[PLUG] 15Mb Access

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Thu Sep 1 18:40:29 UTC 2005


On Thu, 1 Sep 2005, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> The Comcast Acceptable Use Policy[1] is a bit vague. You're not supposed 
> to
>
>  run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide
>  network content or any other services to anyone outside of your
>  Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as
>  public services or servers. Examples of prohibited services and
>  servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file
>  sharing, and proxy services and servers;
>
> Ordinarily, I'd assume that a "Premises LAN" consists of machines, but 
> the prohibition is against offering services to "anyone" (a person!) 
> outside the LAN. This leads me to conclude Comcast primary considers a 
> LAN a group of customers, not a physical collection of machines.
>
> Which further leads me to conclude (or, perhaps, rationalize) that the 
> prohibition isn't so much against services per se, but against services 
> offered to people outside the local customer group, that is, folks who 
> aren't members of your household.
>
> So running sshd to allow you (a paying customer) remote shell access to 
> your machine is probably just fine, while offering your friends (not 
> paying customers) the same service is inviting trouble.
>
> I'm sure the Comcast folks explicitly mention e-mail, Web hosting, et 
> al. because those services are often made available to folks in the 
> non-paying-customer category.

Um, no.  The "Premises" here is the street address at which the Comcast 
link terminates.  This clearly prohibits running any services whatsoever 
that are accessible outside the Premises LAN (the network on which the 
Comcast link terminates and which is contained within the one street 
address).

So your conclusion is, in fact, mere rationalization.  This is a per se 
prohibition on services.  The choice of the word "anyone" is unfortunate, 
but not wholly inaccurate since ultimately all services are provided to 
people.

Unenforcably, this AUP also claims to prohibit running services (programs 
or equipment) that are accessible to any neighbors on the LAN if this 
extends beyond the Premises whether or not those services use the Comcast 
link.  Of course, that's based entirely on this one section of the AUP as 
I haven't read the whole thing.

J.
--
    -----------------
      Jeme A Brelin
     jeme at brelin.net
    -----------------
  [cc] counter-copyright
  http://www.openlaw.org



More information about the PLUG mailing list