Vanade.com Acceptable Use/Terms of Use
ALL Anonymous users: Warning
This server is a private machine for the usage by only the owner and friends of the owner. All other, specifically anonymous usage is prohibited and vehemently denied. Some data and resources are made available for the general public but can be revoked or changed at any time. All accesses to this machine may be monitored and/or logged for any use the owner can conceive of. While the confidentiality of any data collected is generally adhered, many exceptional cases of unusual tampering or hacking may cause the data to be used to ridicule or cease connections to this server. Any access to this machine indicates consent to this logging. No access is allowed to this machine unless it's of original intended access.
Remember: I do not get paid to keep this server up. I actually have to pay time and money to keep this server up and running smoothly. Why should I have to pay to keep YOUR data utilization online? If you want to pay for it, then by all means, go for it and paypal me. No? Didn't think so.
Bandwidth usage
This machine is of limited bandwidth, and is thus easily overwhelmed. Thus, as an anonymous user, you may not use bandwidth or disk space provided on this server for your personal use, unless an agreement is made beforehand. Due to the high cost of network connectivity and capacity, as well as server maintainance, all network and storage space on this server must help the financial burden of this connection.All other usage of bandwidth, regardless for private or commercial, any gains including but not limited to eBay or hosting an avatar for a free public site not approved by the owner, is expressibly prohibited without a preexisting contract. The biggest hog of network resources appears to be the serving of photographs. To limit consumption of my resource, remote website designers may not link to pictures on this server without expressed consent from owner of this machine. Linking to web pages as reference is OK except where prohibited or forbidden. Simply put: Any user of external web pages must link to a text document, not automatically choose to load any binary file (including photographs) from this site unless a preexisting contract agreement is in place.
You may not access any protected resources without permission. Using my machine for spam, harassment (including denial of service), or other unauthorized access is prohibited. All anonymous requests for user accounts will be denied. To get an account, you must ask the sysadmin IN PERSON. And even then, such people must be a personal friend of the owner to get an account.
Rationale
These restrictions are in place due to the high probability of network performance degradation. If you -must- have this site to host data, hosting price contracts start at around $40/month for a limited amount of bandwidth to purchase a second dedicated DSL line or cable modem link to do your work. Sorry, no free lunches here - I do want my network to be running as fast as it can for my personal usage, not some random person who links my server.Linking to this server is entirely the linker's responsibility. Content on this server may change at any time to anything possible.
Example: Linking to the DECstation web page
<a href="http://vanade.com/~blc/decstation.html">is acceptable. This page may actually include a pictures described below, but it includes text. For the most part, I have no issues with deep linking, as for the most part, deep linked resources are complete and contain links to higher level documents. However, a direct link to the photographs of the DECstation via
<img src="http://vanade.com/~blc/DS3100/diablo02.jpg">is prohibited. Some call this "hotlinking" or "image stealing" (but on a bandwidth basis). If caught, the picture could be replaced with another, incorrect picture1. This depends on the intent of the reference page, if I can find it. Most likely the picture will be removed (404) or substituted with another smaller picture to limit bandwidth consumption.
Notice you may be using my network and/or computer without knowing about it. If you do note, please tell the web designer of the web page that's linking to the pictures on my website to STOP ABUSING MY NETWORK, especially if it's a high traffic site like MySpace, Wordpress, or Slashdot.
Referrers and wpicture.cgi
Most of the high bandwidth directories on my server are now protected from hotlinking by wpicture.cgi, a custom script. It will check whether or not to transmit the complete file or an shortened version. As wpicture.cgi uses referer information to determine whether or not an access was sourced from a local web page, all accesses by people who don't return referrer information, whether or not they were legitimate, as improper. This is because there's really no simple way to tell if the web page that referred the resource was indeed from this site - thus, you will see the same reduced bandwidth image as if you were refered to this machine by a non-approved site. Please turn on referers to stop this from happening. If you must turn off referrers, note that the workaround to give a fixed bogus referring page will become arbitrarily difficult. Don't bother trying to find a generic system to "fix" this "problem" - the machine could always check local documents for such links and not bother with remote sites (automatically failing them). Leave it as returning empty entries and continue to grab the low bandwidth, watermarked images, or simply turn/leave referrers on. I'm sorry, it's not those people who don't return referers as the culprit, but without the information, there's no way to tell.As an alternative, you can pass the argument "setcookie" to wpicture.cgi. This will grant your browser a cookie to temporarily bypass wpicture.cgi's picture recompaction. You will need to refresh this cookie every so often as downloading the full sized picture still isn't the solution to help my situation out, but I allow it since it's only a small exception. You may also pass "setmax=nnn" to set the maximum x-dimension to view, but this will give possibly larger but highly compressed images and results are not guaranteed or defined.
Secure Shell Daemon
Anonymous and unknown users may not use the secure shell daemon for any purpose. Use of which is considered to be illicit use of computational resources.
Afterthoughts : Private Use Only
Send email to sysadmin on this server with your proposal, if you wish to get additional details about hosting contracts. Send mail for any other comments if you wish. I'm sorry, I really do not want to do your menial sysadmin work2, hosting/maintaining my own machines and services are enough trouble as it is. Remember, keeping a machine up 24/7 is not an easy task - I have to deal with viruses, security attacks, backups, upgrades, and more. Please don't piggyback, I do notice the weight and refuse to carry your load.Don't forget that security and maintenance work is a large burden on time, enough so that even by-profession sysadmins refuse to run their own servers at home. Vanade.com is not an public or paid internet service provider and does not wish to function as such.
Don't be/cry like this guy: webmunchkin.jpg. That has to be the funniest mail I've ever seen.
Special Class: Authorized Users
Non-anonymous users have to follow a strict guide. Normally these rules are automatically followed as there's trust that these things won't occur. For anonymous users that would like to know policy and how to report issues, it's mostly written at the Terms of Service page.
1I have replaced pictures of cars and computers with incorrect or defective machines for piggybackers who wanted to sell their machines on eBay, which dilutes the value of their auctions or opens up their auctions for fraud. This message claims no responsibility for such consequences, the warning is here.
I've replaced a picture someone was using as an avatar for a popular forum with hardcore pornography with text words overlaid indicating the issue at hand - please don't make my computer slow.
However, with the current wpicture
system, a more amicable and automated solution is now available.
The watermarked, low
bandwidth version of pictures both reduce my bandwidth requirements and warns
of the issue I have with hotlinking. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
2Please use something like
flickr,
photobucket, or
imageshack, not my machine.
There are plenty of free, high bandwidth
sites out there. My machine has no bandwidth and surely can't be free,
so please don't use my computer unless you help pay for it.
Report network abuse (spam, zombie reports, etc.) to: abuse at mail vanade com
Report general questions, etc. to: blc at mail vanade com