Many of you have probably gotten an email by now letting you know that as of May 1, 2018, they are updating their TOS for their services like Skype, XBOX, and Office.
They are banning ‘offensive language’ and what they deem as ‘inappropriate content’.
This means not cursing or nudity. Specifically, the wording says …
Don’t publicly display or use the Services to share inappropriate content or material (involving, for example, nudity, bestiality, pornography, offensive language, graphic violence, or criminal activity).
This means no more private Skype shows.
What I am curious about is, as a writer of erotica using Microsoft Office, how the hell do I that without using office language? I mean you can’t exactly describe a couple making love without discussing things like his erect penis.
For more adult webmasters this is the final straw. Many are now making the move to Telegram which is cloud-based and thought to be more secure due to its heavily encrypted chats.
Some of the performers are migrating over to something called Discord. I don’t know much about it, to be honest, other than it has been used by Gamers for a while now. Apparently, it’s pretty stable, more so than even Skype and that’s always a good thing.
If anyone has used it, let us know in the comments down below. I would love to know what you think of it.
3 Responses
Are you referring to new Microsoft rules or a third party company’s TOS and was the email was from a private billing company or Microsoft? How does it relate to the following blog post that says everything should be alright?
http://blog.skyprivate.com/skype-banning-accounts-sesta-protect-account-skyprivate/
Other reading:
https://reason.com/blog/2018/04/02/reason-roundup
Kelli, as I can see it you have two options for a word processor that shouldn’t be affected by the new Microsoft TOS. One, you can buy a hard drive based perpetual license for Microsoft Office and use that instead of the Office online suite. If Microsoft doesn’t know what you are writing on your computer using the perpetual license version of Microsoft Office they cannot do a damn thing about it.
All documents can be stored on your computer’s hard drive or a USB stick rather than in the Microsoft cloud. The other is to transition to Libre Office, an open-source and free to use office suite, the team maintaining Libre Office is not based in the US and therefore is at least theoretically not subject to SESTA or FOSTA. Again, all documents would have to be saved to a hard drive or USB stick, there isn’t a cloud service with Libre Office.
There are a couple of Chinese based open-source word processing options but China’s laws against sex are even more strict than the new US laws (and backdoors for Chinese government agencies are required for even non-cloud based use, using any Chinese based program would give the Chinese government a backdoor to search your computer — this has come up recently with Huawei phones) so I would suggest not using them for this purpose.
A related note, as for distribution of your erotic works via Amazon Kindle (I have bought a couple of them), you will have to ask them at this point. I will do a search on their site for any changes having to do with SESTA and FOSTA but I haven’t run across anything so far. You really need to speak to an appropriately specialized attorney before the law goes into effect (apparently on May 1), that might be the best use of $500 or $1000 you ever spend considering this is your livelihood. Here is the Amazon Kindle Self Publishing TOS: https://amzn.to/2aS02a4 .
As for Discord I will have to ask my gamer nephew whether he uses it and if he does, how well it works for him and his friends.