 Recent growth of the Internet has brought about more possibilities for abuse of this new communications medium. Thus, PowerSurge Technologies, Inc. has developed the following policies regarding abuse of Internet services. These policies were established to protect you, our customer, form Internet harassment and intrusions of privacy.
“Netiquette” is a term which has come to receive widespread use on the Internet. Netiquette is generally defined as the standards or practices an individual or organization engages in to engender responsible Internet citizenship on their behalf, as well as refraining from standards or practices which would impose undue financial, time, or social constraints on other users of the Internet.
The Internet has no single governing body. There is no Internet Management to complain to when things go wrong. Every facet of the Internet is overseen by individual organizations (such as PowerSurge Technologies, Inc.) whose networks are interconnected to form the Internet. Additionally, every user of the Internet is responsible for his/her own behavior.
Due to the decentralized system of responsibility, the Internet hasmanaged to retain a sense of “community”. Even though many large, commercial entities have recently come online, most of the information on the Internet is made available through the efforts of Internet citizens around the world who have a desire to simply share information with other people.
Because the Internet is simply an interconnected set of similar networks, each entity using the Internet assumes some liability for the cost associated with traffic and storage. When the costs of storage space and transmission are all figured together, a single newsgroup posting can cost the collective Internet thousands of dollars! There are similar costs associated with the bandwidth required to transmit e-mail. Therefore, someone using e-mail or news postings for abusive purposes can create a large financial impact on the individual networks involved.
Aside from the financial costs, individuals who have fallen victim to some sort of Internet abuse have other costs including decreased effectiveness of the Internet. For example, someone besieged by SPAM e-mail (a massive bulk e-mail message to subscribers who did not indicate any desire to receive such e-mail) spends additional time downloading and responding to e-mail which was not requested in the first place. A newsgroup subscriber may see their favorite newsgroup overrun with meaningless off-topic advertisements; thus, obscuring any effective information still remaining in that newsgroup.
When a PowerSurge customer performs one of these abusive activities, PowerSurge pays the price as well. The additional time PowerSurge employees spend responding to complaints could be better spent providing other services. If the domain “powersurge.net” appears anywhere in the e-mail headers, we will get complaints. In particularly egregious incidents, angry Internet users have been known to “mail bomb” an ISP by setting up programs to send so much e-mail that the ISP's mail server crashes thereby denying e-mail access to every customer of the ISP. Our system is robust enough to escape most of these types of activities. However, we, PowerSurge Technologies, Inc. cannot escape every undesirable activity.
Because of the potential consequences of this type of activity, PowerSurge Technologies, Inc. disapproves of this type of behavior by its customers. Any PowerSurge customer who abuses the resources of the Internet in any of the following ways will lose their access to the PowerSurge network permanently. This includes:
- Excessive posting of e-mail to Internet users who previously have not indicated a desire to receive such e-mail;
- Posting messages to multiple Internet newsgroups which are not immediately relevant to the topics of the newsgroups;
- Posting advertisements on groups that don't specifically permit advertising. (How do you know? Watch the group for a while before you post blindly. If other people are advertising openly, then you are pretty safe doing the same. Don't advertise unless you are sure.)
- Using the PowerSurge network for any illegal purpose.
There are literally thousands of advertising and marketing resources that are effective and are available for low or no cost. These include classifieds on every one of the thousands of malls on the Internet, your free PowerSurge web space, registering with search engines, appropriate USENET postings. This is not to say that advertising on the Internet is not allowed. It simply means that PowerSurge reserves the right to cancel the account of any subscriber who advertises inappropriately especially through the use of unsolicited mass mailings and spamming using USENET.
If the subject of Internet abuse is still unclear, please see one of the following URLs:
http://marketing.tenagra.com/rfc1855.html
http://www.oak-ridge.com/ibbch4p1.html
http://www.vix.com/spam/
Any subscriber who violates the SPAM policies of PowerSurge Technologies, Inc. will be charged $125.00 per hour for the time it takes to “clean up” the SPAM. This shall include but not be limited to the time required to answer mail from recipients of your SPAM and/or repair any damage to the server due to the “mail bombing” or other actions of the recipients in response to the SPAM. PowerSurge will turn provide the name and personal information of any person found to be in violation of any laws to the appropriate state and/or federal officials for further legal action.
|
