1. Introduction This Policy sets out how the Services may be used and any restrictions on your use of the Services. Many of the guidelines will be obvious, however, we set them out here so that there can be no confusion or doubt over what is or is not acceptable.
You should check this User Policy regularly as we may change it to take on board new issues that may arise in connection with your use of the Services or the way we provide the Services. The most up to date version of the User Policy will apply to your use of the Services, even if you have not read the updated version.
If we have reasonable grounds to suspect that you are in breach of this User Policy or any other terms on which we provide services to you, or you do anything which would put us in breach of our statutory or other obligations, we reserve the right to suspend or terminate your access to the Services without liability to you. We will give you notice of suspension or termination as soon as it is practical to do so.
2. General Use
As a general principle, you must not use the Services in any way that is unlawful or illegal or in a way that affects the enjoyment of other users of the Services.
Nobody may use the Services, either directly or indirectly:
(a) to transmit, publish, link to, make available or receive any material which is defamatory, offensive, abusive, obscene, indecent, racist, harmful, threatening or menacing; or
(b) in a way that will be a breach of any person’s rights, including a breach of confidence, copyright, privacy or any other rights; or
(c) in breach of any instructions we have given you under the Agreement; or
(d) in a way that is associated with a criminal offence; or
(e) in a way that does not conform with the acceptable use or anti-spam policies of any connected networks, the standards of the Advertising Standards Authority, professional publishing standards or any Internet standards; or
(f) to infringe by the use of any domain name, mail box name or otherwise upon the rights of any other person in a trade mark or name whether in statute or common law; or
(g) to send email or any other type of electronic message with the intention or result of affecting the performance or functionality of any computer facilities; or
(h) in excess of “normal use” bandwidth limits set out in this section.
3. Content
It is a well known fact that the Internet contains material that is inappropriate for minors and may cause offence to others. We do not censor or restrict access to any material or information on the Internet unless required to do so by a competent authority. We will however refer any complaints to the Internet Watch Foundation for further investigation.
The TV Internet and Interactive Services include settings that allow you to control access to certain sites, newsgroups and chatrooms. Details of how to use these settings can be found in the help screens. It is your responsibility to determine restrictions on access. The effectiveness of the settings depends on how you use and monitor them. We make no guarantees that the settings will filter out all inappropriate material. Use of the Services by minors should be supervised and you should always bear in mind the inherent nature of the Internet.
4. Unacceptable Behaviour
Nobody may use the Service, either directly or indirectly:
(a) to threaten, harass or cause distress, annoyance or discomfort to any other person or entity;
(b) to intentionally disrupt or adversely affect any other person or entity’s access to or use of the Internet or any features which form part of the Internet;
(c) to transmit or cause to be transmitted any advertising, promotional or other materials that are unsolicited (commonly known as “spam”);
(d) to transmit or cause to be transmitted mail bombs, chain letters or pyramid schemes.
5. Security
One of the main dangers when using the internet is the possibility of someone gaining access to your PC (or any other device you use to access the Internet) and the information you keep on it. To help prevent this we strongly recommend you use a firewall. A firewall is a product which helps protect your machine from unauthorised access. No firewall can guarantee security, but an adequate firewall will increase the security of your machine and help protect your anonymity. We do not provide firewalls ourselves, but you will find further information on security and details of various firewalls which are available on our help page.
It is your responsibility to ensure the security of your machine and SnowbankIH can not be responsible to you in the event that a person gains unauthorised access, whether or not you use a firewall.
You must not use the Services to carry out Port scanning/probing (which is an attempt to identify an open gateway into another Internet user’s machine). Where it has been identified that an account has been used for this activity SnowbankIH may withdraw the Services without notice.
You must not use the services to run any program that can be used to compromise the efficiency and security of network traffic.
You must not use the service to knowingly or unknowingly cause to be transmitted Worms, Trojans or Viruses. Any account found to have been used to transmit such items can be subject to immediate suspension or disconnection of services without notice.
SnowbankIH in no way offers support for the detection or removal of Viruses, Worms or Trojans. SnowbankIH strongly recommends that you use good quality up to date anti-virus software supplied by a reputable anti virus developer to protect your system from unwanted Viruses, Worms and Trojans.
6. Data Protection and Privacy
Before completing any forms or passing your personal details on to anyone via the Internet you should be certain about who is receiving those details and if you do not wish them to sell your name to third parties, you should check the opt out boxes.
Nobody may use the Services, either directly or indirectly:
(a) in breach of the provisions of the data protection legislation or any directions issued by the Data Protection Commissioner;
(b) to collect names and personal details of other users of the Services;
(c) to transmit, publish, link to, make available or cause to be transmitted any material designed to obtain passwords, account information or other information from other users of the Services.
In our Payment Zone we may pass your credit card/debit card details to content partners for the purpose of fulfilling your transactions, but we will only do this with your consent. Our content partners are only authorised to use your personal details for fulfilling your transactions. If they wish to use your details for any other purposes, (such as marketing) they must obtain your positive and informed consent.
7. Domain Names
You must not request registration of domain names which you do not intend to use yourself or which you intend to sell or make available to third parties.
As and when requested by us, you shall confirm that you are the owner of, or you have been duly authorised by the owner to use, any trade mark or name requested by or allocated to you as a domain name or mail box name and to provide documentary evidence of your rights in the name.
At our request you may be required to select a replacement name.
8. Websites
This section applies where we provide you with webspace as part of the Services.
You are responsible for the content of your website (including any content you link to) which must comply with this User Policy. You must obtain all necessary rights and clearances for the inclusion and publication of anyone else’s work on your website. (See section 10 below for more information.)
You must ensure that no adult material is displayed or linked before a clear warning has been given and the user has had the opportunity to decline to view such material.
You may not run a web site where access is subject to a premium rate telephone charge or which redirects you to such a website.
We may remove or request the removal of any material or links from your website if we consider that you are in breach of this User Policy.
If your website generates abnormally high hit levels or generates abnormally high levels of network traffic, we may at our discretion move it and/or restrict access to it and you shall be liable for any additional charges arising from our action. This may include but is not limited to suspending your Internet access.
On termination of your Internet account and/or Interactive Services for any reason, we may delete your website from our server immediately and without any liability to you.
9. Email Storage
You are responsible for checking your email regularly and storing any emails you wish to keep. On termination of your Internet account and/or Interactive Services for any reason, any emails (read or unread) kept on our servers may automatically be deleted without any liability to you with immediate effect.
10. Copyright and Third Party Rights
Any images, photographs, articles, pages, designs, drawings, software, music, information and other materials published on the Internet and the Services are protected by copyright. Publishing material on the Internet and on the Services does not mean it is available for anyone to copy. Unless the owner of that copyright specifically states that you may copy the work, you should assume that you cannot.
It is an infringement of copyright to copy, reproduce, adapt, translate, broadcast or perform copyright protected material without permission, to make infringing copies available to the public or otherwise to knowingly deal in infringing copies.
The Services must not be used, directly or indirectly, to transmit, publish, link to or otherwise make available any confidential information or trade secrets of any person or entity.
11. Fraud
Nobody may use the Services, either directly or indirectly to impersonate any person, entity or a minor or to commit or attempt to commit any fraud.
In using the Service, you must not use a false name or a name you are not entitled to use.
12. Shopping
SnowbankIH has selected a cross section of companies to provide you with access to a broad range of services. Some of these companies are content partners which means that we work very closely with them to ensure that their content is fully integrated within our Services. Other companies are linked partners – here we have just set up hyperlinks to their websites and have no control over the content of these websites.
Whenever you buy anything using our Services, you are buying from the merchant and not from SnowbankIH, even when you use our payment zone service (see section 6). However, in order to ensure that you enjoy your shopping experience, we recommend that you follow these guidelines:
· make sure you know who you are dealing with – note down the merchants name, address and content details.
· check the merchant terms and conditions and any guarantee.
· check the price and any extras such as delivery costs and the period for which the price remains valid.
· check the delivery times and any returns/refund policies make sure you know what you are ordering – is there an accurate description or picture of the goods or services?
· when ordering via the Internet, make sure that the merchant has confirmed that you are ordering from a secure website – you should be supplied with a password and told that your credit card details will be encrypted. It is not recommended that you send financial information by ordinary email.
· make sure that you get a receipt and acknowledgement of your order and an order reference number.
We will cooperate with merchants and credit card companies in the detection and prevention of fraud.
Remember that consumer protection laws do apply to transactions on our Services which means that all merchants should act honestly and fairly.
13. Chat
IRC chat rooms are a feature of the Internet and SnowbankIH simply provides access to this feature. SnowbankIH does not moderate or control the content of any IRC chatrooms and we are not responsible for any of the content that appears in the chatrooms or any activity that occurs in the chatrooms. If you need any assistance in using the chatrooms or get into difficulties while you are in a chatroom, please use the Help button for assistance.
14. Web Search
The Service may include a web directory and the capability to search the web. The web directory provides links to the Internet and use of search facilities will produce information from web sites on the Internet and links to the Internet. We are not responsible for content on the Internet accessed via the directory or as the result of any search.
15. Abuse of the Services: Package Specific Information
You are responsible for the security of your user name and password combinations. Do not disclose these combinations to anyone.
SnowbankIH cannot guarantee that you will be able to register and use any e-mail address that you would like. If SnowbankIH requests that you change your e-mail address you must comply within the time-frame specified by SnowbankIH at the time of the request. Failure to do so will result in the removal of the e-mail address and and all e-mail contained within that mailbox will be permaneSnowbankIHy lost.
If the e-mail address constitutes the primary mailbox and the changes to the user name are not carried out within the timeframe specified by SnowbankIH at the time of the request, your account may be suspended or disconnected. Upon suspension the account will only be reinstated following receipt of a signed Royal Mail letter confirming the new user name that you wish to use.
16. Servers
(i) Webservers: see Para 8, Websites
(ii) Remote Access: All remote access ( FTP; SSH ; PC Anywhere etc) must be password protected & the address must not be publicly advertised.
(iii) Email:
You must ensure that you do not further the sending of Unsolicited Bulk Email by others. This applies to both material that originates on your system and also third party material that might pass through it. This includes but is not limited to a prohibition on running an “open mail relay”, ie a machine which accepts mail from unauthorized or unknown senders and forwards it onward to a destination outside of your machine or network. If your machine does relay mail, on an authorized basis, then it must record its passing through your system by means of an appropriate “Received” line.
(iv) Other: You may run other servers but be aware that SnowbankIH reserve the right to restrict access to them should they cause network problems or should we receive complaints.
(vi) We may, at our discretion, run manual or automatic systems to determine your compliance with our User Policy (e.g. scanning for “open mail relays”). You are deemed to have granted permission for this limited intrusion onto your network or machine.
(vii) Please be aware that SnowbankIH does not offer any DNS services, e.g. Domain Name Redirection. The SnowbankIH service is based on dynamic IP addressing and you must not specify IP addresses (other than DNS servers) in the network settings for your internet connection.
17. Communications from SnowbankIH
SnowbankIH may use e-mail to communicate with you from time to time. E-mails from SnowbankIH will be sent to your primary e-mail address. We will consider the e-mail delivered at the same time that it is sent. Communication from SnowbankIH via e-mail will be considered delivered after a full 2 working days, i.e. mail sent on a Monday will be considered delivered on the following Thursday. e-mail will be sent to the address registered on your Internet account.
