The following Policy contains rules that govern your use of Cobalt Network’s services (Service) and forms part of the Terms and Conditions of acceptable use of the Service. This Policy may be amended from time to time. It is your responsibility to review this policy at regular intervals so you will be aware of any changes. An up-to-date copy of the current policy will be maintained on our website at:

http://www.cobaltnetwork.co.uk/?page_id=155

Applying the Acceptable Use Policy

Depending upon the nature of the service you have selected:

• You may be setting up a website or websites to be run on either your server or our server (Website)
• You may be using our hardware, software, network and/or telecommunications to use the Service (Our Equipment)
• You may be providing your own hardware, software, network and/or telecommunications to use the Service (Your Equipment)

This Policy applies to all of the services you select.

Restrictions on the Service

You are not permitted to have illegal material on your Website, link to content that is illegal or to allow Our Equipment or Your Equipment to be used for any illegal activity. You risk being prosecuted if you or any of your customers publish illegal material in this or any other country.

You must ensure that your Website, Our Equipment and Your Equipment are not used to incite disorder, publish, disseminate or promote any material which encourages anything which is in any way pornographic, obscene, defamatory, menacing, offensive or in any way unlawful.

Neither you nor your customers is permitted to publish any content, or link to any content, in which you or they (as applicable) do not own the right, without the prior permission of the owner of the relevant right.

You must not use or allow your Website, Our Equipment or Your Equipment to be used to transmit or post any material which may cause offence to others on the grounds of gender, race or religion or which may cause annoyance or offence to any person.

All customers are required to accept email addressed to postmaster@yourdomain-name. Customers will be deemed to have read any and all such email. Cobalt Network may take action on the basis of this assumption.

Unacceptable Activities

You must not use or allow your Website, Our Equipment or Your Equipment to be used to distribute or promote any of the following:

• the sending of unsolicited emails or forged messages or spoofing.
• software which may be used for port-scanning, virus creation, packet sniffing, smurfing, hacking, phishing, Trojan horses or any other illegal or anti-social activity.
• any activity which interferes with systems or Network’ ability to operate including denial of service attacks in any form.
• lists of email addresses (unless all of the addressees on the list have given their explicit permission).
• the processing of personal data which does not comply with all applicable data protection and privacy laws and regulations.
• links to any website that host illegal content.
• content designed to offend or cause needless anxiety to others.

Security

You must not do anything, or allow any third party to do anything, which will compromise the security of Cobalt Network’s equipment and you are therefore required to install and use appropriate virus checking software and security devices and to impose this same requirement on any of your own customers that use your Website or Your Equipment.

Data stored on your Website, Our Equipment or Your Equipment is not guaranteed to be backed up. It is the responsibility of the customer to ensure that they have backups of important data.

Software and OS (operating system) updates are the responsibility of the customer, unless otherwise agreed with Cobalt Network. If Our Equipment or Your Equipment is ‘compromised’ (hacked) due to the failure to keep the software or the OS up-to-date, we reserve the right to charge £100 for the re-installation of the operating system, together with any additional charges for the re-installation of your Website and abuse of your agreed bandwidth.

Passwords

You must not share, or disclose to any third party, any passwords provided by Cobalt Network. Such passwords are your responsibility. ALL passwords used on your Website, Our Equipment or Your Equipment must be secure.

Secure passwords are a minimum of 6 characters long, contain letters of mixed case and non-letter characters, and cannot be found in whole or in part, in normal or reverse order, in any dictionary of words or names in any language.

Cobalt Network may monitor the security of your passwords at any time. If you or your customers have an insecure password, you will be directed to change the password to one that complies with the above rules. We reserve the right to suspend, restrict or terminate your access to the Service if either you or a third party accessing your Website, Our Equipment or Your Equipment repeatedly choose insecure passwords.

If Our Equipment or Your Equipment is ‘compromised’ (hacked) due to the use of an insecure script or password, we reserve the right to charge £100 for the re-installation of the operating system, together with any additional charges for the re-installation of your Website and abuse of your agreed bandwidth.

Banned Scripts

Currently the following scripts are not allowed on our servers:

• UltimateBBS (all versions)
• Ikonboard (all versions)
• IRC Egg Drops
• Proxy Servers
• nph-proxy
• The Anonymizer
• any soap mailers
• web analytic scripts (AWStats can be provided by Cobalt Network)
• BigNoseBird formmail (all versions)
• Tim Stevenson formmail (all versions)
• Matt Wright formmail (all versions)

If you’re in doubt about a script, please contact us for confirmation.

Cobalt Network’s Rights

Compliance with this Policy is a contractual requirement. We reserve the right to suspend, restrict or terminate your access to the Service if either you or a third party accessing your Website or Your Equipment causes, or is likely to cause, our Service to be interrupted, damaged or impaired.

Offending material may be removed without prior notice. We may retain a copy of such material for our records.

Cobalt Network, at its discretion, may run manual or automatic systems to determine compliance with this AUP. Customers are deemed to have granted permission for this limited intrusion onto their Website, Our Equipment or Your Equipment.

We reserve the right to forward offending material to the police or other regulatory authorities in the event that we are requested to do so or where a complaint is made about your use of the Service and is deemed by us to be inconsistent with this Policy.

Complaints

If you consider that one of our customers is in breach of this policy, please send details of the incident to us at:

abuse@cobaltnetwork.co.uk

Please provide as much information as possible including the date, time, time-zone and IP address if applicable, together with all other relevant information. These should be provided in plain text within the email and not as attachments.

We will deal with all complaints received and take appropriate action where your complaint is upheld. Please allow up to two working days for a response.

Acceptable Use Policy – January 2009