Acceptable Use Policy

All Network Innovations, Inc. (hereinafter “NI”) customers are responsible for reviewing and complying with this Acceptable Use Policy. NI customers who provide services to their own users must affirmatively and contractually pass on the restrictions of this Acceptable Use Policy to their users, and take steps to ensure compliance by their users with this Acceptable Use Policy including, without limitation, termination of users who violate this policy. For the purposes of this Policy, "Customer" shall be defined to include NI's customers and also a customer's users and account holders. This Policy is subject to change with notice by publication on this web site; Customers are responsible for monitoring this web site for changes. This Policy was last changed on June 9, 2005. NI reserves the right to deny or terminate service to a Customer based upon the results of a security/abuse confirmation process used by NI. Such confirmation process uses publicly available information to primarily examine Customer's history in relation to its prior or current use of services similar to those being provided by NI and Customer's relationship with previous providers.

The actions described below are defined by NI as "network abuse" and are strictly prohibited under this Policy. The examples named below are not exhaustive and are provided solely for guidance to Customers. If any Customer is unsure of whether a contemplated use or action is permitted, it is Customer's responsibility to determine whether the use is permitted by contacting NI via electronic mail. The following activities are expressly prohibited, and NI expressly reserves the right, at its discretion, to pursue any remedies that it believes are warranted which may include, but is not limited to, the issuance of written or verbal warnings, filtering, blocking, suspending, or terminating accounts, billing Customer for administrative costs and/or reactivation charges or bringing legal action to enjoin violations and/or to collect damages, if any, caused by Customer violations. Such actions may be taken by NI without notice to Customer. In general, NI Customers may not use NI's network, machines, or services in any manner which:

violates any applicable law, regulation, treaty, or tariff, including but not limited to data privacy laws;
violates the acceptable use policies of any networks, machines, or services which are accessed through NI's network;
infringes on the intellectual property rights of NI or others;
violates the privacy of others;
involves the resale of NI's products or services, unless specifically documented in a separate written agreement or in the initial Customer contract with NI;
involves deceptive online marketing practices including, without limitation, practices that violate the United States Federal Trade Commission's guidelines for proper online marketing schemes;
violates any specific instructions given by NI for reasons of health, safety or quality of any other telecommunications services provided by NI or by reason of the need for technical compatibility of equipment attached to the NI Network;
materially affects the quality of any telecommunications services provided by NI; or
otherwise violates this Acceptable Use Policy.

Prohibited activities also include, but are not limited to, the following:

unauthorized use (or attempted unauthorized use) or sabotage of any computers, machines or networks;
attempting to interfere with or denying service to any user or host (e.g. denial of service attacks and/or DNS spoofing attacks);
falsifying header information or user identification information;
introduction of malicious programs into the network or Server (e.g. viruses, worms, Trojan horses, etc.);
monitoring or scanning the networks of others without permission;
attempted or successful security breaches or disruption of Internet communication including, but not limited to, accessing data of which Customer is not an intended recipient or logging into a Server or account that Customer is not expressly authorized to access;
executing any form of network monitoring (e.g. packet sniffer) which will intercept data not intended for the Customer;
attempting to circumvent Customer authentication or security of any host, network, or account ("cracking");
hijacking of IP space;
using any program/script/command, or sending messages of any kind, designed to interfere with a third party customer terminal session, via any means, locally or via the Internet;
sending unsolicited ("opt-out") bulk email;
maintaining an open mail relay and/or an open proxy;
collecting email addresses from the Internet for the purpose of sending unsolicited bulk email or to provide collected addresses to others for that purpose;
transmitting or receiving, uploading, using or reusing material which is abusive, indecent, defamatory, obscene or menacing, or in breach of copyright, confidence, privacy or similar third party rights;
furnishing false or incorrect data on the signup form; or
attempting to circumvent or alter the process or procedures to measure time, bandwidth utilization, or other methods to document "use" of NI's products and services.

IP Transit, Dedicated Internet Access and Co-location Customers

NI IP transit, dedicated Internet access and collocation Customers who provide services to their own users must affirmatively and contractually pass on the restrictions of this Acceptable Use Policy to its users, and take steps to ensure compliance by their users with this Acceptable Use Policy including, without limitation, termination of the user for violations of this policy. NI IP transit, dedicated Internet access and collocation Customers who provide services to their own users also must maintain valid postmaster and abuse addresses for their domains, comply with all applicable Internet RFCs, maintain appropriate reverse DNS information for all hosts receiving connectivity through NI's network for which DNS responsibility has been delegated to the Customer, maintain accurate contact information with the InterNIC and any other appropriate domain, IP and AS registrars, take reasonable steps to prevent IP spoofing by their users and downstream customers, provide a 24/7 contact address to NI for dealing with security and abuse issues, and act promptly to ensure that users are in compliance with NI's Acceptable Use Policy. Reasonable steps include, but are not limited to, using IP unicast reverse-path forwarding ("uRPF") wherever appropriate and using IP address filtering wherever appropriate.

Generally, the following actions are prohibited:

using email to engage in harassment, whether through language, frequency, or size of messages. Continuing to send someone email after being asked to stop is considered harassment;
using email to disrupt (e.g., mail bombing, "flashing," etc.) is prohibited;
sending email with falsified header information;
sending email with falsified or obscured information (e.g., encoded or "obfuscated URLs") designed to hinder identification of the location of what is advertised;
creating or forwarding chain letters, pyramid schemes, and hoaxes; and
using the NI or Customer account to collect replies to messages sent from another provider which violate these rules or those of the other provider.

Bulk Email

Customers sending bulk email, using NI services, may only engage in such activity through the use of "closed-loop opt-in" lists. Such Customers who send bulk email through "closed-loop opt-in" lists must have a method of confirmation or verification of subscriptions and be able to show evidence of subscription for users who complain about receiving unsolicited email.

Sending unsolicited ("opt-out") bulk email is prohibited and is grounds for termination of those services to Customers who engage in the practice. Sending "opt-out" bulk email from another provider advertising or implicating, directly or indirectly, the use of any service hosted or provided by NI, including without limitation, email, web, FTP, and DNS services, is prohibited. Customers may not advertise, distribute, or use software intended to facilitate sending "opt-out" email or harvest email addresses from the Internet for that purpose. In addition, Customers may not sell or distribute lists of harvested email addresses for the purpose of "opt-out" email. Customers who provide or make use of a service employing referral IDs will be considered responsible for unsolicited bulk email sent by members of the referral ID service that makes reference to services hosted by NI. Customers who engage in the practice of unsolicited bulk email, as set forth above, from NI accounts will be charged the cost of labor to respond to complaints, with a minimum charge of $200.

If a Customer has been listed on an industry recognized spam abuse list, such Customer will be deemed to be in violation of NI's Acceptable Use Policy.

Usenet Newsgroups

Customers should be familiar with the workings of Usenet by reading FAQs regarding Usenet at rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/news/announce/newusers/ before becoming active participants. NI places the following restrictions on newsgroup postings by its Customers:

no illegal content, including pyramid/Ponzi schemes, infringing materials, or child pornography, is permitted;
all postings should conform to the various conventions, guidelines and local culture found in each respective newsgroup and Usenet as a whole;
commercial advertising is typically off-topic and/or a violation of charter in most Usenet newsgroups. Information about advertising on Usenet can be found in Joel Furr's "Advertising on Usenet FAQ" www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/advertising/how-to/part1/. For more information on "spam," see the FAQ on "Current Usenet spam thresholds and guidelines" www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/spam-faq/ which is regularly posted to the news.admin.net-abuse.misc newsgroup by Chris Lewis, or visit spam.abuse.net/;
posting 20 or more copies of the same article in a 45-day period ("spamming") or continued posting of off-topic articles after being warned is prohibited. Customers who engage in spamming using NI accounts will be charged the cost of labor to issue cancellations and respond to complaints, with a minimum charge of $200. Customers who engage in spamming from another provider advertising or implicating, directly or indirectly, the use of any service hosted or provided by NI, including without limitation email, web, FTP, and DNS services, is prohibited and is grounds for termination of those services to those users;
excessive cross-posting (Breidbart Index of 20 or greater in a 45-day period) is prohibited. The Breidbart Index (BI) is calculated by taking the sum of the square roots of the number of newsgroups each copy of an article is cross-posted to. If two articles are posted, one cross-posted to 9 newsgroups and the other cross-posted to 16 newsgroups, the BI = sqrt(9)+sqrt(16)=3+4=7. Cross-posting articles to newsgroups where they are off-topic is prohibited; a good rule of thumb is that if you are cross-posting to more than five newsgroups, it's likely to be off-topic on at least one of them; and
posting articles with falsified header information is prohibited. "Munging" header information to foil email address harvesting by "spammers" is acceptable provided that a reasonable means of replying to the message originator is given. Use of anonymous remailers is acceptable, so long as the use is not otherwise a violation of this Acceptable Use Policy.

Customers may not issue cancellations for postings except those which they have posted themselves, those which have headers falsified so as to appear to come from them, or in newsgroups where they are the official moderator.

The World Wide Web and FTP

The web space and public FTP space included with a dialup account may not be resold or used for adult-oriented material. NI reserves the right to require that sites using web or FTP space which receive high amounts of traffic be moved to other servers. Web pages and FTP files may not contain any material, text, or images, whether hosted on NI servers or "transclusioned" (images from another site displayed on the page) which violate or infringe any copyright, trademark, patent, statutory, common law, or proprietary rights of others. Web pages and FTP files may not contain links that initiate downloads of copyright-infringing or other illegal material.

Routing Protocols and Route Exchange

In the event NI identifies the Customer is sending excessive or unnecessary route publications, NI reserves the right to limit the number or routes that will be accepted.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act Policy

It is the policy of NI to respond expeditiously to claims of intellectual property infringement. NI will promptly process and investigate notices of alleged infringement and will take appropriate actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") and other applicable intellectual property laws. Upon receipt of notices complying or substantially complying with the DMCA, when it is under its control, NI will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to any material claimed to be infringing or claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to any reference or link to material or activity that is claimed to be infringing. NI will terminate access for Customers who are repeat infringers. For our IP transit, dedicated Internet access and collocation Customers, you must adopt and implement a Digital Millennium Copyright Act policy that reserves the necessary rights to remove or disable infringing material. If you believe that a copyrighted work has been copied and is accessible on our site in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, you may notify us by providing our registered copyright agent with the following information:

electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright interest;
a description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed;
a description of where the material that you claim is infringing is located on the site;
your address, telephone number, and email address;
a statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf.

Notices of claimed infringement should be directed to abuse@nitelecom.com. When NI removes or disables access to any material claimed to be infringing, NI may attempt to contact the Customer who has posted such material in order to give that Customer an opportunity to respond to the notification. Any and all counter notifications submitted by the Customer will be furnished to the complaining party. NI will give the complaining party an opportunity to seek judicial relief in accordance with the DMCA before NI replaces or restores access to any material as a result of any counter notification.

Internet Relay Chat

Using IRC bots is prohibited. Flooding, cloning, spoofing, harassment, or otherwise hindering the ability of others to properly use IRC is prohibited. Impersonating other users, advertising, and spamming via IRC is prohibited. IRC services which are serving as command and control channels for bots are prohibited and any violation shall subject Customer to filtering and blocking by NI within 24 hours of NI learning of such violation. NI is not obligated to provide notice of such action to Customer.

Servers and Proxies

Customers may not run on NI servers any program which makes a service or resource available to others, including but not limited to, port redirectors, proxy servers, chat servers, MUDs, file servers, and IRC bots. Customers may not run such programs on their own machines to make such services or resources available to others through a NI dialup account; a dedicated access account is required for such purposes. Customers are responsible for the security of their own networks and machines. NI will assume neither responsibility nor accountability for failures or breach of Customer-imposed protective measures, whether implied or actual. Abuse that occurs as a result of a compromised Customer's system or account may result in suspension of services or account access by NI, for example, if a system is abused after becoming infected with a worm or trojan horse program as a result of an Internet download or executing an email attachment. (See www.microsoft.com/security/articles/virus101.asp) Any programs, scripts, or processes which generate excessive server load on NI servers are prohibited and NI reserves the right to terminate or suspend any such program, script, or process.

Dialup Connections

Customers may not run programs or configure machines in such a way as to keep a dialup connection active when not in use or otherwise bypass automatic disconnection for inactivity, unless they have a dedicated Internet access account. Customers may not have multiple simultaneous connections with a single dialup account. NI reserves the right to impose restrictions on or terminate accounts deemed to be in violation of these conditions. NI's dialup access servers will disconnect after 30 minutes of inactivity and after 12 hours of continuous access.

Storing Files

The storage of any program, utility or file on NI's servers, the use of which would constitute a violation of this Acceptable Use Policy, is prohibited. For example, it is a violation to store hacker scripts, IRC bots, or spamming software on NI's servers.

Determinations of Violations

NI has absolute discretion in determining whether a Customer's activities or use of NI services are in violation of this NI Acceptable Use Policy.

Information Accuracy

While NI uses reasonable efforts to provide accurate and up-to-date information on this Web site, NI makes no warranty or representation as to its accuracy. Moreover, information that may have been accurate at the time of posting may have changed and therefore may no longer be accurate or in effect. NI undertakes no duty to update such information.

How to Contact Us

To contact us with questions or comments regarding this Acceptable Use Policy, please email feedback@nitelecom.com. To contact us with claimed violations of this Policy, please email abuse@nitelecom.com.