annoucements about the service and software of CAT

[annoucements about the service and software of CAT <cat-announce AT geant.net>]

Hello,

as you probably know, there is a feature in eduroam CAT which allows you
to send users to your own support pages, regardless of whether the CAT
could serve installers for the platform(s) in question or not. These
redirects can be configured for an entire profile (all platforms) or on
a per-device basis.

Some of the CAT institution administrators were using this feature to
create links to arguably inappropriate content, specifically links to
copyrighted material for which it has been alleged that neither the CAT
operators nor the institutions which created the link have a
usage/redistribution license for.

It has been alleged that showing and making it possible to follow such
links in our web interface makes the CAT product itself a redistributor
of such inappropriate content, even though

* the content is actually hosted at a third-party website (institution
helpdesk pages)
* we provide an explicit notice that by clicking "Continue" the users
get redirected to a third-party webpage
* the CAT operators have no immediate control over the links themselves,
nor the target page

To avoid any dispute we have decided that we will stop making these
links available. By manual inspection, we found three such redirect
links and have already removed them from the database. We will be
contacting the three institutions concerned individually.

Please do not introduce links using the redirect feature which are
alleged to be infringing on other entities' copyright or otherwise
unacceptable; e.g. to a previously downloaded Windows Vista/7 installer
for TTLS which includes the embedded SecureW2 installer, which we took
offline earlier this year.

We have created a contact point for copyright holders
(cat-abuse AT lists.geant.org,
 see my other mail in a bit) for them to
notify us of such content, so that we can take appropriate action.
Links to content which we consider to be inappropriate will be deleted
from the system, and the institution in question will be notified. If
institutions choose to re-introduce the links again, we will need to
think of a means to penalise. I hope that this needs not be the case.

Greetings,

Stefan Winter

-- 
Stefan WINTER
Ingenieur de Recherche
Fondation RESTENA - Réseau Téléinformatique de l'Education Nationale et
de la Recherche
6, rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
L-1359 Luxembourg

Tel: +352 424409 1
Fax: +352 422473

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