Comcast's ToS prohibits:
- use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises
that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your
Premises local area network ("Premises LAN"), also commonly referred to as
public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers
include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and
proxy services and servers;
- use or run programs from the Premises that provide network content or any
other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN, except for personal
and non-commercial residential use;
This appears to not exclude sshd for personal use. They don't discuss
research. However, it clearly excludes running a standalone box to do
this.
Aside from the questions of whether the original plan violates the ToS, what
if you wrote a client that simply checks in periodically for commands about
where to ping? It seems like that is clearly a client, and you could post
the code for audit. I'd generally be less concerned about running code a
number of people I know have read over then I'd be about giving a user
account to someone I don't know. That said, I don't use comcast anyway.
- Amy
On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 11:44 AM, Dustin J. Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 11:36 AM, Randolph Baden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
> >> you're saying it's illegal to run an SSH server? that makes no sense.
> >
> > Don't quote me on this, but from what I've heard it doesn't sound like
> > ISPs really care if you run an SSH server (or even a HTTP server as
> > long as it generates very little traffic). It seems like they put
> > such things in their ToS in case they ever want to be able to use it.
> > I think that a lot of ISPs do it. I think some also say you can't,
> > for instance, use a wireless router, even though people do it all the
> > time.
>
> Correct. And let's be careful to distinguish criminal law from
> contract law. It's not illegal, it's just a violation of a broadly
> worded and probably difficult-to-enforce contract between the end-user
> and Comcast.
>
> You may want to see if you can work this from the "bottom" -- get in
> touch with some of the Comcast net admins, and once they're on board,
> get them to push the proposal upstream.
>
> Dustin
>
> --
> Storage Software Engineer
> http://www.zmanda.com
>
