Whilst idling through some old blog entries, I paid a visit to the website of my old friends Layered Technologies. It seems that since kicking me off their network for running a Tor server (that they explicitly granted me permission to run) they have revised their Acceptable Use Policy to include this:
TOR and Anonymous Routers or Routing Protocols
If an alleged or actual violation of this AUP is believed, at the sole discretion of Layered Technologies and Fast Servers, to have occurred on, to, from, or through the Services, Servers, or IP Addresses provided to you by Layered Technologies and Fast Servers on which TOR or an anonymous router or routing protocol exists, the alleged or actual violation of this AUP shall be deemed to have occurred whether verifiable evidence exists or not and Layered Technologies and Fast Servers shall enforce this AUP at the sole discretion of Layered Technologies and Fast Servers.
Once you manage to get through their grammatical minefield, I think it says that they will kick you out if you run any kind of service that prevents you from passing the blame on to somebody else. I wonder if they added this little clause as a result of my incident. Perhaps they don’t like the fact that my Blog article shows up on Google search results for Layered Technologies.
Well, I have been a customer with LT for several years now. As they state in their AUP, it is only IF there is a complaint lodged. I have dealt with their Abuse department once or twice for random and small issues. They handle things rather well. They do not actively check for services such as Tor or other anonymizer services. The only time they care is if a complaint is lodged against a customers IP address. If you had Tor running, you don’t know what a user could have done from your IP address. Even if it was private, there would be no logs to show that it was not you. Also, since the server was in your name, you are responsible for what is done from that server. Allowing anonymous tunnels through your server is basically like giving someone your root password. It doesn’t matter what they could do to your server, but what they could do FROM your server. Just my take on it.