Slashdot Mirror
Have You Really Read Your ISP's TOS?
NewtonsLaw writes "XTRA, New Zealand's largest ISP is in the process of losing customers in droves after it announced its new Terms of Service which seek to claim rights over customers intellectual property (see the Slashdot discussion). Now, if that wasn't enough, Aardvark Daily reports that the ISP is also banning its users from saying bad things (anything 'detrimental to our reputation or to our brand') about it. I wonder how many slashdotters have actually read their own ISPs' terms of service in detail? Is this type of IP-grab and clampdown on free speech is unique to Xtra or is it slowly pervading the whole industry, right across the globe?" Read on for Xtra's amendments to the original IP-grab terms, though.
Reader THX1138 points out that "After the very recent story on Xtra (New Zealand's version of AOL) they changed the IP section to include 'Xtra does not claim ownership of any content or material you provide or make available through the Services. However...' at the start and 'in each case for the limited purposes for which you provided or made the Customer Materials available or to enable us and our suppliers to provide the Services.' at the end."
If they give up common carrier status and start controlling and owning everything on their network, does this mean that if terrorist sites or kiddie porn appear on their network, their CEO and board of directors will be habeas corpused off to Cuba? Or whatever the equivalent thing that New Zealand does to people they don't like.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Before today, I'd only given the TOS a cursory glance, and I found that I am regularly in breach of a couple of the terms:
I don't really care too much, though, because it's only a dial-up connection, so the connection is inherently throttled...
My local ISP just started to roll out DSL. Our current service is 56k dialup limited to 90 hours per month. We pay about $30 for that.
The new DSL is 1.5mbps "best effort". They have not mentioned any download caps, but they will probably be on the way soon. The worst part of the TOS is the restriction on NAT/PAT.
They say that they can detect how many computers are on a network. For each computer, you have to pay an additional $60 for the exact same bandwidth. They don't even give you another modem for the extra $60.
Anyway, how do you think they are detecting NAT/PAT? Is there any way to stop this detection? I had planned on running Gentoo or *BSD as a firewall, but paying more money for the exact same thing seems harsh to me.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
ISPs change-hands so often here, it's hard to keep up. When my ISP spontaneously became Comcast one month, I asked them to send me a new TOS. They said that their TOS was the same as AT&T's, but have refused to provide them. Am I bound to something they won't give me?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Indeed.
You complain about the agreement, but by agreeing to it, you mearly re-enforce that it's okay for them to do it. There are countless registrars out there now. Most will allow you to transfer a domain name for their annual fee and then include a 1 year extension so the transfer is basically free.
By clicking you agree, you're voting with your dollars, and that's all that matters to these companies.
Jason
ProfQuotes
This effectively means that no broadband, dialup or other ISP customers who get an IP address when they connect will be able to send mail directly to AOL, you wil instead be forced to use your ISPs or some other willing SMTP relay which AOL considers to be worthy of peering with. No more end-to-end TLS encryption and/or verification; no more routing around overburdoned ISP mail hubs.
There is as yet no indication that I've seen one way or the other on what they're doing about DELIVERING mail to such addresses, but if you run your own mail server, be prepared to find that AOL.com no longer exists (which you may not consider "bad", exactly, and in fact I currenly have no plans to route around this particular damage other than to get my relatives to find new ISPs, even if that means going to MSN... *shudder*).
Many have made the argument that this is reasonable for AOL to do because many ISPs have TOSes that ban servers. So far, the standard retort has been 1) no ISP bans direct-to-MX transmission of mail except where it is spam 2) most ISPs don't enforce said rule (and tacitly encourage users to roll their own) 3) not ALL ISPs have such restrictive TOSes, and of course 4) that's none of AOL's business when receiving an incoming message.
For those who are interested in details, here's the almost useless blurb I get when telneting to port 25 on any random AOL MX host:Good luck!
Hmmm, this is interesting:So no posting Project Gutenberg texts, then. Taken literally, anything I post has to be trademarked.So, no GPL'd software that I wrote then, but presumably other peoples' GPL'd software is ok.Seems reasonable, they need the right to distribute the data, they might want to keep an archive, and they might want to sell that archive as an asset. Note the limiting nature of the last paragraph.
IMO, there's nothing sinister here, although the first section I quoted is just incompetently written.
The thing about 'no derogatory comments about our service' is nothing new - in the mid to late 1980s, Micronet (and Prestel), an online service in Britain, also had the same thing. And they did threaten to kick off a friend of mine for complaining about Micronet in one of the message boards.
Their AUP also didn't allow any kind of profanity in the message boards, either!
They did have some good things (such as Shades the MUD, which is *still going* - telnet games.world.co.uk, yes, it's on port 23).
That's not to say it's right. The "you must only say good things about us" clause was incredibly dumb, and people often pushed at them, just to see how far they could go.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Just read the TOS for my ISP again and was reminded why I chose this ISP (even though it is not the cheapest available). One of the clauses says (roughly translated):
I feel that this should be a standard clause in any ISP's TOS.
Indeed, I never read TOS.
But I really enjoyed my ISP. Fast, reliable, not that expensive, and my IP address didn't change as long as the gateway renewed the lease.
But one day, friends using the same ISP told me that all their incoming connections got firewalled. They couldn't connect to their host any more, even through POP, SMTP or SSH.
I checked it, and they were right. The ISP firewalled everything without any prior notice.
A look at the TOS revealed that indeed, customers don't have the right to host any server. No SSH, no SMTP, nothing.
I moved to another ISP since. The new ISP is a bit more expensive, but that's the price to pay to read in their TOS that servers are allowed, and NAT is allowed as well.
{{.sig}}
Here's my story.
The page in question.
Once upon a time (a couple of years ago) I was sysadmin for a smallish ISP up here in Montreal. While out TOS didn't spell it out, it was my policy as well. (I was blessed with intelligent bosses/owners that decided from the onset that given that I was the security, its enforcement should be left to me).
There have been a total of two compromises during the two years I worked there. Both were detected by my diagnostics within minutes. I let both play out to ascertain the intent and method, and one of the crackers was obviously a white hat given that noticing me on the box he talked me to tell me how he got in. The other was a silly warez d00d-- took me about 5 minutes to detect how he got in.
In both cases, I restored offline, plugged the hole, then put the system back up.
Having compromised a system does not give you "forever usage of the system".
Just before I started work there, where was another (major) compromise of the entirety of the DMZ-- the security wasn't set up very well and each box trusted every other box. That took a complete redesign of the infrastructure, but it was also fixed. By the white hat that broke in and went to them with "Look. Obviously you need to hire a sysadmin."
You get to guess who that was.
Not everyone is a script kiddie, you know.
-- MG