"materials that other may find offensive"

Dreambiz

I was just looking at Ice broadband's fine print and there are serveral things that jump out.

The first is under "User's Obligations". It says, "The User covenants that it will not transmit, download, host or distribute any pornographic materials or materials that others may find offensive."

Excuse me, but last time I checked, (adult) porn was legal.

Also, how am I meant to know what materials others may find offensive? What if I write a book that someone "may" find offensive. If I email it to my editor have I now broken the rules and will my broadband contract get terminated? I find that rule offensive!

Maybe someone here could tell me how to interpret this one:

"The User covenants that it will not use the service to host, transmit or download any third party content, which whilst not necessarily illegal, is none-the-less considered inappropriate and deliberately calculated to cause unreasonable anxiety, inconvenience or stress to others"

Sponge Bob

This is meaningless copied and pasted american ****e

You are a citizen, not an "It"
Users have no contract with ice
"covenants" have no status in Irish law or eu law, they apply to California I think.

but if you think thats bad read the clearwire terms and conditions, the Clearwire terms are vile .....and in summary

"we will take your money and give you **** all for it, now piss off"

Ice is a model of meaningles clarity compared to them.

jor el

With regard to "which whilst not necessarily illegal, is none-the-less considered inappropriate and deliberately calculated to cause unreasonable anxiety, inconvenience or stress to others", I'd imagine refers to P2P as this may cause other users connections to slow down.

How are they going to enforce these conditions though? Will they be monitoring everything you do online? Surely that's invasion of privacy.

I'd stay away from a company with terms like this, they sound like a bunch of prudish Nazis.

rogue-entity

Actually, BT and Eircom have similar lines in their terms and conditions prohibiting the use for transmission of "obscene" or illegal material. BT also goes one step further and prohibits use which puts "abnormal" demand on BTs network i.e. BitTorrent.

BT wrote:

6.1 The Customer undertakes not to use the Service or the Equipment:

(i) for any improper, immoral or unlawful purpose, nor cause any nuisance by the use of the Service, nor allow others to use the Service for any of the foregoing purposes or in a way that may cause degradation of service levels to other customers as determined by BT or put the BT network at risk; or

(ii) for the transmission of any material which is, may be or is intended to be a hoax or is of a defamatory, offensive, abusive, obscene or menacing nature; or

(iii) for the infringement of intellectual property rights or trade secrets of another party; or

(v) in a manner which in the opinion of BT in its absolute discretion makes abnormal demands on the Service or BT’s network or facility from a single connection;

I never thought I would say this, but Eircom does have one advantage over BT, Eircom provides an unrestricted connection to the internet whereas BT actively blocks some services such as BitTorrent and the use of some external proxy servers. I can understand why ISP's would restrict/block BitTorrent or P2P services, they use a lot of bandwidth, but I cant think of a good reason for them to block some external proxy servers.

That said, I recall reading somewhere that BT does not monitor its customers use to ensure they comply with the T&Cs, and I doubt Eircom do either, so its not likly that any ISP activly monitors and logs what its users are browsing on the internet, asside from the passive logs recorded each time an IP is dished out etc.

zilog_jones

rogue-entity wrote:

Eircom provides an unrestricted connection to the internet whereas BT actively blocks some services such as BitTorrent and the use of some external proxy servers.

That's news to me! I've been a customer since it was still called IOL Broadband, and have never experienced any attempts of any bittorrents or other traffic being blocked. Anyway, how can any ISP block bittorrents if one is using both encryption and random ports?

in a way that may cause degradation of service levels to other customers as determined by BT or put the BT network at risk

So basically they're saying we're not allowed to make use of the bandwidth they're giving us? It's not my problem if they're overloaded and their contention ratios are crap.

thebman

zilog_jones wrote:

That's news to me! I've been a customer since it was still called IOL Broadband, and have never experienced any attempts of any bittorrents or other traffic being blocked. Anyway, how can any ISP block bittorrents if one is using both encryption and random ports?


So basically they're saying we're not allowed to make use of the bandwidth they're giving us? It's not my problem if they're overloaded and their contention ratios are crap.

Most Irish ISP's seem to have a policy of we will disconnect you if you use our service.

If your paying for 2Mbps broadband with a 10GB limit, you should be allowed use it for whatever you want, whenever you want, otherwise they need to change their terms and conditions.

imeatingchips

Mr T should roll up in his tank and tell them to quite their fool jibber jabber.

imeatingchips

Dreambiz wrote:

It says, "The User covenants that it will not transmit, download, host or distribute any pornographic materials or materials that others may find offensive."

as was so accurately pointed out in scrubs: if they took all the porn off the internet there would be only one website left. and it would be called "Bring back the porn"

rogue-entity

zilog_jones wrote:

That's news to me! I've been a customer since it was still called IOL Broadband, and have never experienced any attempts of any bittorrents or other traffic being blocked. Anyway, how can any ISP block bittorrents if one is using both encryption and random ports?

So basically they're saying we're not allowed to make use of the bandwidth they're giving us? It's not my problem if they're overloaded and their contention ratios are crap.

I have been a BT Broadband customer since my exchange was enabled a year ago. I my neighbour is an Eircom broadband customer. I used proxy servers on occasion to get around IP-restrictions on sites, and I had no problem using them on Eircom, but when I try using them at home, I cant. Now, if these proxies blocked the BT IP range for some reason, I would expect to get a Connection Refused Error, or an Error page when trying to use them, instead I get a Connection Reset by Peer error. What has BT got against free proxies?

I tried using BitTorrent to download Linux ISO's before, and it was always just waiting to connect, and as soon as I tried using encryption, it worked, though, DSL and Torrents dont go so well, because the highest download speed I ever obtained with BitTorrent is 56 KB/sec (normal download speed using direct HTTP for me is about 220KB/sec). I actually get the maximum speed that I can get from my connection, because I am practically next door to the exchange, so I am putting this all down to my upload limit. Given the slower speed of BitTorrent in this case, I think I will stick with NetInst CDs

watty

Encryption and random ports does not hide traffic profile. Data stuffing + encryption does (which inflates the data). A VPN might not hide the traffic profile either.

You can differentiate different flavours of traffic without actually being able to read it. VOIP, Web pages, UDP video and torrents look quite different.

zilog_jones

Yeah I know it's not completely indistinguishable, but we're talking about Irish ISPs here. Would they really go into that much trouble looking at everyone's traffic in that much detail?

I used proxy servers on occasion to get around IP-restrictions on sites, and I had no problem using them on Eircom, but when I try using them at home, I cant. Now, if these proxies blocked the BT IP range for some reason, I would expect to get a Connection Refused Error, or an Error page when trying to use them, instead I get a Connection Reset by Peer error. What has BT got against free proxies?

Something dodgy is going on either with your router or at your exchange or something. OK I've never tried free proxies (not sure why you'd need to use one), but I've used a web VPN (UL's one, for free IEEE journals ), some SonicWall VPN client, Hamachi (a VPN yoke), all with no problems at all, along with every game I've played online, and every filesharing system I've tried (from Gnutella to BTs to infuriatingly slow feckin Freenet). I may have tried SSH tunelling at some time as well - I forget.

With decent BitTorrents (Ubuntu ISOs of course ) I nearly always get 200-220KB/s down and about 20-26KB/s up. Sometimes BT have their dodgy days (like last Monday), but I usually have no trouble.

You sure there's nothing wrong with your setup?

pizzahead77

I recently downloaded the CentOS DVD torrent and it was maxing out at about 750KB/sec

But then again I'm on Smart's 8MBit/sec