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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.
...they can have my slashdot posts!
:p
Nothing intellectual there, really
What's your GCNSEQNO?
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?
At what point did free speech become global?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I live in the Portland/Metro area of Oregon and I *love* my ISP (http://www.easystreet.com).
They are geek-friendly. They encourage limited sharing of your DSL bandwidth (I mean, as long as you lock it down with a password so not every yahoo driving buy can use it) and offer a lot toward the wireless community in Oregon.
Not to mention, they have great policies about allowing you to run non-commercial web and email servers (which is important for me since I do a lot of small testing stuff) and are staffed by a lot of good people (some I've worked with before in a former life).
Everything you could want in an ISP, they are. I have never had a problem with them. Period. They are always friendly, helpful, have 24x7 support. Even their second and third tier tech guys will get paged and call you back in the middle of the night if you are experiencing a severe problem.
They also have people familiar in supporting non-windows OSes (mac, linux, etc) and offere their own tutorials for home networking.
Overall they are very cheap (compared to cable at least - especially if you want static IPs. For the cost of one static IP with Comcast, you can get eight here).
I've been with them for three years and since I work from home, I make HEAVY use of the DSL service. Qwest provides the actual line and I've only had two or three issues in all three years, total. One was due to a hardware problem at the PO-LOC (Qwest problem, obviously), one was due to the ISPs backbone getting torched for a few hours and another was up in the air - but eventually fixed itself.
I would say that I have had approximately two days of down time in these three years. Remarkably good for all the benifits you get.
This is the next big thing for corporations to do, is to attempt control the content that flows over "their" wires. Fortunately governments have failed to control encryption (intentionally? adjust aluminum hat if you think so, but maybe) so this might not be as ominous as it first appears. But if the courts cooperate (i.e. subpoena your key) then ... hilarity may ensue.
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
I haven't read my TOS yet, but I can tell you that my ISP is a total piece of sh
Speaking of insane "agreements"....
The other day I purchased some domain space and dusted off my old domain name I had sitting around for about a year. When I went to change my DNS records via netsol, this is what I got:
"It's appears you haven't agreed to our new revised terms of service. You must do so before you proceed."
So, before agreeing to something I haven't even seen, I went and checked it out. HOLY JESUS -- The thing had to have been about 300 pages long. Besides being soaked in legal double talk, the thing was straight up unreadable in size. This is not service agreement, it's a freaking tome! Needless to say, while I tried to read it, it was all too much and I just agreed to it in the end. I mean, I just need to change a DNS record, not spend 2 days trying to digest the most uninteresting thing ever written. Besides, what if I saw something totally evil in there anyway? Chances are, I would have agreed. What am I going to do, let my domain name go to waste? I already payed for it. Shenanigans!
It's a sad state of affairs. Shouldn't there be some sort of limit on the length of a TOS agreement? It reminds me of the old cartoons where somebody would pull out some insane contract with a library of congress's worth of text on the bottom that could only be read with a microscope.
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
Here is a bit of insight from a New Zealand resident. Xtra is actually an internet branch of Telecom New Zealand. Telecom NZ has been a monopoly here for a very long time, right untill a few years ago (about 4 years, approx.) a weak competition arrived in form of Clear. Weak, because Telecom owns the cabling throughout the country... Then australian Telstra came in, merged with clear and put their own cabling. Anyway, to cut it shorter: Xtra has always been obnoxious towards their customers, since there wasn't much choice in terms of decent internet service. However nowdays if they keep on going like that - they ARE going to loose big time, cause there are other ISPs available that do not depend on Telecoms bandwidth.
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.
I've always wondered though, how can companies actually make clicking on an "OK" button legally binding? No witnesses, no signature, nothing. Although the best one I ever saw was "By opening this package, you agree to the terms and conditions contained within."
I didn't read the TOS, but I used it as toilet paper.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
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
To my knowledge there is no way in heck they can detect another computer behind a Nat. It sounds like BS or a scare tactic. Absolutely ridiculous.
While I on the subject of crappy ISP's I don't understand what is the point of all these conditions. I have friends that work for a fairly large (state-wide), very profitable, ISP that has none of this. Heck they even allow you to resell the service if you so desire. As they say, as long as they make money why should they care? As they see it these restrictive terms drive people directly to them. For instance they started reselling Time Warner's Cable service. TW prohibits Web Servers and such but they do not. Result - alot of customers switching over to them because of the less restrictive terms of use.
If you are in Nebraska, or western edge of Iowa some areas of south dakot and Kansas, I highly recommend Internet Nebraska, they provide DSL, dialup, and cable and their terms and conditions are extremely reasonable. Not to mention they are nice people. =)
It may be due to initial sequence numbers, or possibly the way that a computer responds to IP packets with certain header options set (although I'm not sure if that would be possible when NAT is involved). You could probably get around it by having OpenBSD do the NAT - as it can basically rewrite NATted packets so it looks like it's all coming from the OpenBSD box. The OpenBSD pf firewall is being ported to other BSDs too, apparantly, so you might find you can get it to do the same thing on FreeBSD.
You're sure it doesn't say "\/\/3 0\/\/|\|Z04Z j00! \/\/oo+!!!!!!11!1!!"? There's a surprising number of ways to translate that into legalese, you know...
"Don't worry, it's not loaded." --Terry Kath
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!
Any number of ways. You might note different OS/browser references, or other differences in the way traffic is going from the ISP to you. The problem you face is that I reckon quite a few people will have DSL modems that are also routers. I know I do. And their TOS would seem to preclude this very sensible use of simple tools to protect your computer.
Find another ISP, if you can.
Terms of service? Um, I don't worry about the TOS. I contact the ISP and let them know what I am going to do. I let them tell me what packages are provided for the service desired. I take bids. It levels the playing field quickly. You can get exceptions written into your TOS. When I was on Dial up, I even got permission to have an ocassional dual connection at no extra charge. I told them due to my work schedule, I may be home during the day while the wife is at work. She may check e-mail while at work while I was home surfing the web. No problem. Got it in writing. This doesn't mean sharing the account with all my extended family. That would be a violation of the TOS. It pays to ask for any exceptions you need to the TOS. Your milage is better with small local ISP's and not national mega ISP's. Mega ISP's legal department are too busy to consider the exceptions.
The truth shall set you free!
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.
They changed the agreement quite a while ago, and like you I freaked out when I read it. Unlike you, I have left the "agree" link unclicked for months, while I slowly move my domains to other registrars. There are better (or equal) companies, why not move to them?
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Counting NAT'ed hosts. It's possible (due to the non-random way most OS's handle the IPid field (NOT sequence numbers) in TCP headers.
AFAIK OpenBSD has a side-project going to negate this technique. However, i seriously doubt your ISP is actually putting this method into practice - its just too much work.
Janie took my gun...
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
In fact, some I'm downright thrilled with.
Like ones that come in text boxes that you can edit.
Such as the agreement with ATI I cheerfully clicked my agreement to. When I was done with it, it said "In appreciation for downloading this driver suite, ATI inc. will send me one (1) riding pony in good health and standing in the equine community."
They've since changed the format, but I still don't have my pony.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
IANAL, but I believe that if you have not read the TOS, and have not been made aware of them, they are not binding.
As soon as you become aware of the TOS however, you are (in most cases) obliged to read them and take the appropriate course of action if you disagree...
This is what I have been told by a friend studying Law anyway (Australia)...
Disclaimer: any law suits or bad karma related to this post may be directed to Xtra. All donations and good karma will be handled by me.
While I on the subject of crappy ISP's I don't understand what is the point of all these conditions.
At a guess they either employed or retained an overpriced "lawyer" who then has to do something to appear to be useful.
"By clicking you agree, you're voting with your dollars, and that's all that matters to these companies."
People will sign contracts without reading them because it is highly inconvenient to do otherwise. I regard that as their right, but I also think it's important that they suffer the full consequences if it backfires on them. God help you if I'm on a civil jury where you're a defendant that signed a contract without reading it. People don't read real world paper contracts that bestow financial obligations, what makes you think they read things like the software licenses or the back of the utility bill? They (reasonably) assume that there are no dire consequences awaiting them, so they choose to take the risk.
Now, I do usually ask people that are getting married if they can briefly outline an understanding of the State marriage license. So far, not one has actually read it before signing....
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
They are in NZ !!! *AA do not apply.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Clearly signing away rights to IP is equally incompatible with our way of life.
Actually signing away rights to IP is essential to our way of life, e.g If you go to work for someone anything you create as part of your job be it physical property or IP belongs to the company. How would you get anyone to employ you if you didn't agree to that?
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
I agree with you, and I do read the contracts. When I was applying to access my bank account online, I was supposed to sign a form saying I'd read and agreed to the terms of service on a separate document. When I asked to see that document, the customer service person looked at me like I was nuts. It took her 10 minutes to find a copy and then I sat there and read the 5 page document. There was a clause that said they are not responsible if someone steals from my account even if it's their own employee acting through their negligence. Basically it gives them the right to take my money any time they want. Of course I refused to sign the agreement and from the reactions of the people there that was the first time it had happened.
I was taking an IT law course at the time, so I took a copy of the contract to school and showed it to the lawyer teaching the course. He said if it went to court, a judge would probably throw the clause out, but it would cost so much to fight it, I'd still lose.
I wonder how many people have signed their life's savings over to their bank like that without even knowing it. Jason
ProfQuotes
Go to Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, London... You can give a speech there for free!!! and you can listen to one for free!!!
On a more serious note, Speaker's Corner is really the historic start of free speech as British people have been legally allowed to get up at Speaker's Corner and say what they like for centuries, long before America was was even an idea.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
To my knowledge there is no way in heck they can detect another computer behind a Nat.
Well then, you need a knowledge infusion.
You can detect multiple machines behind a NAT several ways, including IP header parsing, TCP sequencing, and others.
A loophole in our favor still exists here, though. They can tell that you run multiple OSs, but not multiple distinct machines. So when you get the letter of death, just patiently explain your rather convoluted use of Win2k and Linux under VM, with Basilisk for Win2k allowing you to run Macintosh apps (mention other emulators as needed to account for all machines they may think they know you have). Then wait for the silence at the other end, and make sure they agree to remove whatever absurd charges they apply to your account before they hang up in shame and confusion.
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.
- Don't hack the servers or gain unauthorized access to accounts
- No originating spam
- No running chats without approval
- Allows background scripts and self-written CGI as long as they don't screw with the system
- If your scripts are resource hogs, they may ask you to upgrade your service
- No IRC or IRC bots
- No illegal stuff
- No porn/obscene, etc.
There is the phrase "or any other material which we deem to be objectionable" to include Satanic materials. However, that's a catch-all that I don't believe has been used. I'll ask.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}}
I used to work (partner) for Compuserve in the UK and as a tech/supervisor I was used to telling customers that although they did not use their account they had agreed to pay monthly by clicking the "i agree" button during signup. ;)
Until one day I went through all this and the guy said "no i did not", taken aback, I advised him that to get a compuserve account he MUST have clicked "I agree", he said not.
Turned out that when buying the system the helpfull salesman set him up with the account (credit card details and all) and he had clicked "I agree", I advised the customer to take up this issue with the salesman
Never heard from the customer again.
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
The article and the comments by many that have posted shows how ignorant Joe public really is. People keep on referring to this "right to free speech" as though it applies everywhere in all areas. Well sorry to burst your bubble, but that's not so.
The right to free speech does not extend to private property. This is why if I'm inside your house and make a nasty comment about you, you are free to kick me out. The same goes for ISPs. You are subscribing to their service within their private property. If they choose to enforce their TOS a certain way, and you agree to it, then you have no case for this assertion of freedom of speech.
eTrade SUCKS
I can't imagine that's something you can do because allowing bad things to happen is just kind of dumb.
I mean I understand their point - that a benevolent hacking dude will hack the system, gleefully take the 6 monthes of free use, and tell them their security hole.
But in reality, what people in their right mind would do that? I mean, assuming: The hacker was benevolent and wanted the 6 monthes. If you hacked the system - you have unlimited, forever usage of the system, hence the word "0wnz," I believe?
If you are hacking with malevolent intentions, even less will there be a chance of you telling them what happened - and you will just, again, keep making use of the system to send out spam or look through your ex-gf's email or something.
The only thing that I can imagine is bragging rights - but really who would you brag to? the trade off is "bragging rights to your friends + unlimited free use, forever (or, for a long ass time)" vs "bragging rights to your friends and your ISP + 6 monthes free use + ISP will probably forever look at you with extra caution." I really don't think the latter is worth it.
By doing this you are (I think) voiding your rights of prosecution. It's like saying to people "Yeah if you can jack my lambo with its whiz-bang security system and I'll let you drive it around for half a day if you tell me how you jacked it." Are you nuts? If I go through the pains of jacking the car, you bet your butt you ain't getting it back. (The analogy works better if you imagine that the car-thief was only taking the car out at nights to pick up chicks or something - why would you give up that privledge for a chance to drive it for 6 hours during the day?)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
In other words, you are responsble for the basic security of your computer. If you have an id10t problem and open up every attachment asking for your advice and get absolutely every virus that comes along - a pretty good definition of negligent, in this context - they can hold your feet to the fire for it.
Anyone who has ever worked for an ISP would feel joy at having such a clause, b/c it would allow you dump a certain group of problem customers, should you choose to do so. Finally, being grossly stupid is a crime, or least a TOS violation. Woohoo! :-)
I own a small software company; the license agreement to use our software is about 25 pages long. It isn't off-the-shelf software, I won't bore you with the specifics, but it is niche market, mission critical software that really does need a lengthy agreement. I should also mention that the licensees *always* have their lawyers involved in the negotiation, it's not inexpensive software.
At any rate, I have found that when you ask your attorney to write up an agreement for such-and-such, they will invariably write a very one-sided agreement, they will want the other party to sign their life away. After we have verbally come to terms with a new customer, our attorney writes up a license agreement, and more often than not he has put in major restrictions and terms which were not part of our verbal terms with the new customer - we then have to "send it back" to have our attorney remove restrictions which really are excessive.
Before you say that our attorney is just trying to take more time and bill us more: he really isn't - he is just attempting to watch our back in every way he can.
The flip side is also true, when a customer's attorney writes up the agreement, it invariably claims that the customer has exclusive, unlimited, rights to our software. It says that if they [the customer] stubs their toe after installing the software we are liable for millions of dollars. It says we cannot license our software to anyone else [as the customer "owns" it now], etc., etc.
Needless to say, we won't sign such an agreement.
In a nutshell, when attorneys write up any sort of legal document, they really do try to protect their customer in every way they can, and more often than not they go overboard. It really (imho) isn't their job to "see it from the other side", and hence the one-sided agreements.
When you are negotiating an agreement and both sides are represented by council, usually a fair agreement comes out in the end - but when only one side is represented, you can get "terms of service" as that ISP has published.
I suspect that the "fair" terms of service we do frequently see and agree to have been either not written by an attorney, and/or have had someone (but probably not the attorney) playing the role of the customer and looking at the agreement from their point of view.
Evidently, that didn't happen in this case.
An interesting, off-topic, side note that an attorney once told me: If there is a grey area in a contract, usually a court will side with the party that DIDN'T author the contract.
might want to consider..
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
hmmmmmmm
cuba springs to mind here.
dont fight for one right above all only to turn around and find you have lost everything else.
A
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
And how does that affect the logic behind "When you work for someone they have the right to your work.
I was arguing that signing away copyright can't be made illegal, because that would make it impossible for companies (big or small) that create IP (developers, newspapers, research ...) to exist, since any employee could quit and take the copyright to the companys product with him.
That doesn't mean that we should accept giving away copyright to anyone. Your ISP shouldn't take over any copyright. Nor should your job have any stake in IP you create on your spare time, unless it can be proven that it originated from your work
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
Now that's what I call a provider.
Original here.
Be careful what you post with them.
Thankfully, no restrictions on how you talk about thier service. Just the usual "no bad stuff".
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
The TOS for the Express Network basically says that you are not allowed to use Express Network. For anything.
Specifically, they prohibit "machine-to-machine" connections, which, as far as I can tell, limits you from connecting your Express Network enabled computer to any other computer.
Oddly, they say you can use it to read email and surf the web, which I have a hard time reconciling with the whole part about how I'm not allowed to actually connect to the mail servers and web servers.
-- Fratz, human
----------
Something cleverI'm on Comcast in Pennsylvania. A couple of weeks ago they rolled out a change which happened to cause a major screw-up in my (Comcast owned) cable modem, and really confused my poor little PC due to the fact they hadn't considered all the ramifications of their change. (Exact details: long and boring, and I'm still figuring some of them out, because Comcast won't give me the information.) They pushed it out twice in two days, which meant I had exactly the same problem two mornings in a row.
When I contacted them to ask them to politely explain what the heck they'd done (being a little irate as it had taken me two hours to determine just what was going on, not including all the downtime), they first told me they hadn't done anything, then admitted they had done something but it couldn't do what I said it had done and I was making it up, and finally told me "yes, we did it, gosh that's unfortunate, bad luck, goodbye".
Comcast is appalling, and has no technical ability at all. (If I had the same amount of outage as they do, I'd be fired so fast my feet wouldn't touch the ground.) By the way, did you have a service level agreement with your old ISP? You don't with Comcast -- at least in Pennsylvania, you don't. That's right -- NO SLA at all.
I could go on and on about Comcast. Unfortunately, they happen to fit in that last caveat of the parent poster -- they are indeed in a monopoly situation. Scum.
You can get exceptions written into your TOS.
When ATTBI was ATT@home, I had a written contract with them that stated, in writing, "static address due to home network." When ATTBI took over, they took away my static address, and basically told me to fuck off.
So getting it in writing only works if you're willing to pony up the legal fees to file a breach of contract suit. Otherwise, written agreements are no better than a roll of blank toilet paper.
It's standard legal language to protect the service provider from idiots who want to sue them because "you, my ISP, made copies of my copyrighted web page available to everyone via the Internet!!!"
Duh. That's what a service provider is supposed to do, but they have to include the kind of legal disclaimer above to protect themselves from litigious idiots.
Here's my story.
The page in question.
I must have missed the part where they were arrested for expressing their views.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I did this with a government agency that wanted to have free and unfettered access to my private medical records.
I scored that bit out, and added, that they may only have access upon contacting me first and obtaining my permission, and that I vet the information they can have access to (basically "no you can't have access", but less blunt.)
I signed the re-written contract and heard nothing more about it.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
It's probably worth pointing out that Aardvark Daily, the "news and commentary site" being linked to by slashdot, is sponsored by Ihug -- a rival ISP here in New Zealand. It's hardly an independant media source.