Acceptable Use Policy
Draft Updated 5/1/03

Introduction

Southern Kansas Telephone Company, Inc., and its local affiliates and/or distribution partners (collectively “SKT”) are pleased that you have chosen SKT Internet service (the “Service”). Our goal is to provide you with an enriched, high-quality Internet experience. This Acceptable Use Policy (the “AUP”) has been designed to protect our Service, our subscribers, and the Internet community, from inappropriate, illegal or otherwise objectionable activities. Please read this policy prior to accessing the Service. All users of the Service must abide by this AUP. Your violation of this AUP may result in the immediate suspension or termination of either your access to the Service and/or your SKT account. This AUP should be read in conjunction with our Internet Subscriber Agreement, Privacy Policy, and other applicable policies.
By using the Service, you agree to abide by, and require others using the Service via your account to abide by the terms of this AUP. You should consult this document regularly to ensure that your activities conform to the most recent version. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THESE TERMS, YOU SHOULD IMMEDIATELY STOP THE USE OF THE SERVICES AND NOTIFY THE SKT CUSTOMER SERVICE DEPARTMENT SO THAT YOUR ACCOUNT MAY BE CLOSED.

Contents

1. Prohibited Activities
2. Harm to Minors
3. Intellectual Property Infringement
4. User Content
5. Commercial Use
6. Servers
7. Misuse of Service
8. Hacking/Attempted Unauthorized Access
9. Security
10. Disruption of Service
11. Viruses, Trojan Horses, Worms and Denial of Service Attacks
12. Electronic Mail
13. Bandwidth, Data Storage and Other Limitations
14. Newsgroups
15. Conflict
16. Notification of changes
17. How to contact SKT

1. Prohibited Activities. You may not use the Service in a manner that violates any applicable local, state, federal or international law, order or regulation. Additionally, You may not use the Service to:
· Conduct, participate in, or otherwise facilitate pyramid or other illegal soliciting schemes.
· Take part in any fraudulent activities, including impersonating any person or entity or forging anyone else’s digital or manual signature.
· Invade another person’s privacy, stalk, harass, or otherwise violate the rights of others.
· Post, transmit, or disseminate content that is threatening, abusive, libelous, slanderous, defamatory, incites hatred, or is otherwise offensive or objectionable.
· Restrict, inhibit, or otherwise interfere with the ability of any other person to use or enjoy the equipment or the Service, including, without limitation, by posting or transmitting any information or software which contains a virus, lock, key, bomb, worm, Trojan horse, cancelbot, or other harmful feature.
· Collect or store personal data about other users.
· Use an IP address not assigned to you.
· Violate any other SKT policy or guideline.
· Resell or redistribute the Service to any third party via any means including but not limited to wireless technology.
2. Harm to Minors. You may not use the Service to harm or attempt to harm a minor, including, but not limited to, by hosting, possessing, disseminating, or transmitting material that is unlawful, including child pornography or obscene material.
3. Intellectual Property Infringement. You may not use the Service to post, copy, transmit, or disseminate any content that infringes the patents, copyrights, trade secrets, trademark, or propriety rights of any party. SKT assumes no responsibility, and you assume all risks regarding the determination of whether material is in the public domain, or may otherwise be used by you for such purposes.
4. User Content. You are solely responsible for any information that you publish on the web or other Internet services. You must ensure that the recipient of the content is appropriate and must take appropriate precautions to prevent minors from receiving inappropriate content. SKT reserves the right to refuse to post or to remove any information or materials from the Service, in whole or in part, that it, in SKT’s sole discretion, deems to be offensive, indecent, or otherwise objectionable.
5. Commercial Use. The Service is designed for personal use of the Internet and may not be used for commercial purposes. You may not resell or otherwise charge others to use the residential Service. You agree not to use the Service for operation as an Internet service provider, or for any other business enterprise, including, without limitation, virtual private network usage, IP address translation, or similar facilities intended to provide additional access.
6. Servers. You may not operate, or allow others to operate, servers of any type or any other device, equipment, and/or software providing server-like functionality in connection with the Service, unless expressly authorized by SKT.
7. Misuse of Service. You are responsible for any misuse of the Service that occurs through your account. You must therefore take steps to ensure that others do not gain unauthorized access or misuse the Service.
8. Hacking/Attempted Unauthorized Access. You may not use the Service to breach or attempt to breach the security of another user or attempt to gain access to any other person’s computer, software, or data without the knowledge and consent of such person. The equipment and the Service may not be used in any attempt to circumvent the user authentication or security of any host, network or account. This includes, but is not limited to, accessing data not intended for you, logging into or making use of a server or account you are not expressly authorized to access, or probing the security of other networks or computers for any reason. Use or distribution of tools designed for compromising security, such as password guessing programs, cracking tools, packet sniffers or network probing tools, are prohibited.
9. Security. You are solely responsible for the security of any device connected to the Service, including any data stored on that device. SKT recommends that you take appropriate security precautions for any systems connected to the Service.
10. Disruption of Service. You may not disrupt the Service in any manner. Nor shall you interfere with computer networking or telecommunications services to any user, host or network, including, without limitation, denial of service attacks, flooding of a network, overloading a service, improper seizing and abuse of operator privileges or attempts to “crash” a host.
11. Viruses, Trojan Horses, Worms and Denial of Service Attacks. Software or other content downloaded from the Service may contain viruses and it is your sole responsibility to take appropriate precautions to protect your computer from damage to its software, files and data. You are prohibited from posting, transmitting or disseminating any information or software that contains a virus, Trojan horse, worm or other harmful program or that generates levels of traffic sufficient to impede others’ ability to send or retrieve information. Prohibited conduct of this type includes denial of service attacks or similarly disruptive transmissions, as well as transmissions containing other harmful or malicious features.
12. Electronic Mail. You may not use the Service to send unsolicited bulk or commercial e-mail messages (“spam”). Any unsolicited e-mail must also not direct the recipient to any web site or other resource that uses the Service. The Service may not be used to collect responses from unsolicited e-mail sent from accounts on other Internet hosts or e-mail services that violates this Policy or the acceptable use policy of any other Internet service provider. In addition, “mail bombing,” the sending of numerous copies of the same or substantially similar messages or very large messages or files with the intent to disrupt a server or account, is prohibited.
You may not reference SKT, SKT or any portion of the SKT network (e.g. by including “Organization: SKT” in the header or by listing an IP address that belongs to the SKT network) in any unsolicited email even if that email is not sent through the SKT network. Further, forging, altering or removing electronic mail headers is prohibited.
13. Bandwidth, Data Storage and Other Limitations. You must comply with the current bandwidth, data storage and other limitations on the Service. You must ensure that your activities do not improperly restrict, inhibit, or degrade any other user’s use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of SKT) an unusually large burden on the network itself. In addition, you must ensure that their activity does not improperly restrict, inhibit, disrupt, degrade or impede SKT’s ability to deliver the Service and monitor the Service, backbone, network nodes, and/or other network services. SKT may terminate, suspend, or require you to upgrade the Service and pay additional fees if SKT, in its sole discretion, determines that that you are using excessive bandwidth.
14. Newsgroups. Messages posted to newsgroups must comply with the written charters or FAQs for those newsgroups. Advertisements, solicitations, or other commercial messages should be posted only in those newsgroups whose charters or FAQs explicitly permit them. You are responsible for determining the policies of a given newsgroup before posting to it.
Posting or cross-posting the same or substantially similar messages to more than eight newsgroups is prohibited.
Binary files may not be posted to newsgroups not specifically named for that purpose. Users posting binary files to groups with policies concerning the permissible daily volume of posted files are required to observe those limitations.
You may not attempt to “flood” or disrupt Usenet newsgroups. Disruption is defined as posting a large number of messages to a newsgroup, which contain no substantive content, to the extent that normal discussion in the group is significantly hindered. Examples of disruptive activities include, but are not limited to, posting multiple messages with no text in the body, or posting many follow-ups to messages with no new text. Messages may not be canceled, except by the author or by official newsgroup moderators performing their duties.
Forging, altering or removing header information is prohibited. This includes attempting to circumvent the approval process for posting to a moderated newsgroup.
SKT reserves the right to discontinue access to any Usenet newsgroup at any time for any reason.
The Usenet news service included with a Service account is provided for interactive use by the subscriber, using a commonly-available NNTP client such as Outlook Express News. Non-interactive clients that download Usenet articles in bulk are prohibited.
15. Conflict. . In the event of a conflict between the Subscriber Agreement and this Policy, the terms of the Subscriber Agreement will prevail.
16. Notification of Changes from SKT. SKTC.net email is the only notification of changes and potential service disruptions the customer will receive. Unchecked email uses disk space and will be deleted if not checked by the customer. Customer will be notified 3 times over a period of three (3) weeks before mail box is cleaned out.
17. How to Contact SKT. For any questions regarding this AUP, complaints of violations, or cancellation notices, please contact SKT at one of the following:
E-mail: abuse@SKTC.net
Phone: 1-888-758-8976 or visit http://www.SKTC.net/ and check under “Contact”
U.S. Mail: P. O. Box 800, Clearwater, Ks. 67026

SKT Internet Abuse Information

Please use the information provided below to contact our Abuse Department.
The email address to send abuse issues to is abuse@SKTC.net. These are the basic submission guidelines:
· Please do not attach files to your email. For security reasons, we will not open attachments. Please provide us with evidence by copying and pasting from your log files or email headers.
· Please do not send us emails larger than 64 KB (kilobytes) in size (approximately 800 lines).
· Send emails in plain text format. HTML and Rich Text are difficult for us to process.
· Please take the time to remove extraneous information (such as non-SKT ip addresses) from your report.
· Do not include trace routes, ping results, or WHOIS information.
Please note:
· Due to the high volume of email we receive, we cannot provide a personal response to each report we get. Please do not interpret a lack of response as a lack of action.
· Our strict compliance with our privacy policies and applicable legal requirements prevent us from revealing any personally identifiable information about a customer without proper legal documentation.
· Similarly, we cannot disclose any specific action taken against a customer as a result of an abuse complaint.

Network Management and Bandwidth Information

What is “Network Management”?

Network Management is our ongoing effort to maintain and improve your access to the Internet. Based on customer feedback and planned growth models for the SKT Internet service, we are continuing to take additional steps to ensure that all customers share in an appropriate amount of the network resources. We have incorporated three initiatives into our network planning:
1. Network Management
The initiative will reduce the high and low “bursts” that are inherent in any unmanaged network and, instead, maintain a more reliable, consistent speed that meets or exceeds the speeds 99% of our customers currently enjoy. By implementing network management, customers will notice an improvement in the consistency of speed and of the SKT Internet service.
2. Monitoring Network Abuse
For some time now, we’ve been monitoring our network to identify and notify customers who are performing operations outside the SKT Internet Acceptable Use Policyl and utilizing irregularly high amounts of bandwidth.
3. Upgrading Infrastructure
SKT is investing in significant network and equipment improvements, including capacity upgrades to its Internet routing, server and network equipment. The new servers are designed to ensure consistent, reliable performance as our customer base grows. We’re also upgrading our entire cable infrastructure to meet the new U.S. standards in delivering cable-based Internet services. This means that, as future, “next-generation” interactive services are offered, you’ll be able to enjoy them as a SKT customer.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Why are you implementing network management changes now?
These are only three new initiatives of many to our ongoing efforts to improve our network. We continue to proactively monitor the performance of our network in order to implement such upgrades.
Why does my server at home appear to be slow when it is accessed from the outside?
SKT Internet is a residential service designed for you and your family’s use of the Internet. As per the Acceptable Use Policy and subscriber agreement, a residential user may not run programs or servers which provide network services to others via the SKT Internet service.
The more customers you put on, the slower it would get! Is the service slowing down?
The SKT Internet service is not slowing down. All networks need to be managed. We are proactively taking the necessary steps to make sure that you receive a consistently fast experience. We will continue to proactively monitor and upgrade our network.
Are you monitoring my emails and/or my traffic?
No. SKT takes privacy very seriously. We do not monitor an individual’s emails or traffic. The exception is that in certain instances, we may be required by law to monitor an individual’s e-mail traffic (but not the content of any e-mails) pursuant to a government subpoena or warrant. We do however, monitor network traffic volumes which helps to alert us of possible network bottlenecks.
Unsolicited Email (Spam)
Many businesses seek to use bulk email as an inexpensive way of reaching potential customers. Unfortunately, much of this mail is unwanted or unsolicited (not requested by you). SKT Internet realizes you have concerns about receiving unwanted email.

To help protect our customers from receiving large amounts of unsolicited commercial email, we have created “black lists” of locations known to be used for sending this type of mail. Any mail originating from one of those black list locations is rejected before it reaches your email box. We have also placed a block on our network to help prevent our customers’ addresses from inadvertently being used to send unsolicited mail.
“Spammers” generally get their lists from several places. Searching public bulletin boards, web directories and newsgroup posts for valid email names, and preparing a list of common names (like jim, joe, jane...) then adding the @SKTC.net address to them is two of the most common. One of the ways customers remain on mailing lists and get spread is when someone receiving a spam uses the “reply to be removed” function. This actually confirms your address works to spammers and opens the floodgates. SKT remains committed to keeping your email addresses private.
If you receive unsolicited commercial email, you may report the user to the Internet Service Provider where the message originated. There are several websites that detail how to determine where a message originated from and some will assist you with reporting them to the proper providers.
SKT Internet customers are restricted from sending unsolicited commercial email by our acceptable use policy. Please see the policy for complete details and potential penalties. Please send all reports of alleged service abuse by SKT Internet customers to abuse@SKTC.net.