Welcome back to Love Bytes! It’s always great to be here! It’s Dani’s birthday and I hope you all join me in wishing her the very happiest of birthdays and the very best of things to come! Happy Birthday, pretty lady!
Does anyone have any advice with respect to our psychotic spring? Just checking. For those of you out there still suffering, know that my heart goes out to you.
Warning: Rant ahead.
April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month but FOSTA/SESTA don’t do much to help victims. In fact, almost nothing at all.
Tech giants are bracing for the slow unwinding of net neutrality, Europe’s new data privacy rules (effective May 26th), and the new FOSTA/SESTA regulations. Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act are largely window dressing in the name of helping victims, will fail to achieve the []stated goals—[and] will fundamentally change, and arguably cripple, the internet you’ve grown to rely on these past two decades. Sadly, both bills target consenting adult sex workers and consumers rather than child sex exploiters and traffickers. As with the failed Child Online Protection Act, these Acts may eventually go the way of the dodo. In the meantime, these legislative measures are a perfect excuse to impose new regulations on tech giants who may or may not properly implement them… and they have far more to do with censorship than aid to victims or new privacy laws. I won’t bother to touch on the Facebook Cambridge gig.
Following this enormous censorship swing, unintended consequences have made the past five months a living AOHell for me. Setting aside that I wish I’d never started using AOL—and I wouldn’t still be using it save for the fact that there is more than 20 years’ data from my private practice stored which can only be read by AOL software—I am required to “retain and maintain to the highest standards and degrees of confidentiality” data related to my private practice for at least the next millennium whether dead or alive. As such, I have dutifully stored this massive amount of information accordingly. The single advantage of AOL was that data was stored privately on my storage devices. Was.
Private data no more. This disaster began last November when Verizon (who now owns AOL) forced an upgrade to a “gold” version of the software. This involved an easy enough installation but required that we convert all the email stored on our computers to the new format. Liars! It was to download all our data to AOL’s cloud. I am now in breach of confidentiality requirements (string of swear words). AOL, your gold is nothing more than weak yellow urine.
Setting aside the malicious failure to disclose and gross negligence on the part of AOL, this upgrade resulted in:
—breach of confidentiality
—loss of data on AOL’s cloud which can never be recovered
—damage to my laptop
—the inability to consistently access my email
—lockout from any number of social media and other accounts
After more than 120 hours on the phone with AOHell, the software STILL DOES NOT WORK PROPERLY. As for the loss of data? We’re sorry, too bad for you.
//end rant
There are other unintended consequences. Most importantly, that I let you down when I could no longer access my adult content blog. To Anne Barwell, Joe Cosentino, and those of you who had posts scheduled on my blog for me to post and share, please accept a thousand of my sincerest apologies. I’ll be back up and running by the end of the month and I will be blogging again to promote your books.
It goes without saying that I bit the bullet and am in the process of setting up and transferring my email. After AOHell, and thanks to Mel’s dad, I can still laugh. In your face, AOHell!
See you back here next month on Thursday, May 17th! And thanks for reading my books!
P.S. The 2018 laws change DMCA requirements. Please be sure to study the new rules.
About Cody Kennedy
Cody is an author who lives, most of the time, on the east coast of the United States. Cody also writes adult mystery thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, and romance as Aisling Mancy.
Raised on the mean streets and back lots of Hollywood by a Yoda-look-alike grandfather, Cody doesn’t conform, doesn’t fit in, is epic awkward, and lives to perfect a deep-seated oppositional defiance disorder. In a constant state of fascination with the trivial, Cody contemplates such weighty questions as If time and space are curved, then where do all the straight people come from? When not writing, Cody can be found taming waves on western shores, pondering the nutritional value of sunsets, appreciating the much-maligned dandelion, unhooking guide ropes from stanchions, and marveling at all things ordinary.
Cody’s Facebook, Twitter @CodyKAuthor, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+, Ello,
Goodreads, Medium, Booklikes, and read my free serial story, Fairy.
Find Ash on blog, Twitter @AislingMancy, Facebook, Google+, Goodreads, Booklikes,
Dreamspinner Press Author Page, and Amazon
and Ash does respond to emails because, after all, it is all about you, the reader.
Safe and Slaying Isidore’s Dragons are being translated
into French for a December 2nd release!
Pssst. Click on the captioned title of each book to read the first chapter!
No worries, Cody. I figured something had happened. What a disaster and all round horrible experience! Glad you’re up and running again. *huge hugs*
You are an angel, Anne! Thank you for your understanding!
I was stunned at how quickly FOSTA/SESTA and the Cloud Act got railroaded through, and how almost no one called attention to the free speech/civil liberties aspects until it was too late. (Jim Jefferies did do an anti-FOSTA segment on his show the other week, but the bill had already gone through Congress by then. And the poor guy had to keep saying “Of COURSE I’m against sex trafficking!” during the piece, which goes a long way to explain why such a deceptive piece of legislation sailed through. Even the reps and senators in my supposedly liberal area of California took it at face value, which saddened me deeply. I did phone their offices to tell them why they should reconsider, but no one did. I notice none of them have sent me a constituent survey lately, just lots of fundraising requests. When I DO get a survey, I will spell everything out, believe me.) Reminds me of how all the news programs did net neutrality segments AFTER it had been officially repealed, which infuriated me. Every day I keep checking the ACLU and the EFF on social media to see if they’ve brought injunctions against it (since it’s an ex post facto law as well as a violation of the First Amendment, and thus doubly unconstitutional), but nothing yet. I’m just an ordinary citizen, so I can imagine how sex workers and other people whose lives have been placed in danger because of it must feel. I didn’t realize there was already a repeal of similar legislation in the past, so that news does make me feel better. I hope California’s efforts to bring back net neutrality work out too, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m so sorry about the blog troubles too, what a nightmarish thing!
You are exceptionally learned, Trix. Great commentary. I am not only astounded by the lack of disclosure to the masses, but the blind following of the masses. I doubt the legislation will be challenged because the “window dressing” is aimed at current outrage against CSEC–in order to get it through. Using the backs of victimized children to push the legislation through is reprehensible, IMHO.
Again, thanks for the awesome commentary and for stopping by and commenting!