Usenet Terms of Use

By using our Usenet Services you are bound by the following

• You must not use any proxying or News Server software to access 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 are not accepted on this server.
  This is a text based service only

• Maximum article (post/message) size is 96KB.

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

• You can not post more than 1000 articles per hour, including cross posts.

• After 50 posts within a 30 minute period, all subsequent posts will be slowed.
  This helps prevent spambots or malware infected PC from abusing our systems.

• Maximum of 4 simultaneous connections per host.
  No need to be greedy, we impose no maximum number of daily connections or usage time.

• The current daily data transfer limit for readers is 1Gb.
  With the average full article including multiple non trimmed quotes averaging 85 lines and 7kb, that's about 144,000 full header and body 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.

• No cancel messages, it's rare any News Server honors these due to long term abuse.

Privacy

• We understand you will likely 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 hostmark, such as invalid.lan You must not use any valid Email address, hostname, or domain name, unless it's your own.

• The headers X-Sender, X-X-Sender, and X-Trace are suppressed, or stripped out.

• The NNTP-Posting-Host header is replaced by news.ausics.net protecting your IP address.

• 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 deal with breaches of 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.

• 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 GROUP commands, because debug logs grow very big very quickly, it is rare - a last resort actually, that this is enabled at all, and when enabled never for longer than 15 minutes due to the huge log size.