Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") specifies the actions prohibited to users of the network and systems ("infrastructure") of Industrial Revolution IT Services (Pty) Ltd ("Industrial Revolution") , and is intended to enhance the use of the Internet by preventing unacceptable use. Users are required to adhere to all the policies specified in this AUP without exception. 

Laws and Regulations

1) Industrial Revolution's infrastructure may be used only for lawful purposes. Users may not violate any applicable laws or regulations of South Africa within the territory of South Africa. Should the user reside outside of South Africa, the laws of the country in which the user resides shall apply. 

2) Transmission, distribution or storage of any material on or through the infrastructure in violation of any applicable law or regulation is prohibited. This includes, without limitation, material protected by copyright, trademark, trade secret or other intellectual property right used without proper authorisation, and material that is obscene, defamatory, constitutes an illegal threat, or violates export control laws. 

Network

1) The user acknowledges that Industrial Revolution is unable to exercise control over the content of the information passing over the infrastructure and the Internet, including any websites, electronic mail transmissions, news groups or other material created or accessible over its infrastructure.  Therefore, Industrial Revolution is not responsible for the content of any messages or other information transmitted over its infrastructure. 

2) Industrial Revolution's infrastructure may be used to link into other networks worldwide and the user agrees to conform to the acceptable use policies of these networks. 

3) The user may obtain and download any materials marked as available for download off the Internet but is not permitted to use its Internet access to distribute any copyrighted materials unless permission for such distribution is granted to the user by the owner of the materials. 

4) The user is prohibited from obtaining and/or disseminating on-line any unlawful materials, including but not limited to stolen intellectual property, child pornography, and/or any unlawful hate-speech materials. 

   

System and Network Security

1) All references to systems and networks under this section includes the Internet (and all those systems and/or networks to which user is granted access through Industrial Revolution) and includes but is not limited to the infrastructure of Industrial Revolution itself. 

2) The user may not circumvent user authentication or security of any host, network, or account (referred to as "cracking" or "hacking"), nor interfere with service to any user, host, or network (referred to as "denial of service attacks"). 

3) Violations of system or network security by the user are prohibited, and may result in civil or criminal liability. Industrial Revolution will investigate incidents involving such violations and will involve and will co-operate with law enforcement officials if a criminal violation is suspected.

Examples of system or network security violations include, without limitation, the following:

Unauthorised access to or use of data, systems or networks, including any attempt to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of any system or network or to breach security or authentication measures without the express authorisation of Industrial Revolution.

Unauthorised monitoring of data or traffic on the network or systems without express authorisation of Industrial Revolution.

Interference with service to any user, host or network including, without limitation, mailbombing, flooding, deliberate attempts to overload a system and broadcast attacks.

Forging of any TCP-IP packet header (spoofing) or any part of the header information in an email or a newsgroup posting.

E-mail use

1) It is explicitly prohibited to send unsolicited bulk mail messages ("junk mail" or "spam") of any kind (commercial advertising, political tracts, announcements, etc). This is strongly objected to by most Internet users and the repercussions against the offending party and Industrial Revolution can often result in disruption of service to other users connected to Industrial Revolution.

2) Maintaining of mailing lists by users of Industrial Revolution is accepted only with the permission and approval of the list members, and at the members' sole discretion. 

3) Users may not forward or propagate chain letters nor malicious e-mail.

4) Public relay occurs when a mail server is accessed by a third party from another domain and utilised to deliver mails, without the authority or consent of the owner of the mail-server. Users' mail servers must be secure against public relay as a protection to both themselves and the Internet at large. Mail servers that are unsecured against public relay often become abused by unscrupulous operators for spam delivery and upon detection such delivery must be disallowed.

5) Industrial Revolution reserves the right to examine users' mail servers to confirm that no mails are being sent from the mail server through public relay and the results of such checks can be made available to the user. Industrial Revolution also reserves the right to examine the mail servers of any users using Industrial Revolution's mail servers for "smarthosting" or similar services at any time to ensure that the servers are properly secured against public relay. All relay checks will be done in strict accordance with Industrial Revolution's policy of preserving customer privacy.

6) Should mailing lists contain invalid or undeliverable addresses or addresses of unwilling recipients those addresses must be promptly removed.  

News services

1) Users should, before using the service, familiarise themselves with the contents of the following newsgroups: news.newusers.questions, news.announce.newusers, news.answers 

2) Excessive cross-posting (ie, posting the same article to a large numbers of newsgroups) is forbidden. 

3) Posting of irrelevant (off-topic) material to newsgroups is forbidden. 

4) Posting binaries to a non-binary newsgroup is forbidden. 

5) Industrial Revolution reserves the right to delete and/or cancel posts which violate the above conditions.   

ADSL services 

The implementation of the ‘Connection Management’ policy allows us to protect our customers from potential abuse and theft of ADSL accounts. This policy will enforce specific rules pertaining to concurrent sessions and data thresholds.

 

1) Data Thresholds: When the user exceeds the ‘subscribed to’ data cap, the international connection will be fully restricted, while the local connection is allocated to a bandwidth segment shared by all excess users. The account will subsequently be suspended at a threshold of 30 GByte.

2) Concurrent Sessions: There will be no limitation in the number of PPPoE (Point to Point Protocol over Ethernet) sessions on an ADSL line, provided that they originate from no more than two concurrent ports. When the number of sessions per account exceeds two and the user is below the ‘subscribed to’ cap, a mail notification will be sent to the Industrial Revolution flagging the account. No action will be taken against the account at this point.

If the user exceeds the ‘subscribed to’ cap and initiates more than two concurrent sessions, we will receive a daily notification for a period of five days. The notification will inform Industrial Revolution of the account’s activity and pending suspension. On the fifth day, the account will be suspended.

Complaints and abuse 

Upon receipt of a complaint, or having become aware of an incident, Industrial Revolution reserves the right to:  

Inform the user's network administrator of the incident and require the network administrator or network owner to deal with the incident according to this AUP.

In the case of individual users suspend the user's account and withdraw the user's network access privileges completely.

Charge the offending parties for administrative costs as well as for machine and human time lost due to the incident.

In severe cases suspend access of the user's entire network until abuse can be prevented by appropriate means.

Share information concerning the incident with other Internet access providers, or publish the information, and/or make available the users' details to law enforcement agencies.  

Any one or more of the steps listed above, insofar as they are deemed necessary by Industrial Revolution in its absolute and sole discretion, may be taken by Industrial Revolution against the offending party.

All cases of violation of the above Acceptable Use Policy should be reported to abuse@ir.co.za.