<<- use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises ...>>
LOL... you heard them, no stand-alone. Time to put up a Linux Cluster! What a dumb term (stand-alone) to throw into a legal document! Also, according to what is written below: << - use or run programs from the Premises that provide network content or any other <<services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN, except for personal and <<non-commercial residential use; I guess it's a sin to not have security on a wireless router... but then again, if someone connects to it from the neighborhood, they then ARE part of your LAN, so maybe that's ok! Such ambiguity in a legal document is laughable. Joe ----- Original Message ----- From: Amy Alford To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, June 09, 2008 12:08 PM Subject: Re: [UM-LINUX] [OT] Comcast users in the area Comcast's ToS prohibits: - use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network ("Premises LAN"), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers; - use or run programs from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN, except for personal and non-commercial residential use; This appears to not exclude sshd for personal use. They don't discuss research. However, it clearly excludes running a standalone box to do this. Aside from the questions of whether the original plan violates the ToS, what if you wrote a client that simply checks in periodically for commands about where to ping? It seems like that is clearly a client, and you could post the code for audit. I'd generally be less concerned about running code a number of people I know have read over then I'd be about giving a user account to someone I don't know. That said, I don't use comcast anyway. - Amy On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 11:44 AM, Dustin J. Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 11:36 AM, Randolph Baden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> you're saying it's illegal to run an SSH server? that makes no sense. > > Don't quote me on this, but from what I've heard it doesn't sound like > ISPs really care if you run an SSH server (or even a HTTP server as > long as it generates very little traffic). It seems like they put > such things in their ToS in case they ever want to be able to use it. > I think that a lot of ISPs do it. I think some also say you can't, > for instance, use a wireless router, even though people do it all the > time. Correct. And let's be careful to distinguish criminal law from contract law. It's not illegal, it's just a violation of a broadly worded and probably difficult-to-enforce contract between the end-user and Comcast. You may want to see if you can work this from the "bottom" -- get in touch with some of the Comcast net admins, and once they're on board, get them to push the proposal upstream. Dustin -- Storage Software Engineer http://www.zmanda.com
