Categories
Society

Should You Delete Your Patreon Account After They Laid Off Their Entire Security Team?

A nuanced answer to the obvious question in response to Patreon firing an entire Security Team in 2022.

Categories
(Anti-)Social Media Society The Furry Fandom

A Greymuzzle’s Lament

On Puriteens, Furries, and the future of the LGBTQIA+ Community

Categories
Badness Society The Furry Fandom

Was the Buffalo Shooter A Furry?

Obviously, no, he wasn’t. But facts aren’t likely to change the minds of people who are already motivated to hate furries.

Categories
Badness The Furry Fandom

Bad Furries Aren’t Representative of the Entire Fandom

One bad furry doesn’t spoil hundreds of thousands of bunches.

Categories
Society The Furry Fandom

The Dark Truth About the “Furry Protocol”

Do public schools really have a secret “furry protocol” to allow K-12 students that identify as cats to use litter boxes in restrooms? No.

Categories
Society The Furry Fandom

On the (In)security of Social Media Callouts

If your first instinct upon reading the title of this blog post was the Ctrl+F for the words “SJW”, “woke”, or “cancel culture”, you’re already assuming incorrectly about this post and the author’s positions. If “please don’t do that” is asking too much, maybe sit this one out? We like to think we live in […]

Categories
Cryptography Meta-blog Society The Furry Fandom

Lightning Round

An assortment of topics that don’t quite deserve their own dedicated blog post.

Categories
Society The Furry Fandom

Selfishness: The Pandemic We Can’t Develop a Vaccine Against

“You’re going to love this, trust me. What you’re seeing now is my normal state. This is a super-spreader. And this… This is what is known as a super-spreader that has ascended above a super-spreader. Or, you could just call this a super-spreader two. AND THIS. AND THIS IS TO GO EVEN FURTHER BEYOND!!” 2021 […]

Categories
(Anti-)Social Media Badness The Furry Fandom

Furry Amino Sucks at Art Attribution

Over the weekend, I decided to make an account on Furry Amino. My reasoning at the time was, “A lot of furries lurk there, I should see what it’s about.” That was a bad move that I’d like to discourage others from making. What’s Furry Amino? Furry Amino is a furry-centric community on the Amino […]

Categories
Badness Society

Blue Alerts: Security Theater and Copaganda

Last week, Floridians were startled by an emergency alert sent to all of our cell phones. Typically when this sort of alert happens, it’s an Amber Alert, which means a child was abducted. In Florida, we sometimes also receive Silver Alerts, which indicates that an Alzheimer’s or dementia patient has gone missing. (Florida has a […]

Categories
Badness Cryptography Meta-blog Society

On the Word “Nonce” in Cryptography and the UK

Earlier today, I made a Twitter shitpost that confused a lot of folks from the UK. Now, anyone can be forgiven for not knowing what AES-GCM-SIV is, or for being confused by the grammar of the meme. But the source of confusion was the word “nonce”. Let’s talk about what the word “nonce” means in […]

Categories
Society The Furry Fandom

Why Furries Make Excellent Hackers

Briefly explaining the Infursec prevalence within InfoSec

Categories
(Anti-)Social Media Badness

A Balanced Response to Allen Gwinn

Responding to “Our cybersecurity ‘industry best practices’ keep allowing breaches”

Categories
Badness Society

Avoiding the Frigid Hellscape of Online Marketing

An Internet Marketer Offered Me $100 to Betray Myself and My Community

Categories
Society

Why I Chose to Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19

#WhyIGotVaxxed

Categories
Society

Against Hierarchies

One of the funniest concepts for a YouTube channel has to be TierZoo, which treats the animal kingdom as an MMORPG and animal species as different classes within this hypothetical game, and then proceeds to analyze it the same way gamers analyze the “meta” for a given season of a game. Tier lists are just […]

Categories
Society The Furry Fandom

A Furry’s Guide to Cryptocurrency

Normally when you see an article that talks about cryptocurrency come across your timeline, you can safely sort it squarely into two camps: For and Against. If you’re like me, you might even make a game out of trying to classify it into one bucket or the other from the first paragraph–sort of like how […]

Categories
Society The Furry Fandom

The Furry / Sexuality Blog Post

Sexuality and the Furry Fandom.

Categories
Badness Society

No Gates, No Keepers

The technology industry is hurt at every level by toxic gatekeeping.

Categories
Badness Cryptography Software Security Vulnerability

On The Toxicity of Zed A. Shaw

Boycott Zed Shaw’s writing. (With bonus zero-days in his work.)

Categories
Bullshit Society

No, You’re Not a “Sigma Male”

“Sigma Male” is just the latest trend in pick-up artist/involuntary celibate/anti-feminist grifting.

Categories
Badness Vulnerability

Masks Off for TheDonald.win

The server for thedonald.win is hosted at 167.114.145.140. Read on to learn how I discovered this.

Categories
Meta-blog Society The Furry Fandom

You’re Not Alone; It Gets Better

We’ve more-or-less all been coping with the pandemic since early March. During this time, I’ve seen a lot of people stressed and depressed to their breaking points, usually while also blaming themselves for not being able to bottle their feelings up and believing no one else is at their limit. And that’s simply not true. […]

Categories
Society The Furry Fandom

Nearly Everyone Underestimates the Importance of Good Friendships

If living through the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything–and it surely hasn’t–it would be the importance of friendship and community to our physical and emotional well-being. For more on the subject of People Who Ought to Know Better Not Learning the Obvious Lessons from Misfortune, one needs look no further than social media. Popularity […]

Categories
Badness The Furry Fandom

Extinguishing a Flaming Pile of Bad Takes on My Doorstep

There’s an old adage on the Internet: “Don’t feed the trolls.” The reasoning for such an argument is kind of a proof by induction if you squint hard enough at its structure: If you don’t feed the trolls, they’ll have to look elsewhere to get the engagement they crave. If you iterate the advice and […]

Categories
Badness Software Security Vulnerability

EduTech Spyware is Still Spyware: Proctorio Edition

Spyware written for educational institutions to flex their muscles of control over students and their families when learning from their home computer is still, categorically, spyware. Depending on your persuasion, the previous sentence sounds like either needless pedantry, or it reads like tautology. But we need to be clear on our terms. Educational spyware is […]

Categories
Society

A Few Missing Lessons from American Education

As American students are preparing to return to the classroom during a pandemic–in flagrant disregard of everything ranging from our scientific understanding to matters of good taste–we keep hearing from politicians how essential education is. Of course, if they actually believed the words coming out of their mouth, you’d expect them to be a little […]

Categories
(Anti-)Social Media Badness

A Canned Response to My Viral Tweet

This is a bit different from my usual blog post, insofar as I don’t have much of a point except that I’m tired of repeating myself. The other day, I was frustrated about Pinterest clogging up the Google Image Search results and tweeted a really simple and well-known life-hack to counteract their search engine manipulation. […]

Categories
Badness The Furry Fandom

Resolving The Reoccurring Discourse on Furry Twitter

While the furry fandom can be a wonderful place and a force for good in the world, the topics that tend to circulate on Furry Twitter are somewhat seasonal: They repeat every so often–usually sparked by someone saying or doing something shitty–and never actually lead to a productive result. Let’s look at a few of […]

Categories
Badness

Fraudulent Apps on the Google Play Store: COVID-19 Contact Tracing Edition

Cryptographers around the world are still designing privacy-preserving contact tracing systems for combating the spread of COVID-19. Even though some papers have been published (one using zero-knowledge proofs, another based on blockchain (sigh)), the ink is still very wet. The first framework designed by Apple and Google needs work but was surprisingly not god-awful. That […]