Feedback and debate is welcome, should you disagree strongly with some aspect of this policy. Although we don't promise to change anything, we'll listen. Send mail. Nonetheless, by using our systems you are agreeing to the terms of this policy.
When you use service from Chud Systems, regardless of whether you paid for it or it is provided for free, we place certain limits on what you can do. This may include limits on time as well as disk space. You will also be using resources which are more difficult to meter, including CPU, network bandwidth, and support personnel. If you make very heavy and unusual demands on our resources, we reserve the right to either charge you for those resources, limit your use of resources, or terminate your account.
We assume that you are using our services for access to the Internet. We expect you to follow the norms of the Internet in your usage. This means that your use of electronic mail, news servers, and other Internet services should match the intended use of these services. A prime example of uses which are NOT allowed would include widespread posting of advertisements or other bulletins to newsgroups or mailing lists not in accordance with their charter (spam) or directly sending unsolicited email to large numbers of users. Abuses of external resources, such as newsgroups and mailing lists, are grounds for termination of your account.
The deliberate creation or propagation of viruses, worms, trojan-horse programs and the like is also prohibited. We realize that people do get infected with these things accidentally, but if you're bent on writing one of your own or adapting and releasing an existing one, don't do it here. If you're working on these things for research or educational purposes, it's your responsibility to make sure it stays under control.
We are not interested in prying into your affairs nor in acting as policemen should you accidentally or intentionally offend some other Internet user. You have a reasonable expectation of privacy and autonomy and we will make our best effort to meet your expectations. We feel that privacy is important especially in Internet and electronic communication, and we will do everything we can (within reason, see below) to protect your privacy. This system supports GPG (GNU version of PGP) for the encryption of files and email; we encourage and support its use and the use of similar applications and measures users may wish to employ on their own to protect their privacy. See also the Chud Systems Privacy Statement.
Many kinds of activities are illegal in Arizona. If it is brought to our attention that you are participating in some illegal activity using our systems, we reserve the right to suspend your account until the matter can be worked out. If we are asked to provide private information about you to officials bearing warrants, we are not going to go to jail to protect your files or electronic mail. Our recommendation is that you encrypt anything which is especially sensitive.
We have no political, moral, or ethical objections to your using our systems to promote your point of view---within reason. However, we ask that you not use our systems to openly disseminate material which would violate community standards of decency. If you make such material publicly available, we reserve the right to protect such material from public access until the matter can be worked out.
What you disseminate privately is up to you (but see below). If you wish to publish material to a limited set of users through a restricted mechanism (for example, web pages protected by a password) we can help you set up restrictions that meet your needs. (We do not consider this "publicly available" unless you post the password on newsgroups, public web pages, or otherwise look like you're trying to sidestep the spirit of it.)
Further, although we recognize your First Amendment right to freedom of expression, we are not obligated to provide a platform for you to express your views. If you use our systems, even privately, to promote or organize hate crimes and we find out about it, we will ask you to take your business elsewhere.
Within the budget we have available, we have made our best effort providing reliable and available systems. However, there are single points of failure which could take us (and you) off the Internet for an extended period of time. We will not be held liable for any loss you suffer because of system failure on our end, either through acts of God or stupid negligence on our part. If you have a truly non-stop application which must be available at all times or suffer dire business consequences, you should not be using our services. If our systems are unexpectedly unavailable for a period of 12 hours or longer, we will refund any fees you have paid for the month in which the outage occurs.
Because the Internet is not guaranteed to offer connectivity between any two points at any time, we want you to understand that any Internet outage outside of our premises is not considered a system outage.