Panix Rules

Panix Rules of Use

The Objective of These Rules:

The Rules below apply to all users. They are intended to protect us, our users, and the Net. We state them firmly, so them may sound harsh, but very few of our users in our entire history have ever been affected or unduly restricted by them.
We try to keep our regulations to a minimum, so these are the ones that must be obeyed. Failure to comply may result in immediate termination of your account without refund.
Please do not try to be creative about circumventing our rules. We're generally nice folks with an excellent reputation for being reasonable; if you have a problem with them, bring it to us.
The rules on this page apply to all Panix accounts. Depending on the type of account you have, others may apply as well.

The Rules:

Remember that you are responsible for your account. This means that we expect you to maintain a reasonable degree of security and not to share your password or leave it where others can make use of it. Unless we have some reason to believe that your account has been broken into by means essentially beyond your control, we have to hold you responsible for anything done under your login or from your dialup-IP host.

You may not:

Do anything illegal or anything that adversely affects Panix's legal interests.
Share your password with anyone or allow anyone else to use your personal use account except in your immediate presence, nor dial in to our access servers from more than one modem (or ISDN device) at a time.
Tamper with other accounts, or commit unauthorized intrusion into any part of Panix's system or use any of Panix's machines, files or accounts to intrude without authorization into any other system (cracking).
Use Panix services not included in your subscription or devise ways to circumvent security so you have access to services you haven't paid for (theft of services).
Use the system (willfully or negligently) in a manner that encumbers disk space, processors or other system or network resources so as to interfere with others' normal use of services on Panix or on other systems (causing a "denial of service").
Create or participate in chain letters or pyramid schemes.
Harass users (on Panix or elsewhere). Sending email or real-time messages to a user who has asked explicitly and unambiguously that you not do this is harassment. In some cases, a harassing user may be warned against engaging in similar behavior with other users as well.
Send unsolicited mass mailings or unsolicited subscriptions with a "negative option" for continuation. (The negative option is one where you invite people who do not wish to receive further mailings to reply to you, or to unsubscribe themselves.) If you use a mass mailing from another site to promote a service that we host, we may disable that service.

The following rules pertain specifically to netnews postings. If you never use netnews, they don't apply to you.
Before posting to newsgroups, you should familiarize yourself with USENET and its customs of conduct. Panix provides some documents to assist you:
Netnews Transgressions and Numerical Guidelines. You may not

Spam the net with commercial or non-commercial postings.
Maliciously or wantonly flood newsgroups.
Redistribute articles or portions of articles from the panix.* hierarchies outside Panix without the explicit permission of the author and anyone quoted in the article.

Also, we reserve the right to terminate your account without refund for other kinds of nontrivial misbehavior, although in our entire history we have never terminated an account for reasons other than those listed here. In all of these matters, decisions by Panix staff are final.

We reserve the right to amend these rules without prior notice. We keep a current copy of the rules on our web site for users to reference. (We tend not to make many changes, and when we do we generally discuss them first in the panix.policy newsgroup and post changes to panix.announce and/or in the system messages-of-the-day (MOTDs).)