory or that otherwise could adversely affect any individual, group or entity (collectively, "Persons") under Compliance with Law, as a previous poster mentioned this site had some pretty strong backers and suggestions.

I think you're assuming you know what's in said contract. That contract might very well have a clause in it stating that the ISP reserves the right to deny service to anyone posting what the ISP's owners/directors consider objectionable material. If that is in fact the case (most service contracts have similar stipulations with some detail as to what might be considered objectionable) the the ISP was within every right to shut down the site.

You can freely enter into any contract you so choose, but be sure to read that contract. As a business owner, you're right... I do appreciate contracts being enforced. But contracts are rarely short, and usually very specific. I do make sure to read the fine print, and quite often make corrections to a contract before I sign it... it's the nature of business deals.

The real point is there is no detail as to what happened. I was merely providing a view from the other side. It is quite possible the ISP was within their rights to shut this site down, but we won't know until more details are released.

You might want to read here, here, and here if you're curious about The Planet's policies, especially the part that says threatening, obscene, indecent, defamatory or that otherwise could adversely affect any individual, group or entity (collectively, "Persons") under Compliance with Law, as a previous poster mentioned this site had some pretty strong backers and suggestions.

I think you're assuming you know what's in said contract. That contract might very well have a clause in it stating that the ISP reserves the right to deny service to anyone posting what the ISP's owners/directors consider objectionable material. If that is in fact the case (most service contracts have similar stipulations with some detail as to what might be considered objectionable) the the ISP was within every right to shut down the site.

You can freely enter into any contract you so choose, but be sure to read that contract. As a business owner, you're right... I do appreciate contracts being enforced. But contracts are rarely short, and usually very specific. I do make sure to read the fine print, and quite often make corrections to a contract before I sign it... it's the nature of business deals.

The real point is there is no detail as to what happened. I was merely providing a view from the other side. It is quite possible the ISP was within their rights to shut this site down, but we won't know until more details are released.

You might want to read here, here, and here if you're curious about The Planet's policies, especially the part that says threatening, obscene, indecent, defamatory or that otherwise could adversely affect any individual, group or entity (collectively, "Persons") under Compliance with Law, as a previous poster mentioned this site had some pretty strong backers and suggestions.

From The Planet's acceptable use policy:

"Customer shall not post, transmit, re-transmit or store material on or through any of Services or Products which, in the sole judgment of the Company (i) is in violation of any local, state, federal or non-United States law or regulation, (ii) threatening, obscene, indecent, defamatory or that otherwise could adversely affect any individual, group or entity (collectively, "Persons") ..."

further down:

"The Customer is not permitted to post any material that is illegal, libelous, and tortuous, indecently depicts children or is likely to result in retaliation against Company by offended users. Company reserves the right to refuse or terminate service at any time for violation of this section."

and a little bit further down:

"Company reserves the sole right to suspend service to any Customer located in our datacenter for violation of the AUP without notice. Company reserves the right to terminate service without notice for any violations of the AUP."

Looks to me like the terms of service and acceptable use give The Planet the right to terminate service for almost anything.

Don't like that? Move to another ISP.

Why is this news?

Terminations on the part of The Planet are supposed to be 30-day notices, if I read their ToS correctly. There may have been ongoing issues with payments, but 48 hours still seems too short to fit into the wording they use.

I'm going to wait a bit to see what happens, but this does look odd to me.

But they sure as hell have a right to what they paid for, according the the terms of service!

But every TOS I've ever seen indemnifies the ISP against any jerky actions they might undertake against their customer.

ThePlanet's TOS says:

"Company may, at its option, terminate this Agreement, upon [...] Customer ceasing to do business in the normal course[.] Any such termination thereafter may be effected without prior notice to Customer."

(that could mean anything, it seems)

and

"Customer agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Company and the employees and agents of Company [...] against any losses, claims, damages, liabilities, penalties, actions, proceedings or judgments [...] which Losses arise out of, or relate to this Agreement or Customer's use of the Services and Products, and will reimburse [...] for all legal and other expenses, including reasonable attorneys' fees incurred by such [...] in connection with investigating, defending or settling any Loss whether or not in connection with pending or threatened litigation"

(Hoo boy.)

Also this:

"Company shall not be deemed to be in default of any provision of this Agreement or be liable for any failure of performance of the Services and Products to Customer resulting, directly or indirectly, from any (i) weather conditions, natural disasters or other acts of God, (ii) action of any governmental or military authority, (iii) failure caused by telecommunication or other Internet provider, or (iv) other force or occurrence beyond its control. The exclusive remedy against Company for any damages whatsoever to Customer arising out of or related to this Agreement shall be the refund of the fees paid by Customer to Company with respect to the then current term of this Agreement."

(Even if the government did interfere, that's covered by the contract)

And the kicker...

"ANY CONTROVERSY OR CLAIM ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THIS CONTACT OR ANY BREACH THEREOF IN EXCESS OF $250.00 SHALL BE SETTLED BY ARBITRATION"

Even if you somehow managed to find a loophole by which you could legitimately complain, if you want justice outside of anything but Small Claims Court, you're SOL.

If only there were some way for people outside the US to get a web server and set up a Slashdot like site dedicated to the politics of their country, rather than whining about how all other countries are somehow entitled to have coverage in a section dedicated to US politics.

I don't know about every web host, but any cheap arse virtual host in a decent datacentre should be able to handle it... for a while.

The person who submitted this story is one stupid idiot. Heck, even hosting a mirror in ISP user webspace would be better.

* Disclaimer: I operate a virtual webhost in a "decent colo", more specifically, The Planet

If datacentres and hosting companies are deploying this widely, then you can be sure that there are many sysadmins out there who are creeping up the learning curve and are unaware of precisely what they run on or what it means (2.6 kernel performance with MySql should prompt many to upgrade, but it doesn't).

So the 2.4 kernel is far more widely deployed than you may initially suspect. This is where Red Hat are making their money and why it matters to use.

Very true. Australian bandwidth stinks. Sure, the Southern Cross Cable linking Oceania with the U.S is pretty phat, but it's costs are too big. ISP's here tend to run transparent proxies (I have a ADSL ISP blacklist of ISP's I won't go with for that reason. At least my dialup ISP, iPrimus isn't stupid enough) in order to keep costs down. Well, instead of trying to cut costs on the ISP side, why don't they try to make Australian->US bandwidth less expensive?

It's probably cheaper to dump a server in a US colo facility overall than dump it in a Australian colo and watch yourself get Slashed/Farked no matter what your primary demographic for your website is :(

I can't The Planet any more highly. They have some very competitive rates, and they are very proffesional. I have some web space for a client there, and just yesterday bought a hosted server off of them. I remomend them to all my clients as well.