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
(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
(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
Badness Society

No Gates, No Keepers

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

Categories
Badness Cryptography Software Security

On The Toxicity of Zed A. Shaw

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

Categories
Badness

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
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

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
(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 […]