Crystal Wind Communications, Inc.

Crystal Wind Communications, Inc.
Acceptable Use Policy
Last revised: 12/26/2003

Important Note: These terms and conditions supersede all previous understandings or agreements and shall prevail notwithstanding any variance with terms and conditions or any order submitted. Crystal Wind reserves the right to amend, alter, or modify this Acceptable Use Policy at any time and in any way, such changes becoming effective immediately upon posting on this website. Use of CWCi's services constitutes acceptance of these current terms and conditions. Violations of any provisions herein may result in immediate termination of service with no refund, solely at the discretion of Crystal Wind Communications, Inc. CWCi reserves the right to pursue legal action for any damages incurred from violations of its policies.
Reports of activity in violation of this policy may be sent via email to abuse@xtalwind.net.

This document is divided into the following sections:


Introduction

  When you open your CWCi account, you join two communities. First is the community formed by our network and our customers; the second community is the one made up of all networks and users connected to each other that make the Internet.
  Becoming a member of these communities gives you certain rights and privileges, but also imposes certain duties and responsibilities. CWCi has established an Acceptable Use Policy in order to make these duties and responsibilities more clear. This document is intended to provide a general understanding of the CWCi Acceptable Use Policy.
  The following factors direct the establishment and enforcement of the CWCi usage policies:

  CWCi intends to provide to its customers access to everything the Internet has to offer. While CWCi is firmly committed to the principles of free speech, certain activities are damaging to the resources of both CWCi and the Internet. The resources of CWCi and the Internet are limited, and abuse of these resources by one user has a negative impact on the entire community.

  We do not routinely monitor the activity of accounts except for measurements of system utilization and the preparation of billing records. However, in our efforts to promote good citizenship within the Internet community, we will respond appropriately if we become aware of inappropriate use of our service.

  If a CWCi account is used to violate the Acceptable Use Policy, we reserve the right to terminate that account without notice.
We prefer to advise customers of inappropriate behavior and take any necessary corrective action. However, flagrant violations of the Acceptable Use Policy will result in immediate termination of service. Our failure to enforce this policy, for whatever reason, shall not be construed as a waiver of our right to do so at any time.

  As a member of CWCi, you must use your Internet access responsibly. If you have any questions regarding this policy, please contact us at support@xtalwind.net.

Any customer signing up for a CWCi account must provide current and accurate information including legal name, street address (and the address used on the credit card, if applicable and different from street address), telephone numbers, and billing method requested.
The customer is responsible for reporting any and all changes, including new or updated credit card and/or bank information.
CWCi is not responsible for any damages, financial or otherwise, which may accrue due to a misrepresentation of or failure to update current and accurate account information.

If you choose to have your account automatically renew (this requires a valid credit or debit card), your account will renew monthly until CWCi is notified by the account owner that automatic renewal is no longer desired. Termination of auto-renewal must be made prior to the account's renewal. Refunds will not be granted for charges made prior to notification.

CWCi uses email to alert its customers to system changes, billing information, expiration of credit card, and other essential information.
Customers are solely responsible for monitoring the email in their email accounts.

General Information

  Your CWCi account provides you access to a vast collection of networks and services around the world such as the World Wide Web, electronic mail, and newsgroups. Your use of these services is subject to the following policies. Violations of these policies may result in termination of your account with or without notice in accordance with the agreement you signed when you opened your CWCi account.

    CWCi's "unlimited-interactive" accounts are intended for interactive use only. These accounts are not intended to provide full-time connections, and some restrictions do apply.

Right to Disconnect Dial-up Accounts:

CWCi's unlimited interactive dial-up connections are intended for periodic, active use. As a consumer-oriented dial-up service, it is not intended, nor is it designed, to provide an "always on" or "always connected" capability.
In order to make the service available fairly to all our members, we reserve the right to terminate members' sessions after an extended period of time, and may establish a minimum "idle time" at our discretion in order to remain connected to the service.

Long Connections and Logins

  • Our dialup services are intended for periodic, active use of email, newsgroups, file transfers, Internet chat, games, and browsing the World Wide Web.
  • Dial-up customers may not maintain a connection on a standby or inactive basis, nor may they use any automatic method to avoid disconnection.
  • An individual dialup account entitles the named User to login to Crystal Wind's Internet service using one dial-up modem or TCP/IP session at a time. Violations may result in termination of the account and/or additional charges.
  • Dial-up customers agree that CWCi may change the minimum idle time without advance notice.
  • Dial-up customers may not take action for the purpose of defeating our "idle timeouts" or similar mechanisms.
  • Pinging is expressly prohibited.
  • Dial-up customers may not provide public information services over the connection.

    Accordingly, CWCi maintains the right to terminate any member's connection following any extended period of inactivity as determined by CWCi.

    Any dial-up account which exceeds these limitations may be terminated or given the option of changing the account to a dedicated dial-up account. This will be done solely at the the discretion of Crystal Wind Communications, Inc.

    Examples of prohibited types of software and/or actions:

    •     Any intentional abuse of this policy may be considered grounds for immediate account termination.

    In general, you may NOT use your CWCi account:

      CWCi reserves sole discretion to determine whether any use of the service is a violation of this policy. Guidelines for using your account follow. This information is only a guideline, and is not intended to be all-inclusive.

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    Domain and Site Restriction

    CWCi reserves the right to block information including, but not limited to email, websites, and newsgroups, from domains and sites which have been deemed an unacceptable risk due to disruptive email attacks of CWCi or with a history of such originating from or relayed through said sites or domains, until such time as the originating sites implement measures to cease outgoing spam. This blocking of originating domains and IP addresses is to protect the CWCi servers from becoming swamped with spam and slowing service to our customers or even crashing our servers entirely, and causing a cessation of services as happened to the CNN, Yahoo, and other well-known sites in 1999.

     

    Electronic Mail

      Your CWCi account gives you the ability to send and receive electronic mail. Misuse of electronic mail may result in termination of service. The following examples are non-exclusive and are provided for your guidance.

      CWCi accounts may not be used to collect replies to messages sent from another Internet service provider if those messages violate this Acceptable Use Policy or the acceptable use policy of the other service provider.

    CWCI strongly discourages the propogation of email chain letters and virus hoaxes. Please ignore any messages received regarding supposed "viruses" or "promotional gimmicks". They contain bogus information, and are intended only to frighten or confuse users. NO virus alert will instruct the reader to send the warning to everyone in his address book or in any way further disseminate the alert.

    Please refer to http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/hoax.html , Symantec's AntiVirus Center hoax database, whenever you receive what appears to be a bogus message regarding a new virus, promotion, or the like, rather than spreading spam and fear.

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    Newsgroups

      Your CWCi account gives you access to thousands of newsgroups. Newsgroups may be moderated or unmoderated. Newsgroups may also have a charter or a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) that describes what subjects are appropriate for each newsgroup. Misuse of newsgroups may result in the termination of your service.

      CWCi provides an uncensored newsfeed. As such, CWCi does not control the content of the newsgroups available to you. CWCi believes that decisions about which newsgroups and messages to read are best left to its customers. Screening software is available from third parties, and it is your responsibility to use such tools if desired. CWCi is not responsible for the content of any newsgroup message, whether or not the message was posted by a CWCi customer.

      CWCi does not censor or control content posted to a newsgroup. As a user of our service, you are solely responsible for the content that you publish. CWCi, upon receiving notification that certain posts violate this policy, or any state or federal law, or infringe on the trademarks or copyrights of another, reserves the right to remove such posts from our news server and to terminate your account.

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    Personal Home Page

      Your account with CWCi includes server space for a personal home page. CWCi will not routinely monitor the contents of your personal home page.

      You are solely responsible for any information contained on your personal home page. However, if your page is found by CWCi to contain unlawful, indecent, or objectionable material (this to be judged solely by CWCi), or copyrighted material copyrighted by someone other than the website owner or used without the copyright holder's permission, CWCi may, at its discretion, remove the personal home page hosted on CWCi servers, remove any links TO that page occurring on any of CWCi's pages, OR terminate your personal home page service.

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    Extra Email Boxes

      Your account with CWCi provides you with extra email boxes. All provisions of the Acceptable Use Policy apply to your use of these additional email boxes; in particular, please note the Electronic Mail, Newsgroups, and Security sections of this policy. Misuse of extra email boxes service may result in the termination of your account.

      As the primary account holder, you are responsible for all account activity. If a secondary mailbox is involved in a violation of the Acceptable Use Policy, your account, including all secondary mailboxes, may be terminated. A terminated account will result in lost email and Internet access for all users of your account. Therefore, it is important that you make sure everyone you allow to use your account or a secondary mailbox understands all terms of this Acceptable Use Policy and the consequences of violations.

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    Security

      You are responsible for any misuse of your account, even if the inappropriate activity was committed by a friend, family member, guest or employee. Therefore, you must take steps to ensure that others do not gain unauthorized access to your account. In addition, you may not use your account to breach security of another account or attempt to gain unauthorized access to another network or server.

      Your password provides access to your account. It is your responsibility to keep your password secure.
    Passwords are generated by CWCi. If you feel your password has been compromised, you may request a new one from CWCi. Please note that only the individual whose name the account is under may request a new password.

      Sharing your password and account access with unauthorized users is prohibited. You should take care to prevent others from using your account since you will be held responsible for such use.

      Attempting to obtain another user's account password is strictly prohibited, and may result in termination of service.

      You must adopt adequate security measures to prevent or minimize unauthorized use of your account.

      You may not attempt to circumvent user authentication or security of any host, network or account ("cracking"). This includes, but is not limited to, accessing or attempting to access data not intended for you, logging into or attempting to log into or making use of a server or account you are not expressly authorized to access, or probing the security of other networks. Use or distribution of tools designed for compromising security is prohibited. Examples of these tools include, but are not limited to, password guessing programs, cracking tools or network probing tools.

      You may not attempt to interfere with service to any user, host, or network ("denial of service attacks"). This includes, but is not limited to, "flooding" of networks, deliberate attempts to overload a service, and attempts to "crash" a host.

      Users who violate systems or network security may incur criminal or civil liability. CWCi will cooperate fully with investigations of violations of systems or network security at other sites, including cooperating with law enforcement authorities in the investigation of suspected criminal violations.

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    Network Performance

      CWCi accounts operate on shared resources. Excessive use or abuse of these shared network resources by one customer may have a negative impact on all other customers. Misuse of network resources in a manner which impairs network performance is prohibited by this policy and may result in termination of your account.

      You are prohibited from excessive consumption of resources, including CPU time, memory, disk space and session time. You may not use resource-intensive programs which negatively impact other customers or the performance of CWCi systems or networks. CWCi reserves the right to terminate or limit such activities.

      CWCi will provide, for an additional charge, multiple connections.

      You may not provide network services from your account. (for example, you may not use your account to operate an ftp or a web server)

      Each customer account will be provided 5Mb of disk storage for email and 5 Mb storage for a website.

      You may not employ automated electronic or mechanical processes designed to defeat network inactivity time-outs. Such tools include, but are not limited to, use of an auto-dialer and repetitive pinging of a host.

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    Internet Relay Chat

      Although CWCi does not offer technical support for Internet Relay Chat (IRC), you may use your account to connect to IRC servers and networks maintained by third parties. Please remember that you are a guest when you make use of these facilities. It is particularly important that you do not engage in activities which might interfere with other customers' access to IRC.

      You may not use IRC scripts or programs that interfere with or deny service to other users on any other server, host, network or channel. The use of bots on our server is expressly forbidden.

      You may not engage in activities which harass other users. This includes, but is not limited to, "flooding" (rapidly entering text with the intent to disrupt service), "flashing" (disrupting terminal emulation), "takeovers" (improper seizing and abuse of operator privileges), attempting to send private messages to those who do not wish to receive them, attempting to return to a channel after being banned from it, and other disruptive behaviors.

      You may not attempt to impersonate other users. The use of nicknames does not constitute impersonation.

      You may run "clones" (multiple simultaneous IRC connections) and "robots" only as permitted by the host IRC server, and these may not be run from CWCi's servers.

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    Illegal Activity

    Any activity on our network that is a violation of any state or federal law is a violation of this policy and will result in immediate termination of service. Prohibited activities include, but are not limited to:

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    Commerce on the Internet

      The Internet can be a valuable business tool when used properly. However, it can reflect poorly upon a business when used improperly. You are strongly encouraged to visit the following Web pages before doing business on the Internet.

      Any customer considering the commercial use of newsgroups is strongly urged to read the document entitled "Advertising on USENET: How To Do It, How Not to Do It" which can be found in the FTP archives listed below:

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    Without prior notice, Crystal Wind may terminate this Agreement, your password, your account, or your use of the Services, for any reason, including, without limitation, if Crystal Wind, in its sole discretion, believes you have violated our Acceptable Use Policy, or any of the applicable user policies, or if you fail to pay any charges when due. Crystal Wind may provide termination notice to you by: email addressed to your email account or by US Mail or courier service to the address you provided for the Services.

    The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life.
                                --The Players Litany from 'The Long Run' by Daniel Keys Moran

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