On Thu, 2002-01-17 at 11:22, Phil Mendelsohn wrote: > On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 10:36:45AM -0600, Chad C. Walstrom wrote: > > > There are ways around these agreements, people. You just have to > > look closely. > > Sheesh, some people's kids. > > You're not agreeing if you're going around an agreement, are you? An agreement is what it is, not what the person writing it wishes it was, or wishes that it could be. This is particularly important, both morally and (so I believe, although IANAL) legally, when the party writing the agreement is vastly more powerful than the other. Definitions matter; words matter. If AT&T had chosen to write their TOS agreement so as to prohibit anything that, functionally, is a server from connecting without its own public, static IP address, they'd have found themselves losing all their corporate clients, who have lawyers and systems folks too, and who understand that, in some senses, almost any Windows workstation is a server. (See Steve Gibson's Shields Up for some discussion of how a Windows PC with NetBios enabled is, fundamentally, a server.) AT&T/RR/etc. are *not* going to disallow everybody using Windows from buying their services. Nor are they going to say, well, run any server you want, and use as much bandwidth as you like, as long as you run it over NetBIOS, for reasons I'll leave as an obvious exercise to the reader. Nor, for that matter, are they going to say, "hey, you get x gigabytes per month, and we'll charge you extra for using more than that", as folks who aren't going to use even a fraction of x will gravitate toward a provider who gives them an open pipe. So, they've come up with a fairly sensible compromise: the contract says, in effect, "don't run a server for others", and the practice is "don't run a server in a way that's going to make trouble for us". Which, really, is just fine. If I wanted to run a lot of server stuff, I'd get a static IP connection, and pay for it. As it is, I don't, and I don't. (In a parallel sort of way, RoadRunner will tell you, "yes, we do promise you service and connectivity, but if you want to connect from a Linux box, or put a hub and more than one machine directly on your cable box instead of using a Windows gateway machine and NAT, you're on your own." [I ran into that problem, by the way. At some point, RoadRunner stopped issuing more than two dynamic IPs to my cable modem, and I had to figure out how to get NAT working on one of the Linux boxes, so that the others could talk to the net. I would have loved to dump the problem in their lap, but that wasn't part of the agreement, so I was on my own. They could have said, "no hubs or switches may be connected to our cable box," and I'd have had to put the hub behind the gateway/firewall machine, which would be the loophole for that problem.) All of which is fine. They don't really care if my wife ssh's in to check her email at home, or if you check in, via webmin, to see the logs on your own machine. They don't want you starting your own private yahoo.com for $50/month.... So everybody goes away happy, right? -- ------------------------------------- There's a widow in sleepy Chester Who weeps for her only son; There's a grave on the Pabeng River, A grave that the Burmans shun, And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri Who tells how the work was done. -------------------------------------