Usenet Terms of Use

By using our Usenet Service you are bound by the following

• This service is provided free of charge to Australian Residential, Mobile, and Educational facility/campus users. It may not be available to those using a Hosting, VPN, or VPS Service. This service is provided as-is, without any assistance (financial or otherwise) or co-operation from any ISP, RSP or other third party, as such, we are under no obligation to grant access and reserve the right not to do so where we may deny access to an IP, IP range, or in rare cases an entire AS (ISP) network at any time without warning.

  Our access lists are manually added from BGP routing tables, most ISP/RSP's have been included, as you can appreciate this manual process is tedious and time consuming, so is not done often, and it is possible that because of this, new Service Providers may not have been picked up, and new ranges of IP's from existing providers may also not be included, in most cases when brought to our attention, we will access our resources to obtain their prefixes and include them.

• You must not use any proxying, caching or News Server software with this service.
  If you have such requirements, please see our peering page

• HTML posts are not accepted on this server.
  Most Usenet servers do not accept HTML posts, and we are no exception.

• Binary posts (files) are not accepted on this server.
  This is a text based service only, allowing us to have long article retention periods.

• Maximum single article post size is 128KB.
  No single text discussion article should be near this big, if it is, learn to trim quotes

• You can not post more than 200 articles per hour, excluding cross posts.

• You can not post more than 500 articles per hour, including cross posts.

• After 100 posts within a 30 minute period, all subsequent posts will be slowed.
  This helps prevent spambots or malware infected machine from abusing usenet.

• Maximum of 8 simultaneous connections per host. (increased from 4. updated Feb, 2025)
  No need to be greedy, we impose no maximum daily usage limits apart from total data Transferred.

• The current daily data transfer limit for readers is 1Gb.
  Seem small? Well a typical article size with trimmed quotes averages 85 lines, or about 7kb in size, that's still a whopping 144,000 odd articles a day.

• Any interference with the system's integrity is forbidden

• This service must only be used for lawful purposes and by use of this service you are bound by the laws of, and submit exclusively to, the jurisdiction of the Courts of The State of Queensland, in The Commonwealth of Australia.

• Your use of this service must not contain or reference material that is deceptive, fraudulent, malicious, harmful or discriminatory.

• You must not use this service to bully, taunt, harass, intimidate, or threaten any person(s).

• It is prohibited to use this service to spam. Australia has, and enforces under Federal Law, The Spam Act (2003), where substantial penalties exist.

• We do not process cancel messages.
  it's rare a News Server will honor these due to long term abuse.

• We do not process NOCEM messages.
  it's rare News Servers will honor these also due to abuse.

• We do not process supercede messages.
  it's rare a News Server will honor these due to long term abuse.
  Think before sending. Update by replying to your original article.

Privacy

• We understand you will want to protect yourself from spam bots, address harvesters, and other miscreants, it's acceptable to use a From address other than your own legitimate addresses only if using a junk style hostmark, eg: invalid.lan. You must not use any valid Email address, hostname, or domain name, unless it is your own.
  • Contrary to some misguided beliefs, using unresolvable From Addresses in usenet will not impede your ability to post to moderated news groups - we do it all the time. The only drawback may be if a moderator rejects your article, you may not get a reason on a rare as hens teeth occasion they actually bothered to send one in the first place.

• The headers X-Sender, X-X-Sender, and X-Trace are disabled.

• The NNTP-Posting-Host header address is set to news.ausics.net instead of your actual IP Address ².

• The hostname used in your newsreader may in some cases be used in the Message-ID, this may expose your PC name to the wider Internet community, it's fairly safe though if using a junk hostname like invalid.lan, this is common of Usenet. The Message-ID header is used for followups and referencing, but it is a protocol violation for Servers to obfuscate it as it affects your readers ability to track related posts, and would allow duplicates, so it's up to the newsreader client software to obfuscate it. Some readers, like Pine, may have a scramble-message-id setting in options to allow for anonymity, nearly all though allow you to use a non-resolving hostname to protect your identity.

Logging

• The C.A.C. has confirmed to us that Usenet is not covered by the Australian Data Retention Legislation.
  We are therefor under no obligation to collect or retain any meta-data information of those using The Service other than what we have always done allowing us to enforce our TOU.

• We do log the IP address of a readers initial connection to show who has been granted or denied access.
  These logs are kept for a minimum of 90 days then progressively rotated out.

• ² We do log the IP address, Message-ID, Subject and From meta data of all locally posted articles.
  This is no different to sending an Email, an obvious step we need to take to identify and block spammers.
  These logs are kept for a minimum of 90 days then progressively rotated out.

• We do not log accesses to, searches for, subscriptions to, or un-subscriptions from, groups. ¹

• We do not log searches for, or reads of, articles. ¹

  ¹ This is by default, the single rare exception to this is if a fault develops and we can not identify the cause, we may then place the server briefly into debug mode, which does log most commands, because debug logs grow very big very quickly, it is rare - a last resort actually, that this is enabled at all, but when enabled never for longer than 15 minutes due to the huge detailed log size.