Acceptable Use Policy

Introduction

The Acceptable Use Police (“AUP”) is an attempt to:

• ensure compliance with the relevant laws of the Republic;
• specify to Clients and users of Iteology’s service what is considered unacceptable use of the service;
• protect the integrity of Iteology’s network and the ISP’s we are partnered with; and
• inform, and where possible, enact the undertaking such prohibited activities.

Iteology suggests that the Client read all our policies and terms thoroughly and direct any queries to us here should there be and queries as they may contain number of legal obligations which the Client needs to be aware of.It is import to acknowledge that Iteology respects the rights of Iteology’s Clients and users of Iteology’s services to freedom of speech and expression, access to information, privacy, human dignity, religion, belief and opinion.

Unacceptable Use

Iteology's services may only be used for:

• lawful purposes and activities.

Iteology prohibits any use of its Services including (but not limited to):

• the transmission, storage and distribution of any material or content using Iteology’s network that violates any law or regulation of the Republic. This includes, but is not limited to:


• Any violation of local and international laws prohibiting child pornography, obscenity, discrimination (including racial, gender or religious slurs) and hate speech, or speech designed to incite violence or hatred, or threats to cause bodily harm.
• Any activity designed to defame, abuse, stalk, harass or physically threaten any individual in the Republic or beyond its borders; including any attempt to link to, post, transmit or otherwise distribute any inappropriate or defamatory material.
• Any violation of Intellectual Property laws including materials protected by local and international copyright, trademarks and trade secrets.
• Any violation of another's right to privacy, including any effort to collect personal data of third parties without their consent.
• Any fraudulent activity whatsoever, including dubious financial practices, such as pyramid schemes; the impersonation of another client without their consent; or any attempt to enter into a transaction with Iteology on behalf of another client without their consent.
• Any violation of the exchange control laws of the Republic.
• Any activity that results in the sale, transmission or distribution of pirated or illegal software.
• Any activity which threatens the functioning, security and/or integrity of Iteology's network or that of our partners is unacceptable. This includes:


• Any efforts to attempt to gain unlawful and unauthorised access to the network or circumvent any of the security measures established by Iteology or its partners for this goal.
• Any effort to use Iteology's equipment or that of our partners to circumvent the user authentication or security of any host, network or account ("cracking" or "hacking").
• Forging of any TCP/IP packet headers (spoofing) or any part of the headers of an email or a newsgroup posting.
• Any effort 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.
• Any activity which threatens to disrupt the service offered by Iteology or our partners through "denial of service attacks"; flooding of a network, or overloading a service or any unauthorised probes ("scanning" or "nuking") of others' networks.
• Any activity which in any way threatens the security of the network by knowingly posting, transmitting, linking to or otherwise distributing any information or software which contains a virus, trojan horse, worm, malware, botnet or other harmful, destructive or disruptive component.
• Any unauthorised monitoring of data or traffic on the network without Iteology's explicit, written consent.
• Running services and applications with known vulnerabilities and weaknesses, e.g. insufficient anti-automation attacks, any traffic amplification attacks, including recursive DNS attacks, SMTP relay attacks.
• Failing to respond adequately to a denial of service attack (DOS / DDOS).

Dialup, ADSL and Fibre Thresholds

Each of Iteology’s bandwidth services may by subject to Uncapped Monthly Thresholds, Throttling, Shaping and Bandwidth Priority depending on the packages acquired.
These thresholds, unless otherwise stated in your agreement if so reached may affect your speeds which could be subject to throttling if the network is under strain.

Our Capped, Premium and Business Uncapped packages, have no usage thresholds.

The packages are subject to throttling and/or shaping should:

• A user have reached their monthly threshold and the network is under strain;
• Should the network be under strain packages then some or all packages may be subject to shaping of downloads;
• Peer to peer traffic is detected that is related to downloading of illegal content.

Monthly Thresholds limits where they are applicable are available in writing on request.

Spam and Unsolicited Bulk Mail

Iteology regards all unsolicited bulk email whether sent with a commercial in nature or not, as spam, except where:

• Where parties already maintain a relationship prior to mail being sent by one party to another and the subject matter of the message(s) is related to such relationship;
• Explicit consent of the receiving party has been given to the sending party;
• Receiving party agreed to receive bulk mail which they would expect to receive as a result of an existing relationship.

It is further worth mentioning that the following is also a breach of our AUP:

• Sending unsolicited bulk mail for marketing or any other purposes (political, religious or commercial) to people who have not consented to receiving such mail;
• Using any part of Iteology’s or our partner’s infrastructure for the purpose of unsolicited bulk mail, whether sending, receiving, bouncing, or facilitating such mail;
• Operating or maintaining mailing lists without the express permission of all recipients listed.
  In particular, Iteology does not permit the sending of "opt-out" mail, where the recipient must opt out of receiving mail which they did not request. For all lists, the sender must maintaining meaningful records of when and how each recipient requested mail.
  Iteology will also monitor Clients deemed to be operating “cleaning lists”, which is using illegally obtained email addresses but removing addresses as complaints arise.
  Should Iteology, at its discretion, believe that this is the case, it will be treated as SPAM;
• Failing to promptly remove from lists invalid or undeliverable addresses or addresses of unwilling recipients or a recipient who has indicated s/he wishes to be removed from such list, or failing to provide the recipient with a facility to opt-out;
• Using Iteology's service to collect responses from unsolicited email sent from accounts on other Internet hosts or e-mail services that violate this AUP or the AUP of any other Internet service provider. Advertising any facility on Iteology’s infrastructure in unsolicited bulk mail (e.g. a web site advertised in spam).
• Including Iteology's name (or that of any of our partners) in the header or by listing an IP address that belongs to Iteology (or our partners) in any unsolicited email whether sent through Iteology's network or not.
• Failure to secure a Client's mail server against public relay as a protection to themselves and the broader Internet community. Public relay occurs when a mail server is accessed by a third party from another domain and utilised to deliver mails, without the authority or consent of the owner of the mail-server. Mail servers that are unsecured against public relay often become abused by unscrupulous operators for spam delivery and upon detection such delivery must be disallowed.
  Iteology reserves the right to examine users' mail servers to confirm that no mails are being sent from the mail server through public relay and the results of such checks can be made available to the user. Iteology also reserves the right to examine the mail servers of any users using Iteology's mail servers for "smarthosting" (when the user relays its mail via a Iteology mail server to a mail server of its own or vice versa) or similar services at any time to ensure that the servers are properly secured against public relay. All relay checks will be done in strict accordance with Iteology's Privacy Policy and the laws of South Africa.

Where the above mentioned is not followed, Iteology reserves our right to take action in whatever manner we are allowed to against any user engaging in any of the following unacceptable practices:

Users Outside of South Africa

• Where any user resides outside of the Republic, permanently or temporarily, such user will be subject to the laws of the country in which s/he is currently resident and which apply to the user.
• On presentation of a legal order to do so, or under obligation through an order for mutual foreign legal assistance, Iteology will assist foreign law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in the investigation and prosecution of a crime committed using Iteology's resources, including the provisioning of all personal identifiable data.

Hosting

While Iteology endeavours not to charge for bandwidth (web traffic) on most of our platforms for hosting where the hosting is seen to not use more than the average usage of all our hosted services, the client may be responsible for the bandwidth charges dependent on their needs. Should a customer’s hosted service cost Iteology bandwidth that is not average or normal to our collective services, the client will be responsible to pay for the excess bandwidth used.

With this in mind, Iteology expects that the use of our hosting is kept virus free, security managed, reasonable and responsible, as determined at Iteology's discretion. Should we find that our hosting environment is being abused or is compromised in any manner, Iteology reserves the right to discontinue services of the client without notice and will not be held responsible for any consequences that will arise from such actions. Any fees that are incurred in such findings will be the responsibility of the client.

Where a package does not cater for the client’s needs, Iteology may increase the cost and/or change package of the customer with written notice. Unless otherwise specified disk space on our platforms may only be used for content the service was signed up for. Unauthorised storage or distribution of copyrighted materials is prohibited by any means.

All our solutions from time to time may require that Iteology (or our partners) implement security updates, software patches and other updates or upgrades from time to time, to maintain the best performance, at their sole discretion. These updates or upgrades may be software, hardware or change of services completely. Iteology is under no obligation to effect such upgrades, or to rectify any impact such changes could potentially have to Hosting Clients. Such updates may be implemented without warning or in writing.

Iteology will not be liable or responsible for the backing up, restoration or loss of data under any circumstances. Clients are solely responsible for ensuring their data is regularly backed up and for restoring such backups in the event of data loss or corruption.

Iteology explicitly prohibits Clients from doing the following on hosting platforms administered by Iteology:

• Running services or applications that are not production-ready or which could cause harm or damage to the device is running on or where it could affect memory or CPU usage that could implicate the device integrity. This includes storing or running back-door shells, mass mailing scripts, proxy servers, web spiders, phishing content, or peer-to-peer software;
• Running services applications that have no security that could compromise the device, server or the network;
• Generating significant traffic which can be avoided. If such is unavoidable, the client is to inform Iteology so that the right package or solution is implemented to allow for such traffic to be catered for;
• Storing malicious content of any kind including viruses, malware or links to such kind of content;
• Dominating server resources, including CPU time, memory, network and disk bandwidth.
• Running Torrents for download, Streaming Services, Seed Servers and/or TOR (or other Online Anonymity Services).
• Otherwise circumventing the Acceptable Use Policy or intended use of the product.

Protection of Minors

Iteology prohibits Clients from using Iteology's service to harm or attempt to harm a minor, including, but not limited to, by hosting, possessing, disseminating, distributing or transmitting material that is unlawful, including child pornography and cyber bullying.
Iteology prohibits Clients from using Iteology’s service to host sexually explicit or pornographic material of any nature.

Privacy and Confidentiality

Iteology respects the privacy and confidentiality of Iteology’s Clients and users of Iteology’s service. Please review Iteology’s Privacy Policy which details how Iteology collects and uses personal information gathered in the course of operating its Services.

User Responsibilities

Clients are responsible for any misuse of Iteology's services that occurs through the Client's account. It is the Client's responsibility to ensure that unauthorised persons do not gain access to or misuse Iteology's service.
Iteology urges Clients not to reply to unsolicited mail or "spam", not to click on any suggested links provided in the unsolicited mail. Doing so remains the sole responsibility of the Client and Iteology cannot be held liable for the Client being placed on any bulk mailing lists as a result.

Where the Client has authorised a minor to use any of the Iteology's services or access its websites, the Client accepts that as the parent/legal guardian of that minor, the Client is fully responsible for: the online conduct of such minor, controlling the minor's access to and use of any services or websites, and the consequences of any misuse by the minor.
Should the client suffer any damage through our network or that of our partners regardless how it was caused including our own negligence, Iteology will not be held responsible. It is therefore recommended that the client follow the recommendations of this policy.

Complaints Procedure

Complaints relating to the violation of this AUP should be submitted in writing by using our contacts page. Complaints must be substantiated, and unambiguously state the nature of the problem, and its connection to Iteology’s network and services.

Action Following Breach of the AUP

Upon receipt of a complaint, or having become aware of an incident, Iteology may, in its sole and reasonably-exercised discretion take any of the following steps:

• Warn the Client and/or suspend the Client account and/or revoke or cancel the Client’s Service access privileges completely;
• Where it is found that abuse stemming from a third party, inform the third party’s network administrator of the incident and request the network administrator or network owner to address the incident in terms of this AUP and/or the ISPA Code of Conduct (if applicable);
• In severe cases suspend access of the third party’s entire network until abuse can be prevented by appropriate means;
• In all cases, charge the offending parties for administrative costs as well as for machine and human time lost due to the incident;
• Assist other networks or website administrators in investigating credible suspicions of any activity listed in this AUP;
• Institute civil or criminal proceedings where the client or the party infringing the AUP will be held responsible for all legal fees;
• Share information concerning the incident with other Internet access providers, or publish the information, and/or make available the users' details to law enforcement agencies; and/or
• suspend or terminate the Service as provided for in the Agreement.

Final Policy Notes

• This policy applies to and will be enforced for intended and unintended (e.g., viruses, worms, malicious code, or otherwise unknown causes) prohibited usage.
• Reservation and Non Waiver of Rights.
• Iteology reserves the right to amend or alter this policy at any time, and without notice to the Client.
• Iteology reserves the right to take action against any individuals, companies or organizations that violate the AUP, or engage in any illegal or unlawful activity while accessing Iteology’s services, to the fullest extent of the law.
• Iteology reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to act against other types of abuse not listed in this document and to investigate or prevent illegal activities being committed over Iteology’s network or that of our partners.
• Iteology does not waive its right to enforcement of this AUP at any time, or prejudice its right to take subsequent action, should Iteology fail, neglect or elect not to enforce a breach of the AUP at any time.