As everyone knows, Elon Musk is now running Twitter directly into the ground. Who knows? Maybe he needed some inspiration for the Boring Company.

Art: Chai Lynx

This has, as many predicated, been a complete clusterfuck.

https://twitter.com/kennwhite/status/1589396945830813700

We should assume that Twitter is on its way out the door. Elon Musk is not a good CEO, as evidenced by the immediate mass lay-offs of Twitter employees.

Or his immediate pause of content moderation (which let some really dumb homophobes run wild).

https://twitter.com/lucashoal/status/1587443643735908353

You get the point.

Art: Chai Lynx

Rather than continue to ruminate on the current mess, I’d like to instead take a moment of everyone’s present to look into the future, because we’re actually in a unique position to make a lot of good changes to the world; or, at least, to make something hilarious out of a bad situation.

This matters for everyone, but especially for furries, sex workers, and porn artists.

Art: Chai Lynx

I’m going to break this post into three parts:

1. How to Make a Larger Impact Than Deleting Your Account
2. An Opinionated Summary of Alternate Platforms
3. How to Architect the Porn-Friendly Social Media of Tomorrow

It should go without saying, but my standard disclaimer applies:

The contents of this blog post are the sole opinions of a 30-something gay furry who presents as an anthropomorphic dhole on the Internet. Do not confuse the opinion or satire contained within for either a) fact, b) professional advice, or c) the opinions of any company or entity; especially the author’s current or past employers.

How to Make a Larger Impact Than Deleting Your Account

Art: Chai Lynx

If you’re considering deleting your Twitter account and moving to an alternative platform, I encourage you to move but not delete your account. There’s something much cooler you can do with your existing account than delete it.

Twitter’s operations costs are currently fairly predictable. Well, predictable enough to lay off a lot of the workers necessary to keep the lights on, anyway.

Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of deleting their accounts in protest, we decided to make our accounts cost more in storage and compute costs?

I posed a similar question to Twitter the other day.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1587807410944630790

Here are some of the more fun and interesting ideas that were shared with me:

Block and Search with Wild Abandon

(I can’t find a record of who suggested this idea. Maybe I imagine someone suggesting it, and it was actually my own idea, but I’m misremembering. Who even knows anymore?)

Filtering blocked/muted accounts from your timeline requires a small amount of server-side CPU.

Searching for trending topics and common words in your native language will likely hit many thousands of accounts.

If you ask Twitter’s search engine for all tweets that contain certain common words or phrases, and then the application has to filter out hundreds of thousands of blocked and/or muted accounts, this is going to become computationally expensive.

Especially if you systematically mute or block every single account that promotes a tweet.

Especially if you’re already using an adblocker, such as uBlock Origin (which you can install in Firefox for Android, by the way).

To be clear: The goal of this idea is NOT to degrade the platform or perform a Denial of Service attack. It’s simply to make Musk pay more for useless processing that won’t increase Twitter’s ad revenue.

Art: Chai Lynx

Use Twitter Like TikTok

Instead of typing a reply, record a short video instead. The queerer and less marketable the contents of your video, the better.

https://twitter.com/XydexxUnicorn/status/1587810839620378628

If you don’t have a fursuit (most furries actually don’t), consider using rigged 3D models (or Live2D avatars; e.g. FaceRig) instead.

Just make sure you include a transcript or alt text for people with disabilities.

Everyone else can participate simply by diligently playing every single one of these videos (even if on mute).

Let’s run up Elon’s storage and bandwidth bills. There’s lots of fun that we can have with this idea.

Upload Lots of Compression-Unfriendly Images

For example:

https://twitter.com/yourcompanionAI/status/1587815968700600321

Bonus points if you somehow manage to work this into the video reply idea, and it actually inflates their storage costs significantly.

Bad Suggestion: Reply to Brands with Yiff

There were a few people who suggested posting adult furry art in reply to brand tweets. The idea being that this will make Twitter less marketable for advertisers.

This is a terrible idea for two reasons:

1. Optics. Regardless of your goals, you’re going to expose a lot of unsuspecting users to unsolicited pornographic art. This is not how you make friends. This will make a lot of undecided people form a negative opinion of the furry fandom.
2. Underage users. The minimum age to sign up for Twitter is 13. Parents who might be comfortable with their young teenager following a household name Twitter account will not want their child being exposed to hardcore pornography.

Too often, I see some furries reach for this tactic. You should consider it the nuclear option, because the small tactical gain is largely outsized by collateral damage.

The only thing you’ll accomplish is giving ammo to right-wingers who loudly proclaim all LGBT people are groomers (meanwhile they vote down laws that would stop child marriage; how so very curious of them).

Art: Chai Lynx

Wrap-Up

https://twitter.com/charlotteirene8/status/1585700642626191360

With any luck, we can make Twitter the most expensive $44 Billion that Elon Musk will ever spend.

An Opinionated Summary of Alternate Platforms

Where should we go when Twitter dies? There are a lot of opinions to be had.

Rumors of Tumblr’s Sex Positivity Are Wildly Exaggerated

Shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, Tumblr had announced updated Community Guidelines that, allegedly, permit the naked human form to appear in Tumblr content.

This apparently doesn’t include cartoon nudity. To wit:

https://twitter.com/LeafDubois/status/1589026084640940032

We can do better than Tumblr.

Cohost

Cohost is a somewhat new platform for posting. I have an account there (@soatok).

You can think of Cohost as the best parts of Twitter’s user experience, with the best parts of Tumblr, without any ads, tracking, or recommendation system (The Algorithm).

The premise of Cohost is to build around users, not profit.

Cohost is brought to you by a group calling themselves the Anti Software Software Club–a software company that hates the software industry:

we are a group of three developers and designers—and maybe more soon!—with very strong opinions about how to operate a software company. we’ve all left jobs at conventional tech companies to build cohost and we’re thrilled we finally get to share it with the world. you can read more about us, including our manifesto, on our main website. ASSC is not-for-profit and 100% worker owned.

According to the Cohost website

It’s worth emphasizing that “not-for-profit” is most likely an aspiration and a tenet, not a legal designation. Cohost is an LLC. It would be an error to mistake it for a non-profit organization. The legal term “non-profit” almost always refers to 501(c)(3) organizations.

Personally, I don’t care at all about these distinctions. Some people do. I’m not a lawyer, and I actually find legal topics exhausting to the point of being physically painful. That’s not at an exaggeration.

It’s a neat project. If you want a centralized replacement for Twitter, Cohost is probably your best bet.

Mastodon

Mastodon is federated software, which feels in some ways more like Email or RSS than Twitter does. Moderation is local to your instance, rather than top-down like a centralized platform. Discovery is based on which instances peer with which instances.

There’s a lot to like about Mastodon. However, if you’re an artist that’s looking for a centralized watering hole where all your customers already are, Mastodon… is not that.

That being said, a lot of people are moving to Mastodon already. Now’s probably the best time to join.

Personally, I used to have a Mastodon account, but I didn’t really use it much, and then the instance that hosted my account shut down and I lost all my data. That experience killed my interest in Mastodon.

Telegram Channels

Pro: Furries already use Telegram, extensively.

Con: They’re now selling “collectible usernames” as NFTs

Art: Chai Lynx

Wrap-Up

There are probably other platforms that are worth considering, but there are only so many hours in a day, and I have a day job.

If you find yourself deeply dissatisfied with the options presented, please feel free to explore others. Alternatively, you may wish to build a new platform in line with your own vision.

If you lack the skills to build your vision, grab a few friends and read through Furward Momentum together.

How to Architect the Porn-Friendly Social Media of Tomorrow

What do sex workers, porn artists, and fantasy sex toy companies have in common?

Mastercard doesn’t want to provide them services. Neither do PayPal nor Venmo.

Sex workers and artists are two of the groups most likely to be negatively impacted by Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter.

https://twitter.com/woot_master/status/1518689141763936259

What would it take to build a social media platform that actually supports sex workers and NSFW artists? Well, a lot. But I’d like to at least provide a sketch for how such a platform might be architected.

Art: Chai Lynx

Require Hardware Security Keys For All Users

Your platform should use WebAuthn instead of password authentication.

I recognize that this makes onboarding users difficult (due to a lack of availability of FIDO2-compatible hardware keys), but the security benefits are immensely worthwhile.

The best thing about WebAuthn is, when implemented correctly, your users become extremely phishing-resistant without requiring any diligence on their part.

Use End-to-End Encryption for Private Messages

Further reading: Going Bark: A Furry’s Guide to End-to-End Encryption.

We don’t need more surveillance capitalism. The less you know about your users, the better.

Consider An Invite-Only Design

Lobste.rs requires new users be invited by an existing user.

This is a great way to reduce the blast radius of platform abusers and their subsequent attempts at ban evasion: If the same person keeps inviting bad people, take away their invite privileges.

I chose a similar approach when I designed FAQ Off.

Don’t Mix Payments With Platforms

Simply put: The platform that users interact with should be mostly independent from the component that processes payments for the users of the platform.

By “mostly independent”, I mean they should be distinct legal entities, with no overlap in ownership, that operate in different countries. The only things that should be exchanged between the two are HTTP messages (over TLS) and API keys.

The payment gateway should accept multiple options (credit cards, PayPal, etc.), but never provide a custom “memo” field. Where possible, the invoice feature should be used (with the possibility of tipping left open).

If you permit users to fill in custom memos, they will inevitably leave a remark that flags the recipient’s account as porn/sex related.

This payment gateway will not just process payments and subscriptions; it will also act as a payment escrow service and amortize the risk of chargeback fraud over multiple content creators. (To that end, it should have a name that isn’t embarrassing on a bank statement.)

The incumbent payment gateways used by the porn industry should be avoided, for multiple reasons:

1. They’re expensive
2. The transactions they process get flagged a lot as fraud
3. They’re often used by spammers, scammers, computer criminals, and deplatformed hate groups

Instead, you’d want your value proposition to be more about social media and payments between friends. The fact that you allow porn and sex work on your platform (which should be one of many platforms that use this payment gateway) needs to be a mere footnote.

Finally, consider very carefully whether or not to support cryptocurrency in your payments (or payouts) platform.

This List is Non-Exhaustive

These are just some considerations I can think of off-hand when imagining what a sex-positive social media platform would look like, if it were built in 2022.

The biggest challenges any platform faces will not be legal or technical; they will be social.

Twitter exploded in popularity after a few celebrities started using it. I don’t know how to replicate their success with a greenfield project, and I doubt anyone else does either.

In Summary

Elon Musk is probably going to kill Twitter. It would be really funny if we made this cataclysmically expensive for Elon Musk, personally.

There are a handful of alternative platforms that folks are already migrating to in anticipation of Twitter’s demise, but none is a clear winner.

Twitter’s death will put a lot of artists (especially porn artists) and sex workers in peril, so I sketched some ideas that would enable a Twitter alternative to better serve them.

Ultimately, the future remains uncertain. I don’t pretend to have answers, just ideas. If you think you know, or can do, better, I wish you the best of luck.

https://soatok.blog/2022/11/07/contemplating-the-future/

#ElonMusk #furries #furry #FurryFandom #Society #Twitter

Dhole Moments

2020-08-10 07:00:50

Some of you may be surprised to learn that my fursona is not a fox, nor a wolf; nor is it a fictitious fox-wolf hybrid popular within the furry fandom (which is usually called a “folf”).

No, my fursona is a dhole, which is a real species of endangered wild dogs from Southeast Asia.

The word “dhole” is only one syllable, with a silent H.

https://twitter.com/canemckeyton/status/1024198407429054469

The Furry Fandom needs more dhole fursonas.

Dholes Are Amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifcCNERGUZU

Dholes are very social creatures that live and hunt in large packs. But how they hunt is needlessly awesome: Where other canids (e.g. wolves) try to chase and then surround their prey, dholes spread out and use high-pitched whistles to coordinate their strikes over large distances.

Some other interesting notes from animal conservationalists over the years: Dholes have very low sexual dimorphism (so you generally cannot tell whether a dhole selected at random is male or female at a glance), and they’re known to do a handstand when they’re urinating.

https://twitter.com/Tikrekins/status/1176953841385951233

You can learn more about dholes and dhole conservation efforts here.

The Symbolism of Dhole Fursonas

If you’re trying to pick a species for your fursona, how do you know if a dhole is right for you?
Art by SkiaSkai
Here’s a short list of values and traits you can derive from dholes and dhole behavior in the wild:

1. Do you value and understand friendship in its purest form?
2. Do you value cooperation (n.b. without power structures and hierarchies)?
3. Do you enjoy communal living (with a chosen family of close friends and/or a polycule)?
4. Are you clued into dog whistles? (Okay, this one’s kind of a dumb joke because dholes are called “whistling dogs”, but a lot of dhole furries I know are very clueful about the alt-right’s bullshit, so it’s fitting.)
5. Do traditional notions of sex and gender not interest you in the slightest?

If you said yes to any of those questions, or if you simply can’t decide between fox or wolf and don’t feel like phoning it in with a fictitious hybrid, a dhole may be a good fursona choice for you.

Are Dhole Fursuits Beautiful?

Yes. Very yes.

https://twitter.com/SparkleKreation/status/1039539876121608193

https://twitter.com/Millitrix01/status/1175111740473991168

https://twitter.com/RustiDhole/status/1276399918240931840

https://twitter.com/DamnitKnightly/status/1290751428206587904

Coming soon (probably 2021) to this section of the blog post: My fursuit.

https://soatok.blog/2020/08/10/all-about-dholes-and-dhole-fursonas/

#CuonAlpinus #dhole #dholes #furry #FurryFandom #fursona

Last year I wrote a grab-bag post titled, Don’t Forget To Brush Your Fur, because I’m terrible at SEO or making content easily discoverable.

In the same vein as that previous example, this is going to be in the style of Lightning Round talks at technology conferences.

Why are we doing this again?

I maintain a running list of things to write about, and cross ideas off whenever I cover a topic.

After a few months of doing this, I realize most of what remains is kinda interesting but not quite interesting enough to warrant a dedicated entry.

It always needs more isogenies.
(Art by Lynx vs Jackalope)

Contents

• Asymmetric Key Wear-Out
  
  • ECDSA Key Wear-Out
  • RSA Key Wear-Out

  
  

• HMAC Wear-Out?
• Asymmetric Commitments
• Against “Fluffies”
  
  • Divide and Conquer
  • Pre-Existing Terminology

  
  

• A Meditation on Furries and Cringe
• Furries and Blue State Privilege

Asymmetric Key Wear-Out

Last year, I wrote about cryptographic wear-out for symmetric encryption. That post has attracted quite a bit of feedback from folks requesting comparisons against other block cipher modes, etc. One topic that I didn’t see requested much, but is equally interesting, is how this reasoning can be applied to asymmetric cryptography (if at all).

Let’s get one thing clear: Cryptography keys don’t “wear out” in the same sense as a physical key might. What we’re talking about is an ever-increasing risk of a collision occurring in random nonces.

ECDSA Key Wear-Out

ECDSA signatures involve a one-time secret, k. The scalar multiplication of k and the base point for the curve is encoded as half of the signature (r), while its modular inverse is multiplied by the sum of the truncated message hash and the product of r and the secret key to produce the other half of the signature (s).

If your selection of k is biased, or k is ever reused for two different messages, you can leak the secret key.

Strictly speaking, for any given ECDSA curve, there is only one k value that corresponds to a given r for all users (n.b it’s not distinct per keypair).

This means that all users of e.g. ECDSA over NIST P-256 have to worry about a shared cryptographic wear-out: After 2^112 signatures, there is a 2^-32 chance of a single collision occurring.

Fortunately, the search space of possible k-values is enormous, and this will not impose a real-world operational risk in the near future. If you’re worried about multi-user attacks, P-384 gives you a wear-out threshold of 2^176 messages, which we’re probably never going to achieve.

RSA Key Wear-Out

In order to calculate the wear-out for an RSA message, you first have to begin with an attack model. Previously, we were looking at algorithms that would become brittle if a nonce was reused.

RSA doesn’t have nonces. You can’t attack RSA this way.

But let’s assume that such an attack did exist. What might the safety limit look like? There are two remaining possible considerations for RSA’s security against cryptographic wear-out: Key size and padding mode.

RSA private keys are two prime numbers (p, q). RSA public keys are the product of the two primes (n) and a public exponent (e) that must be coprime to (p-1)(q-1). (In practice, e is usually set to 3, 65537, or some other small prime.)

The security of RSA is subexponential to key size, based on the difficulty of integer factoring attacks and the requirement for p and q to be prime numbers.

This primeness restriction doesn’t apply to your message. The padding mode dictates your upper limit on message size; e.g., PKCS#1 v1.5 padding will take up at least 3 bytes:

• For encryption, x = 0x00 || 0x02 || r || 0x00 || m, where r is random padding bytes (minimum 8 bytes).
• For signatures, x = 0x00 || 0x01 || 0xFF..FF || 0x00 || m.
• In either case, the padding is always at least 11 bytes long.

So if you have 2048-bit RSA keys, you can encrypt or sign up to 245 bytes (1960 bits) with PKCS#1 v1.5 padding. This corresponds to a safety limit of 2^974 messages.

(Art by Lynx vs Jackalope)

HMAC Wear-Out?

To keep things simple, the security of HMAC can be reduced to the collision risk of the underlying hash function.

If you’re trying to estimate when to rotate symmetric keys used for HMAC, take the birthday bound of the underlying hash function as your starting point.

• For SHA-256, you have a 50% chance of a collision after 2^128 messages. For a 2^-32 chance, you can get 2^112 messages out of a single key.
• For SHA-384, this is 2^176 messages.
• For SHA-512, this is 2^240 messages.

In either case, however, these numbers might as well be infinity.

With apologies to Filippo Valsorda.

Asymmetric Commitments

Did you know that fast MACs such as GHASH and Poly1305 aren’t random-key robust? This property can matter in surprising ways.

Did you know that ECDSA and RSA don’t qualify for this property either? This is related to the topics of malleability and exclusive ownership. You can learn more about this in the CryptoGotchas page.

Essentially, if a signature scheme is malleable or fails to provide exclusive ownership, it’s possible to construct two arbitrary (m, pk) pairs that produce the same signature.

Any nonmalleable signature scheme with exclusive ownership (i.e. Ed25519 with low-order point rejection and canonical signature checks, as provided by the latest version of libsodium) provides sufficient commitment–mostly due to how it uses a collision-resistant cryptographic hash function. (It’s also worth noting: HashEdDSA doesn’t. Isn’t cryptography fun?)

Generally, if you need random-key robustness, you want to explicitly make it part of your design.

Against “Fluffies”

In my blog post about the neverending wheel of Furry Twitter discourse, I mentioned the controversy around SFW spaces for underage furries.

Everything I said in that post is still accurate (go read it if you haven’t), but I want to emphasize something that maybe some people overlooked.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1426638694786682884

Underage furries calling themselves “fluffies” is a bad idea, for two reasons.

Divide and Conquer

The first reason is tactical, and not specific to what they’re calling themselves: If you label yourselves separately from the larger furry community, you make it much easier to be targeted–especially by propaganda. There’s a severely disturbed alt-right fringe to the furry fandom (dubbed alt-furry, the Furry Raiders, and so many other names) that would love nothing more than to sink their claws into younger furs.

It’ll start innocently enough (“Yay, you have your own space!”), but it will quickly accelerate (“Congrats on kicking those degenerates to the curb!”) to horrible places (“All LGBTQIA+ people are degenerates”), gliding on the wings of edgy humor.

This descent into madness is also known as the PewDiePipeline and all parents of furries should be made aware of it, lest it happen to their child:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnmRYRRDbuw

It bears emphasizing: This existence of a PewDiePipeline within the “fluffy” space is not predicated on the intentions of the proponents. They can have all the best intentions in the world and it will still happen to their microcosm.

https://twitter.com/ARCADEGUTS/status/1425687280983937027

Preventing this from happening will require an almost inhuman degree of vigilance and dedication to correcting discourse from going sour. None of us are omniscient, so I wouldn’t take that bet.

Pre-Existing Terminology

The second reason the “fluffies” label is a bad idea is more specific to the word “fluffies” in particular: It already refers to a very disturbing meme on 4chan from not-very-many years ago: Fluffy Abuse Threads.

I’m intentionally not including any videos or images of this topic. There just aren’t enough content warnings for how gross this content is.

By calling yourselves “fluffies”, the most deranged 4chan-dwellers and/or Kiwi Farms lurkers on the Internet will begin associate you with the “fluffy abuse” memes, and may even act accordingly. In their twisted minds, they may even rationalize their conduct as if somehow you’re consenting to the abuse, by virtue of what you call yourselves.

Look, I get it: When you’re young, the over-sexualization of the media can be very uncomfortable, and it’s natural to want to avoid it. Additionally, it’s only human to want your own special club with a special name to hang out with your exclusive (n.b. same-age) community.

But please think carefully about what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and which adults you decide to trust.

Also: maybe talk to older queers and/or furries about the history of the Furry Fandom, Pride, and kink before you make dangerous moves that make you more vulnerable to the worst humanity has to offer? Even if you don’t agree with us, we don’t want to see you get hurt.

There definitely is room in the furry fandom for people who are not comfortable with sexual content, or simply don’t want to be inundated with it all the damn time. It doesn’t need to be an exclusive thing or concept; instead, it should be normalized.

Ultimately, there’s probably a lot of work to be done to ensure kids and families have a safe and enjoyable furry con experience during daylight hours without repressing the queer and sexual identities of consenting adults at night. The best way to get from here to there is to talk, not to isolate.

Otherwise, we’ll keep seeing occurrences like this:

https://twitter.com/PrincelyKaden/status/1426192114694692866

The onus here is going to be largely on furry convention staff and chatroom moderators to actually listen to people reporting abusive behavior. They haven’t always been good about that, and it’s time for change.

https://twitter.com/MegaplexCon/status/1425966589241970693

A Meditation on Furries and Cringe

Every once in a while, I get a comment or email like this one:

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1360835077899436033

The biggest magnet for poorly-reasoned hate comments is, surprisingly, my tear-down of the “sigma male” meme.

You’d think the exposure of TheDonald’s non-CloudFlare IP address would draw more ire than having correct opinions on masculinity, but here we are.

Art by Sophie

Let’s talk about masculinity for a moment, guys.

There is nothing manlier than being your authentic self. Even if that means liking some “girly” things. Even if that means being soft and vulnerable at times. Even if that means actually conforming to some stereotypes perpetuated by toxic masculinity when it coincides with your likes and interests. You do you.

But this isn’t just true of the male gender. Authenticity is the epitome of humanity. There’s nothing that stops women and enbies from being ruthlessly themselves.

You can’t be authentic when you’re participating in Cringe Culture, which blindly tears large swaths of people down to stoke the feelings of superiority in the people who evade its blast.

People are weird. I’m weird. I don’t expect everyone to like me, nor do I want them to. (Parasocial relationships suck!)

It’s okay to be a little obsessed about something other people look down on just because you happen to like it. Just make sure you’re not eschewing your adult responsibilities. (We all have bills to pay and promises to keep to the people that matter to us.)

If people don’t like you because you suddenly revealed your fondness for classic video games, rock-tumbling, or linear algebra? Fuck ’em. May the bridges you burn light the way to people who will appreciate you for who you truly are.

I’ve been told my blog is “weapons grade cringe” before, because I dared talk about encryption while having what, to most adults, comes across as little more than a cartoon brand or company mascot.

(Art by Lynx vs Jackalope)

Furries and Blue State Privilege

I sympathize with most queer people and/or furries for not wanting to subject themselves to the bigotry that runs rampant in Red States, but the ones who are jerks to other members of their community for living in those states, I can do without.

https://twitter.com/SarahcatFursuit/status/1413566747148435456

Being an asshole to someone because they live in, or are moving to, a state whose politics you dislike is equal parts stupid, selfish, and self-defeating:

• It’s stupid because there’s no reason for expressing prejudice or painting with broad brushes. For example: “Florida Furs are bad people” is an attack on the author of this blog.
• It’s selfish because not everyone who wants to leave these states has the resources or opportunity to do so, so all you’re doing is shining a spotlight on your own privilege. Way to show your entire ass to the community.
• It’s self-defeating because of the way the U.S. political system is architected:
  If you wished for a genie to move every LGBTQIA+ person to the west coast of the United States, within a few years you’d essentially reduce support for LGBTQIA+ rights to approximately 6 out of 100 votes in the US Senate and 68 out of 435 in the House of Representatives.

  When you factor in who owns the land in the big tech cities (San Francisco, Seattle, etc.) and how much political and economic power they wield, it becomes very clear that your shaming of others for not boarding the bandwagon serves the interests of the worst of humanity: Landlords and venture capitalists.

  Not a good move for people who claim to be progressive, and want to achieve progressive political outcomes nationwide.

The fact that some states have horrendous laws on the books, even worse bastards enforcing these laws, and somehow even more terrible politicians gatekeeping any meaningful progress from changing the system isn’t ever going to be improved from the outside.

I say all this, and I acknowledge Florida does suck in a lot of obvious ways: Our governor (Ron DeSantis) has a disposition that would actually be improved if he wore clown make-up to press appearances. We also have far too many furries that are anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, or both.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1300911840000708608

But when furries go out of their way to shame someone, simply for living here? You’re not helping. Seriously stop and think about your priorities.

And maybe–just maybe–be surgically precise when you decide insults are warranted.

Now that I’ve flushed the blog post topic buffer, I’m fresh out of ideas. Let me know some topics that interest you in my Telegram group so I don’t get bored and eventually write Buzzfeed-quality crap like this:

In hindsight, ideas like this are 90% of the reason Cringe Culture refuses to die.

https://soatok.blog/2021/08/16/lightning-round/

#asymmetricCryptography #ECDSA #Florida #furries #FurryFandom #HMAC #Politics #RSA #Society #wearOut

Dhole Moments

2020-07-07 14:05:09

There are a lot of random topics I’ve wanted to write about since I started Dhole Moments, and for one reason or another, haven’t actually written about. I know from past experience with other projects that if you don’t occasionally do some housekeeping, your backlog eventually collapses under its own gravity and you can never escape from it.

So, to prevent that, I’d like to periodically take some time to clean up some of those loose ends that collect over time.

Random-Access AEAD

AEAD stands for Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data. Typically, AEAD constructions involve a stream cipher (which may also be a block cipher in counter mode) and a message authentication code (which may also be an almost-universal hash function).

AEAD modes are designed for one-shot APIs: Encrypt (then authenticate) all at once; (verify then) decrypt all at once. AES-GCM, ChaPoly, etc.

AEADs are less great at providing random access to the underlying plaintext. For example: If you’re encrypting a 240 GB file with AES-GCM, but you only need a 512 KB chunk at some arbitrary point in the file, you’re forced to choose between either:

1. Authenticating the rest of the AES-GCM ciphertext, then decrypting only the relevant chunk. (Performance sucks.)
2. Sacrificing integrity and decrypting the desired chunk with AES-CTR.

Being forced to choose between speed and security will almost certainly result in a loss of security. The incentives of software developers (especially with fly-by-night startup engineers) all-but-guarantee this outcome.

Consequently, there have been several implementations of streaming-friendly AEAD. The most famous of which is Phil Rogaway’s STREAM construction.

Source: Rogaway’s paper

The downside to STREAM is that it requires an additional T bytes (e.g. 16 for an 128-bit authentication tag) for each chunk of the plaintext.

A similar solution, as implemented in the AWS Encryption SDK, is to carefully separate plaintexts into equal-sized frames and have special rules governing IV/nonce selection. This lets you facilitate random access while still making the security of the whole system easy to reason about.

Can we do better than STREAM and message framing?

The most straightforward idea is to use a Merkle tree on the ciphertext with a stream cipher for extracting a distinct key for each leaf node. This can be applied to existing AEAD ciphertexts, out of band, to create a sort of deep authentication tag that can be used to authenticate any random subset of the message (provided you have the correct nonce/key).

However, I haven’t found the time to develop this idea into something that can be toyed with by myself and other researchers.

More Introductory Articles

Let’s face it:

Art by Riley

I’ve previously suggested an alternative strategy for programmers to learn cryptography. I’d like to do more posts covering introductory material for the topics I’m familiar with, so anyone who wants to actually employ my proposed strategy can carry themselves across the finish line.

Dissecting Dog-Whistles

Random fact: My fursona is a dhole–also known as a whistling dog.

Soatok is a dhole, not a fox. Art by Khia.

Coincidentally, I’m deeply fascinated by language, and planned to start a series analyzing dog-whistle language (especially the kind commonly used against queer subcultures).

However, the very nature of dog-whistle language provides a veneer of plausible deniability for the whistler’s intent, which makes it very difficult to address them in a meaningful way that doesn’t undermine your own credibility.

So, for the time being, this is on the back-burner.

Reader Questions

I’ve received quite a few questions via email and social media since I started this blog in April. The most obvious thing to do with these questions would be to periodically collate a bunch of them into a Questions and Answer style post.

However! I have an open source projected called FAQ Off that is way more efficient at the Q&A format than a long-form blog post. If you’d like to see it in action, start here.

Art by Kyume

General Punditry

I make a lot of dumb jokes, typically involving puns and other wordplay. Most of these live in private Telegram conversations with other furries, but a few have leaked out onto Twitter over the years.

Is automated vulnerability scanning a nessusity?

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) November 23, 2017

Nurse: "I suspect this patient attempted to shove a foreign object into their urethra for pleasure"

Doctor: "I believe your theory is sound"

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) June 25, 2018

A lot of them involve queer lingo.

People say it's lonely at the top.

No wonder there's so many bottoms in this fandom 😛

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) December 30, 2019

BitTorrent users are thirsty bottoms. Always complaining about wanting more seed.

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) August 4, 2019

My RAID controller has big disk synergy

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) August 1, 2018

Some of them involve furry in-jokes.

Q) Why are foxes so prevalent in the furry fandom?

A) We're a sub-culture not a dom-culture.

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) May 24, 2018

Intrusion detection systems are old hat. What we need is a protrusion detection system.

Introducing OwO

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) February 1, 2018

Some are just silly.

Using mined bitcoins to buy a pumpkin spice latte makes you an ASIC bitch, right?

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) February 6, 2018

So in gay male furry culture if you give into a booty call from your ex-boyfriend… does that mean you were craving the XD?

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) August 25, 2018

If SQL is pronounced "sequel" then PHP must be pronounced "fap".

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) July 23, 2019

What do you call a submissive dragon with a mathematics background who's already lubed up for you?

A sliding scale.

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) December 26, 2018

Did you hear about the clairvoyant babyfur that broke RSA?

Turns out, all you needed was a padding oracle.

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) October 1, 2017

I should look for my next partner in a nuclear chemistry lab.

I hear they're good at dating.

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) December 8, 2016

In my humble opinion, there haven’t been nearly enough puns on this blog (unless the embedded tweets above count).

Normally, this is where I’d proclaim, “I shall rectify this mistake” and proceed to make an ass out of myself, but I don’t like forced and obvious puns.

A lot of furries get this wrong: “Pawesome” is not clever, unless you’re talking to someone with a marsupial fursona. Then maybe.

The best puns come in two forms: They’re either so clever that you never saw it coming, or they’re just clever enough that the punchline lands at the same time you realized a bad pun was even possible.

Only Soatok brand puns are 100% whole groan

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) January 26, 2018

Miscellaneous / Meta

The past few blog posts touched a little on political subjects (especially How and Why America Was Hit So Hard By COVID-19, but this short-term trend actually started with my Pride Month post).

At some point in the future, I may write a post dedicated to politics, but for the time being, it’s not really a subject I care enough about in and of itself to emphasize all the time.

Let me be clear: Being gay in America is inherently political. Developing technology is inherently political (although you don’t always realize it). Being a gay technologist, saying something politically significant is an inevitability.

But I’m not interested in the traditional roles and narratives that infect politics and political discourse. Labels are stupid and I’m not interested in being a Useful Idiot for anyone’s propaganda.

---

The most difficult thing about writing blog posts for me is coming up with a meaningful title. I’ve lost many hours due to the writer’s block that ensues.

The second most difficult thing for me is writing closing statements that aren’t totally redundant.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/l44OV2jlN7A?start=665&feature=oembed
George Carlin – “Count the Superfluous Redundant Pleonastic Tautologies” – Skip to 11:05 if WordPress breaks something
Some bloggers like to sign off like they’re writing an email. “Happy hacking!” and whatnot. To me, this feels forced and inauthentic, like a bad pun.

So instead, here’s a totally sick piece of art I got from @MrJimmyDaFloof.
Furry artists are, like the rest of the fandom, amazing.
https://soatok.blog/2020/07/07/dont-forget-to-brush-your-fur/

Spoiler: It’s nothing scandalous or bad.

Every once in a while, someone posts this photo on Twitter to attempt to dunk on furries:

Midwest FurFest 2018

Over the years, I’ve seen this discourse play out several times.

The people that post this photo usually don’t elaborate on why they think this photo is meaningful, they just let it stand alone and expect their audience to fill in the blanks.

So let’s leave nothing to the imagination!

I’m going to take somewhat of a Q&A format for this blog post, which is a slight departure from my usual writing style.

But first, let’s tackle the most important point:

STI Testing is a damn good idea

If you’re organizing any type of public event–be it a gaming, anime, steampunk, cyberpunk, or comic book convention, music concert, medieval or renaissance festival, and so on–you should consider doing what Midwest FurFest does.

This is obvious to most queer people, but might be counter-intuitive at first. So let me explain.

Any large gathering of people is likely to lead to adults hooking up. This is a fact of life, especially when alcohol is involved.

Having a convenient way to know your status onsite is a great way to allow consenting adults to make informed decisions about their sexual health, especially if they’re not generally promiscuous and aren’t in the habit of getting tested regularly.

Let me emphasize: the most sexually promiscuous adults are generally already in the habit of getting regularly tested, so the onsite STI testing doesn’t actually do much for them.

This only helps people who don’t regularly visit their health department or planned parenthood to know their status.

Therefore, free onsite STI testing is a damn good idea to protect the health of your community.

Even if you hold some weird disdain for the habitually sexually promiscuous (“sluts”), this service primarily benefits everyone else, since any ethical slut already knows their goddamn status as well as the status of anyone they’re fucking that night.

Any event that can afford to offer Free STI testing and doesn’t probably doesn’t care about adults making informed decisions about their sexual health.

Furry conventions are for furries, which are overwhelmingly LGBTQIA+ compared to the rest of the population. That one of our conventions can afford to take steps to protect the sexual health of its adult attendees is a damn good idea, even if it was limited to HIV at first.

Everyone should consider stealing this idea from us.

Seriously, it’s not the 1980’s anymore. Everyone is at risk of HIV. It isn’t just us gays that need to be careful.

MarleyTanuki

What are the other benefits of offering STI Testing at conventions?

Aside from the obvious benefits to public health, there are some other community benefits to offering STI screenings at large public gatherings like conventions.

Specifically, it destigmatizes sexual health and people who are HIV-positive.

It doesn’t encourage “degeneracy” (which is a word loaded with historical baggage that many people aren’t aware of).

It encourages people to know their status and ask prospective partners their status–and, if they don’t know, provides a convenient way to get tested before any sexual activity occurs. This obviously prevents the spread of STIs and is a great idea for public health.

How much does this cost MFF?

As far as I’m aware? Nothing, aside from dedicated convention space and maybe some parking passes for the hotel. This doesn’t touch the convention budget.

Howard Brown Health approached MFF years ago and, from what I can gather, continues to cover the cost of STI testing.

(HBH is Chicago-specific, though. I can’t promise there’s a congruent organization in your area, specifically. I’ll update this post if I find a good resource for finding local organizations beyond “ask your local health department”.)

What is the context behind this photo?

Midwest FurFest usually overlaps with World AIDS Day.

Many years ago, they decided to start offering free onsite HIV testing in observance:

https://twitter.com/FurFest/status/804366774699429888

Many people realized what a damn good idea that free HIV testing was for conventions, so the demand for these tests far exceeded what they anticipated.

Thus, by popular demand, they have continued this forward in the years since.

https://twitter.com/FurFest/status/1595450934410170368

In addition to being overwhelmingly queer today, the furry community has a long history of queer involvement going back to its roots.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIPk-itLl1jOlIa2wTnu-1wpivom6MTd-

The photo at the top was from 2018–the third year of this service being offered.

Unlike the other photos of the booth signs taken over the years, that particular photo was posted on a subreddit dedicated to hating furries (r/yiffinhell). This may explain why it’s the specific photo that always gets reposted by people trying to dunk on furries.

(Also: Try harder next time. This kind of dunk is self-defeating.)

This photo is proof that furries are sex freaks!

Wrong. Humans in general are sex freaks. Furries really aren’t that special here.

To wit: Ask any experienced event organizers about their experiences with Tupperware conventions, and you’ll hear stories that make furry convention antics seem tame in comparison.

Alternatively, ask about academic or medical conferences.

Furthermore, as I explained above, offering free HIV testing (or even free STI testing) doesn’t actually benefit the kinds of “sex freaks” that you may be worried about.

But sex is evil!

What’s actually wrong with sex? None of us would be alive if it weren’t for people having sex.

Rape is bad. Clearly. The difference between rape and sex is consent. So if the conduct is occurring between consenting adults, who cares? Let them fuck who they want. You’re not responsible for them.

In an environment where sexual health is taken seriously, inadvertently encouraging sexual promiscuity by making these tests available… doesn’t actually hurt anyone.

Like, stop and think about it. What specific harm is it causing, and who specifically would actually be harmed?

Furry may be a sex-positive space, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily sexualized. There’s a difference between the two terms, y’know!

Why talk about this?

There’s a tendency among some furries to promote negative peace, especially when it involves the media.

I’m not one of them.

Sophie

We need to acknowledge and deal with problems that happen in our community, and hold people accountable for misbehavior. We cannot do this if we cannot talk about problems. Real problems are not “drama”.

If there was any social downside to STI testing being offered at conventions, I’d talk openly about it. But there isn’t any.

The only “problem” occurs when bigots and imbeciles try to make it seem like bad optics to do the bare minimum to prevent the transmission of STIs in their community.

Don’t fall for their deceptions. If you’re reading this page, you’re probably better than that.

Also, my blog tends to rank high on search engines, so I saw fit to write about this topic so when someone seeks to fact-check this photo, they’ll have the opportunity to learn about it.

AJ

TL;DR

Furry conventions offering STI testing is a damn good idea that everyone should copy for their own events.

https://soatok.blog/2024/09/30/why-are-furry-conventions-offering-hiv-testing-to-attendees/

#conventions #furries #furryConventions #FurryFandom #HIVTesting #publicHealth #STITesting

Dhole Moments

2021-04-02 11:30:22

If you’ve somehow never encountered an Internet meme before, you may be surprised to learn that the number 69 is often associated with sex (and, more specifically, a particular sex act).

This happens to be the 69th blog post published on Dhole Moments, since I started the blog in April 2020.

You could even go as far as to say it’s the 4/20 +69th post, for maximum meme potential.

42069, get it? (Art by Khia)

However! I make a concerted effort to keep my blog safe-for-work, so if you’re worried about this post being flooded with furry porn (a.k.a. yiff art), or cropped yiff memes, or any other such lascivious nonsense, you won’t find any of that on this blog. (Sorry to disappoint.)

Instead, I’d like to take the opportunity to correct some public misconceptions about human sexuality, identity, and how these topics relate to the furry fandom.

Is Furry a Sex Thing?

I find it difficult to overstate how often people assume the “furry is a sex thing” premise. Especially on technical forums.

But let’s backtrack for a second. What isn’t a sex thing?

Art by Khia.

This turns out to be a difficult question to answer. Even Wikipedia’s somewhat concise list of paraphilias doesn’t leave a lot of topics off the table.

Are shoes a sex thing? Are cigarettes? Poetry?

Comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Hell, one might be tempted to cry foul on the header image used in this blog post for including tentacles, hypnotic eyes, and footpaws in the same image. (Scandalous!) But if you look at the uncropped versions of these images, you’ll quickly realize they aren’t yiffy.

Top Art by AtlasInu.
Bottom: Created by FlashWhite_. Fox is Kiit Lock.
The more you read about this topic, the more you’ll realize this question is inert. Anything can be a sex thing. Humans are largely a sexual species, and sex is deeply ingrained in our culture (which can make life awkward for asexual people).

Instead, the question of whether or not the furry fandom is sexual becomes a bit of a Rorschach test for one’s cognitive biases.

If you’re chiefly concerned with public image–especially when fursuiting in public, where kids can see–you’re incentivized to double down on the fact that the furry fandom is no more inherently sexual than anything else can be. And this is true.

If you’re concerned with cultivating a sex-positive environment where people can live out their sexual fantasies in a safe, sane, and consensual manner, you’re incentivized to insist that furry is a sexual thing. “We have murrsuits for crying out loud! Stop kink-shaming! Down with puritan ideologies on sex!” And this is also true.

Humans are largely sexual, so any activity humans engage in will inevitably involve people sexualizing it. Even tupperware parties, for fuck’s sake! Anyone who believes there is a “Rule 34 of the Internet” tacitly acknowledges this fact, even if it’s inconvenient for a narrative they’re trying to spin.

So while this might be a meaningless question, one has to wonder…

Why Does Everyone Care So Much If Being a Furry (In Particular) Is Sexual or Not?

To understand what’s really happening here, you need to know a few things about the furry fandom.

1. Approximately 80% of furries are LGBTQIA+ (source).
2. Early anti-furry sentiments were motivated by queerphobia, especially on forums like Something Awful–and the influence of early hateful memes can still be seen to this day.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

One of the Something Awful staff eventually acknowledged and apologized for this.

Archived from here. To corroborate, an Internet author named Maddox once parodied SomethingAwful’s hateful obsession with furries.

There was even a movement within the furry fandom history (the “Burned Furs“) that aimed to excise queerness and sex-positivity from the community. It’s no coincidence that a lot of the former Burned Furs joined with the alt-right movement within the furry fandom.

The alt-right is explicitly queerphobic; especially against trans people. But it’s not just queerphobic; it’s also an ableist and racist movement.

Regardless of sexual orientation, a lot of furries are neurodivergent, too.

Simply put: The reason that most people care whether or not furries are sexual is rooted in the propensity of anti-furry rhetoric in Internet culture, which was motivated at its inception by mostly queerphobia with a dash of ableism.

Art by Khia.

The notion that furries are “too sexual” originated as a dog-whistle for “too gay”, and caught on with people who didn’t know the hidden meaning of the idea. Now a lot of people repeat these ideas without intending or even knowing their roots, and many more have internalized shame about the whole situation.

Unfortunately, this even precipitates into the furry fandom itself, which leads to an unfortunate cyclical discourse that takes place largely on Furry Twitter.

Original tweet unavailable

Furry Isn’t a Sexuality. There is no F in LGBT!

If you publicly state “anti-furry rhetoric is largely queerphobic dog-whistles”, you will inevitably hear someone try to retort this way. So let’s be very clear about it.

Furry isn’t its own sexual identity, and I would never claim otherwise.

Unlike transgender people, furries do not experience anything like “species dysphoria” (although therians/otherkin do report experiencing this; don’t conflate the two).

What’s happening here is: Most furries (about 80% of us) have separate sexual/gender identities that deviate from the heteronormative. A lot of queerphobia is easier to sell when you convey it through dog-whistles. So that’s what bigots did.

Polite company that wouldn’t partake in queer-bashing is often willing to laugh at the notion of “Beat A Furry Day“.

Anyone who tries to twist this acknowledgement to mean something ridiculous like an LGBTF movement is either being irrational or a 4chan troll.

Art by Khia.

For related reasons, you shouldn’t ever feel the need to “come out” as a furry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG2DRLimBSM

It’s okay to just really like Beastars, Zootopia, or even the Furry aspects of the Minecraft and Roblox communities. It doesn’t make you a sex-freak.

What’s the Take-Away?

It doesn’t really matter if the furry fandom has a sexual side to it. Everything does! The people who proclaim to care very much about this care for all the wrong reasons. Don’t be one of them.

Art by Swizz.

And remember: Lewd furries aren’t furry trash; we’re yiff-raff!

Sex Isn’t Well-Defined Either

While we’re talking about sex, did you know that biological sex isn’t neatly divided into “male” and “female”? This isn’t an ideological position; it’s a scientific one. Just ask a biologist!

https://twitter.com/JUNIUS_64/status/1054387892624285699

Trans and nonbinary people change gender (which is about your role within society) from what they were assigned at birth, but even sex itself isn’t so concrete.

The next time someone tries to appeal to “science” when talking about trans rights and then vomits up some unenlightened K-12 explanation of human reproduction and biological sex, remind them that science disagrees with their oversimplified and outdated mental model–and they might know this if they kept up with scientists.

Where Can I Learn More About the Sexual Side of the Furry Fandom?

Important: If you’re under the age of 18, you should stay out of adult spaces until you’re old enough to participate. No excuses.

If you’re looking for pornographic furry art (also called “yiff”), most furry art sites (FurryLife, FurAffinity, etc.) have adult content filters that you can turn off when you register an account.

If you’re looking for something more interactive, there’s a swath of furries that develop private VR experiences for 18+ audiences. One of the most well-funded Patreon artists makes adult furry games.

If you’re curious about why and how people express their sexuality when fursuiting (also called “murrsuiting”), there’s a subreddit for that.

It’s really not hard to find. This is one of the advantages of furry being a largely sex-positive community.

Furry YouTuber Ragehound even has a series about Furries After Dark if you want to learn more about these topics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGOlQJDO5no

Finally, similar to how 69 is a meme number for sex, furries have an additional meme number (621) that comes from the name of an adult furry website (e621.net).

You now have enough knowledge to navigate the adult side of the fandom. Just don’t come crying to me when you develop the uncanny knack for recognizing which r/furry_irl posts are actually cropped yiff versus wholly worksafe art.

https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #LGBTQIA_ #Society

Recently, there has been a lot of misinformation and propaganda flying around the American news media about the furry fandom. Unfortunately, this seems to be increasing with time.

Art: LvJ

Consequently, there are a lot of blanket statements and hot takes floating around social media right now about whether or not furries should talk with journalists.

That is to say, a lot of people are screaming, “Don’t ever talk to the press!”

I thought I’d offer my perspective, seeing as I did talk to journalists during the whole Ridgeland library incident.

But to explain my nuanced position, I need to explain a bit of background.

Never Say Never

My blog talks a lot about cryptography. You don’t need to understand anything about cryptography to get the point I’m going to make today, however.

Most information security professionals have hammered into their own minds to “never roll your own crypto”.

Taken to the logical extreme, this kind of advice would prevent the development of cryptography and make everyone’s communications vulnerable. This is obviously a bad outcome.

So why do professionals keep saying it?

99.99% of the time, the rule applies. If you’re building a line-of-business CRUD app, you don’t need to invent a new block cipher. Even if your cipher turns out to be very good, by whatever coincidence, it’s better to leave that to the experts.

In the minority of cases where someone needs to break the rule, they must do so knowing that they’re violating a norm. And the impetus is on them to justify this breakage; lest they suffer the consequences.

Usually, in cryptography, this just means “you aren’t taken seriously,” which is a pretty bad outcome.

In other areas of life, breaking a norm can mean ostracization or legal peril.

Back to Furries and the Media

When I see furries screaming, “Don’t talk to the press!” I’m reminded of how “Don’t roll your own crypto!” is practiced by the cryptography community.

Most of the time, it’s obviously a bad idea for furries to talk to the press, for a few obvious reasons:

1. Random furries probably have no special training for dealing with the media, which means they’re easy to manipulate into spreading a false narrative
2. Public communication is a skill that most of us don’t practice
3. If you suffer from any kind of anxiety, the previous two reasons are exacerbated

Even if you’re a popular streamer or content creator, the kinds of questions they ask and how they present your answers to their audience is a different class from your fans and friends.

But should the rule for furries and the media be, “Never?”

Uncle Kage from AnthroCon says yes (with some nuance, in so many drunken words):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZX0IvavEo

Meanwhile, Xydexx says no (with some nuance):

https://twitter.com/XydexxUnicorn/status/1666111194531332098

https://twitter.com/XydexxUnicorn/status/1666111788448923650

https://twitter.com/XydexxUnicorn/status/1666112045719203840

How you answer this question broadly depends on how much you trust your community.

Do you assume malice or incompetence from fellow furries? “Don’t ever talk to the press” likely sounds like sage advice to you.

Conversely, if you hold your community members in higher esteem, you’re more likely to encourage some conversations with some media outlets.

Regardless, there is one rule that must never be broken, but recently was.

Furries Must Never Contribute to Right-Wing Extremist Media like FOX News

Unfortunately…

…they already have.

Don’t do this. FOX News isn’t actually news; they argue as much in court.

Furry Press Checklist

If you’re going to talk to the press, you need to (at bare minimum) know the following:

1. Which outlet, and what is their reputation?
2. Who within that outlet are you talking with?
3. What are you talking about?
4. What questions or concerns do they believe their viewers have?

The most egregious incidents can be prevented by asking the first question and researching the outlet.

You should also know who you’re talking to, and whether or not they try to appeal to violent right-wing stochastic terrorists.

Many local news stations are okay, but specific journalists aren’t trustworthy. That’s why question 2 matters.

Regardless of the yellowness of the journalism you’re exposing yourself and all of the furry fandom to, you need to have a clear understanding of what’s being asked of you before you agree to any interviews.

Art: Scruff Kerfluff

This is a lot of homework and responsibility. If you’re not willing to do it, then don’t talk to the media.

There are better ways to get your thirty pieces of silver fifteen minutes of fame.

Epilogue

Of course, the person who went on FOX News is also a horrible person across every axis.

Not just this:

Citing your IQ in an online discussion means you lose whatever argument.

…but also this:

https://twitter.com/videah_/status/1667490374909149187

FOX News. Not even once.

https://soatok.blog/2023/06/06/on-furries-and-the-media/

#FOXNews #furries #furry #FurryFandom #media #Society

Dhole Moments

2022-04-06 10:30:32

You’ve probably heard the rumors by now. It’s cropped up in Michigan, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and even Australia.

The rumor is: Parents around the country are expressing “concerns” over schools allegedly permitting students that identify as cats use litter boxes in public schools.

You can hear this idea being parroted by Nebraska State Senator Bruce Bostelman, without an ounce of irony or self-awareness:

https://twitter.com/jonnykip21/status/1508485363177861124

Of course, it doesn’t matter how often or how thoroughly these allegations are debunked (and, make no mistake, they are debunked), that doesn’t stop people from spreading this false and damnable rumor on Facebook Groups like “Protect Nebraska Children”.

As a member of the furry community who also strongly opposes misinformation on the Internet, I feel it’s necessary and appropriate for me to expose the dark truths about this litter box story once and for all.

Who and What Are Furries?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPSQVRJuDTs

Furries are members of the Furry Fandom, an art-centric participatory online community (with real-world conventions and events) consisting of people who enjoy anthropomorphic characters.

Characters like this!
(Art: LvJ)

For one reason or another, furries are also a predominantly LGBTQIA+ community. If you took a large random sample of people, you’d expect at least 90% to be heterosexual and cisgender. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. But if you took a random sample of furries, that figure is now only 20%.

For this reason, furry hate was often used as a dog-whistle for homophobia in forums where overt homophobia was not permitted.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

If you’d like to learn more about the furry fandom, I highly recommend the appropriately named 2020 documentary The Fandom by Ash Coyote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY

Are Furries in K-12 Public Schools?

Overwhelmingly, no. The average age of the furry fandom varies from survey to survey, but 26 years old seems like a good estimate for the median age for survey participants (as of 2020).

Source: FurScience, 2020 survey results

Interestingly, the median age of furries was only 20 in the year 2011, which suggests that the furry fandom is consistently getting older.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t any furries under the age of 18. We just don’t have any data on them today.

Second, due to ethical restrictions, the IARP is unable to study minors (as parental consent would be required, something we cannot reasonably expect to obtain if a person has not “come out” to their family as a furry).

Furscience

This is the only scientific data we have, and it’s not perfect, but you can actually extrapolate a reasonable heuristic for the magnitude of underage furs based on the change in adult median age over time.

Since the adults of the furry fandom are consistently getting older (median 20 in 2011, median 26 in 2020, which is a 6 year increase over 9 years), the proportion of people under 18 was likely at most 33% of the total furry population in a given year during this interval.

This upper limit assumes most underage furries continue to be furries in adulthood, a negligible mortality rate, and people are discovering the fandom younger than 18.

If a lot of furries discover the fandom after they turn 18, then 33% is probably unreasonably high.

If this proportion still holds true, then the median age for furries is still squarely in the realm of young adulthood, not childhood.

Do Furries Identify as Animals?

No, furries do not identify as animals in the way that these very dumb rumors would imply.

People that identify as a non-human animal are called therians (or more broadly, otherkin). Most furries are not therians, but some are.

Do Furries That Identify as Cats Use Litter Boxes?

No, this is a damned lie with no basis in reality. Even Snopes debunked it.

If you’re interested in the origins of this dumb rumor, Dogpatch Press has a deep dive into the history of it going all the way back to the 1990’s.

---

The Dark Truth About These Rumors

If it’s not true, why are Facebook Groups and GOP politicians spreading lies about furries and public school students all of the sudden?

Unfortunately, the answer is transphobia.

https://twitter.com/KandissTaylor/status/1506603753008472064

There is an emerging generational culture war about transgender people.

To many older Americans, the idea that a person could be anything other than male or female seems absurd, and the notion that anyone could change their gender is uncomfortable (but science is consistently on trans people’s sides here).

Most younger people don’t carry the same prejudices as their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

This litter box rumor is both a dog whistle for generalized queerphobia (as the majority of furry hate always has been) and a weak satire of non-binary gender identities. “If they can decide they’re neither male or female, what’s stopping them from identifying as a cat?” is the premise of this bigoted reasoning.

Before gay marriage was legal in America, there were a lot of online arguments put forth by evangelical Christians and Republicans that, “If you make gay marriage legal, soon you’ll have people wanting to marry their pets and we’ll have to legalize bestiality.”

Which, yes, is a very dumb slippery slope fallacy, but the current furry panic certainly echoes their same delusional beliefs about alternative lifestyles.

In short, the entire premise of the “furry litter-box in public schools” rumor is to bully nonbinary and/or transgender students through a dog-whistle, so they can evade being cancelled for overt bigotry.

These people are showing their whole ass when they spread these lies.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1506931766837321731

Also, it’s interesting that the people spreading these lies are Republicans, who claim to want to “protect children”, but are also in favor of child marriage.

What Can We Do About These Lies?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify anyone in your life who believes these rumors (especially if they’re sharing lies from Facebook Groups that peddle misinformation), and then link them to this blog post.

I don’t expect it to persuade everyone, but it can save you the effort of having to argue further with them. Just copy+paste the URL and move on with your day, knowing you did your part to tell them, “You’re wrong, shut the fuck up.”

Where Did This Hoax Originate?

Allegedly, this entire hoax about “furries being permitted to use litter boxes in public schools” was started as a prank by a user named Tracing Woodgrains, a contributor to the anti-trans podcast Blocked and Reported, hosted by Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog (alternative mirror).

(Art: LvJ)

So—what does it take to persuade Libs of TikTok to tilt at windmills, to spread a moral panic over a falsehood? How can hoaxers break past her fact-checking, with nary a red flag to be seen?

A nonexistent man passed on a false tip on the basis of paper-thin evidence, then squirmed away at any attempts to nail down the concrete before finishing things off with a broken link to a Facebook group that did not exist.

— How I Convinced Libs of TikTok to Publish a False Story

So there you have it. This entire thing is not only unbelievable, but fabricated for the sake of trolls’ amusement.

https://soatok.blog/2022/04/06/the-dark-truth-about-the-furry-protocol/

#demographics #falsehoods #furries #furry #FurryFandom #lies #litterBoxRumor #misinformation #Politics #rumors #Society

You’ve probably heard the rumors by now. It’s cropped up in Michigan, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and even Australia.

The rumor is: Parents around the country are expressing “concerns” over schools allegedly permitting students that identify as cats use litter boxes in public schools.

You can hear this idea being parroted by Nebraska State Senator Bruce Bostelman, without an ounce of irony or self-awareness:

https://twitter.com/jonnykip21/status/1508485363177861124

Of course, it doesn’t matter how often or how thoroughly these allegations are debunked (and, make no mistake, they are debunked), that doesn’t stop people from spreading this false and damnable rumor on Facebook Groups like “Protect Nebraska Children”.

As a member of the furry community who also strongly opposes misinformation on the Internet, I feel it’s necessary and appropriate for me to expose the dark truths about this litter box story once and for all.

Who and What Are Furries?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPSQVRJuDTs

Furries are members of the Furry Fandom, an art-centric participatory online community (with real-world conventions and events) consisting of people who enjoy anthropomorphic characters.

Characters like this!
(Art: LvJ)

For one reason or another, furries are also a predominantly LGBTQIA+ community. If you took a large random sample of people, you’d expect at least 90% to be heterosexual and cisgender. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. But if you took a random sample of furries, that figure is now only 20%.

For this reason, furry hate was often used as a dog-whistle for homophobia in forums where overt homophobia was not permitted.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

If you’d like to learn more about the furry fandom, I highly recommend the appropriately named 2020 documentary The Fandom by Ash Coyote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY

Are Furries in K-12 Public Schools?

Overwhelmingly, no. The average age of the furry fandom varies from survey to survey, but 26 years old seems like a good estimate for the median age for survey participants (as of 2020).

Source: FurScience, 2020 survey results

Interestingly, the median age of furries was only 20 in the year 2011, which suggests that the furry fandom is consistently getting older.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t any furries under the age of 18. We just don’t have any data on them today.

Second, due to ethical restrictions, the IARP is unable to study minors (as parental consent would be required, something we cannot reasonably expect to obtain if a person has not “come out” to their family as a furry).

Furscience

This is the only scientific data we have, and it’s not perfect, but you can actually extrapolate a reasonable heuristic for the magnitude of underage furs based on the change in adult median age over time.

Since the adults of the furry fandom are consistently getting older (median 20 in 2011, median 26 in 2020, which is a 6 year increase over 9 years), the proportion of people under 18 was likely at most 33% of the total furry population in a given year during this interval.

This upper limit assumes most underage furries continue to be furries in adulthood, a negligible mortality rate, and people are discovering the fandom younger than 18.

If a lot of furries discover the fandom after they turn 18, then 33% is probably unreasonably high.

If this proportion still holds true, then the median age for furries is still squarely in the realm of young adulthood, not childhood.

Do Furries Identify as Animals?

No, furries do not identify as animals in the way that these very dumb rumors would imply.

People that identify as a non-human animal are called therians (or more broadly, otherkin). Most furries are not therians, but some are.

Do Furries That Identify as Cats Use Litter Boxes?

No, this is a damned lie with no basis in reality. Even Snopes debunked it.

If you’re interested in the origins of this dumb rumor, Dogpatch Press has a deep dive into the history of it going all the way back to the 1990’s.

The Dark Truth About These Rumors

If it’s not true, why are Facebook Groups and GOP politicians spreading lies about furries and public school students all of the sudden?

Unfortunately, the answer is transphobia.

https://twitter.com/KandissTaylor/status/1506603753008472064

There is an emerging generational culture war about transgender people.

To many older Americans, the idea that a person could be anything other than male or female seems absurd, and the notion that anyone could change their gender is uncomfortable (but science is consistently on trans people’s sides here).

Most younger people don’t carry the same prejudices as their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

This litter box rumor is both a dog whistle for generalized queerphobia (as the majority of furry hate always has been) and a weak satire of non-binary gender identities. “If they can decide they’re neither male or female, what’s stopping them from identifying as a cat?” is the premise of this bigoted reasoning.

Before gay marriage was legal in America, there were a lot of online arguments put forth by evangelical Christians and Republicans that, “If you make gay marriage legal, soon you’ll have people wanting to marry their pets and we’ll have to legalize bestiality.”

Which, yes, is a very dumb slippery slope fallacy, but the current furry panic certainly echoes their same delusional beliefs about alternative lifestyles.

In short, the entire premise of the “furry litter-box in public schools” rumor is to bully nonbinary and/or transgender students through a dog-whistle, so they can evade being cancelled for overt bigotry.

These people are showing their whole ass when they spread these lies.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1506931766837321731

Also, it’s interesting that the people spreading these lies are Republicans, who claim to want to “protect children”, but are also in favor of child marriage.

What Can We Do About These Lies?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify anyone in your life who believes these rumors (especially if they’re sharing lies from Facebook Groups that peddle misinformation), and then link them to this blog post.

I don’t expect it to persuade everyone, but it can save you the effort of having to argue further with them. Just copy+paste the URL and move on with your day, knowing you did your part to tell them, “You’re wrong, shut the fuck up.”

Where Did This Hoax Originate?

Allegedly, this entire hoax about “furries being permitted to use litter boxes in public schools” was started as a prank by a user named Tracing Woodgrains, a contributor to the anti-trans podcast Blocked and Reported, hosted by Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog (alternative mirror).

(Art: LvJ)

So—what does it take to persuade Libs of TikTok to tilt at windmills, to spread a moral panic over a falsehood? How can hoaxers break past her fact-checking, with nary a red flag to be seen?

A nonexistent man passed on a false tip on the basis of paper-thin evidence, then squirmed away at any attempts to nail down the concrete before finishing things off with a broken link to a Facebook group that did not exist.

— How I Convinced Libs of TikTok to Publish a False Story

So there you have it. This entire thing is not only unbelievable, but fabricated for the sake of trolls’ amusement.

https://soatok.blog/2022/04/06/the-dark-truth-about-the-furry-protocol/

#demographics #falsehoods #furries #furry #FurryFandom #lies #litterBoxRumor #misinformation #Politics #rumors #Society

Dhole Moments

2020-04-24 02:43:25

My recent post about the alleged source code leaks affecting Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive made the rounds on Twitter and made someone very mad, so I got hate DMs.
No more Angry Whoppers for you, mister!
…Look, I only said I got hate DMs, not that I got interesting or particularly effective hate DMs! Weak troll is weak, I know.

A lot of people online claim they “hate furries”, but almost none of them quite understand how prolific our community is, let alone how important we are to the Internet. As Stormi the Folf puts it…

I guarantee you the internet would collapse in a most horrific manner if all the furries in the world got Thano's snapped.

They *run* the internet in more ways than most people realize

— 🦊Stormi the Folf🐺 🔜FWA (@StormiFolf) April 23, 2020

Stormi is the Potato of Knowledge and Floof
What Stormi’s alluding to is true, and that’s a tale best told by an outsider to our community.

Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day. https://t.co/k1UqOv5kpd

— Ẑ͚͔͍̻̤̟ä̶̼̗̟͔́̿̾̓n̬͙̫̿͑͊̈̚d̡̰̭̞͖̟̖̟ͬ̚ê̺͖̂ͩ̀̉ͣrͪ̓ (@mmsword) November 28, 2019

Their follow-up tweet that elaborates on furry involvement is here.
So I’d like take the time to explain why nobody should ever underestimate the ingenuity or positivity of the furry community.

The Furry Fandom Has Saved Lives

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3h9sO17CV9A?feature=oembed
This is just one of many anecdotes. You can find many more here.
Although the furry fandom is widely misunderstood, it’s difficult to overstate how many lives have been saved and enriched by our community.

I wanted to share this touching moment. @Reo_Grayfox was telling me his story, and said those lines while staring straight into his fursuit's eyes. Hearing personal stories like this makes you appreciate the vastly diverse reasons why the furry fandom is essential to so many. pic.twitter.com/fD09Wmv6mf

— Joaquín Baldwin (@joabaldwin) January 22, 2018

Furries Provide Much-Needed Comfort to Others

In 2016, refugees from the civil war in Syria ended up in a hotel in Canada. This would have been an utterly remarkable fact if it wasn’t the same hotel and weekend as the local furry convention, Vancoufur.

The kids loved it.

This isn’t an isolated incident either. Our community is well-known for kindness and generosity in spades.

https://charcoalthings.tumblr.com/post/132996328881/i-will-defend-furries-to-my-grave

https://wakor.tumblr.com/post/126072529744/ok-you-know-what

What’s there to hate?

The Furry Fandom is Collectively Pretty Bad-Ass

Art by RueMaw.
No, not like that.

The fandom is bad-ass in as many ways as the fandom is incredibly diverse.
Image source and backstory of this meme: Dogpatch Press

90s furries built the Internet pic.twitter.com/Gicxme2HkT

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2019

SwiftOnSecurity knows the truth about more than just corn.

So one of my friends said furries pretty much run the US nuclear response communication networks. Just in case you're worried about Trump.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 12, 2016

Seriously.

Some of the Most Talented People You’ll Ever Meet Are Furries

eSports Champions:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWhrECl6zOY?feature=oembed

Musicians:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/4NlXsjKmcWegIfQEI0JzHK?utm_source=oembed

Artists and costume makers: I could literally link to hundreds of artists here. Follow me on Twitter; I retweet a lot of cute stuff.

Pretty much everything you could aspire to be that isn’t also terrible, if you look hard enough, you’ll find furries in the leaderboards having a fun time with it all.

The only reason to hate furries is thinly-veiled homophobia, because only about 25% of furries are heterosexual.

Why So Curious?

If I’ve made you curious about our community, and now you want to learn more about us, I’ve got you.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/K2XeOxWW2oY?feature=oembed

Psychology Today: What’s the Deal with Furries?

Furry Fandom Documentary When?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cF9DQQsUcs0?feature=oembed

Ash Coyote is releasing a documentary about our subculture soon, titled The Fandom. You can find out more about it on her YouTube channel.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/23/never-underestimate-the-furry-fandom/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #hateMail #positivity #Society

The people afraid to show their peers or bosses my technical writing because it also contains furry art are some of the dumbest cowards in technology.

Considering the recent events at ApeFest, a competitive level of stupidity is quite impressive.

To be clear, the exhibited stupidity in question is their tendency to project their own sexual connotations onto furry art–even if said art isn’t sexual in nature in any meaningful sense of the word.

But then again, poetry can be sexual, so who knows?

Scandalous furry,
Why are you glitching like that?
Haiku are lewd too!
Art: AJ

The cowardice comes in with the fear of their peers or bosses judging them for *checks notes* the content and presentation that I wrote, and not them.

Which (if you think about it for any significant length of time) implies that they’re generally eager to take credit for other people’s work, but their selfishness was thwarted by a cute cartoon dhole doing something totally innocent.

Even sillier, there’s a small contingent on technical forums that are “concerned” about the growing prevalence of queer and furry identities in technical spaces (archived).

MarleyTanuki

MarleyTanuki

Even some old school hackers conveniently forget that alt.fan.furry was a thing before the Internet.

As frustratingly incompetent as these hot takes are, they pale in comparison to, by far, the biggest source of bad opinions about the furry fandom.

Credit: Tirrelous

The call is coming from inside the house.

Like Cats and Dogs

Last month, I wrote a blog post about Aural Alliance, which caused a menace in the furry music space to accuse me of “bad journalism” for not verbally crucifying the label’s creator (a good friend of mine) for having a failed business venture in the past, or taking credit for donating to their cause early on.

Twitter DM conversation.
Everyone I’ve talked to that has dealt with this particular person before responded with, “Yeah, this is typical Cassidy behavior.”

To which one must wonder, “Since when am I a journalist?”

I’ve never called myself a journalist. I’m a blogger and I don’t pretend to be anything more than that. I especially would never besmirch the work of real journalists by comparing it with my musings.

At times, I also wear the security researcher hat, but you’ll only hear about it when I’m publishing a vulnerability.

This is a personal blog. I will neither be censored nor subject to compelled speech. I have no moral or professional obligations to “both sides” of what amounts to a nontroversy.

Nobody has ever paid me to write anything here, and I will never accept any compensation for my writing.

Sure, I contributed to covering Aural Alliance’s up-front infrastructure costs when it was just an idea in Finn’s head. I’m not going to apologize for supporting artists. The Furry Fandom wouldn’t exist without artists.

This kind of behavior isn’t an isolated incident, unfortunately. A handful of furries have rage-quit tech groups I’m in because they found out I generously tipped artists that were under-charging for their work.

It bewilders me every time someone reacts this way. Do you not know the community you’re in?

The most intelligible pushback I’ve seen over the years is, “Well if everyone raises their prices, low-income furries will be pushed out of the market!”

Setting aside that art is a luxury, not a need for a moment, that’s not actually true.

There are so many artists, and they’re so decentralized, that no coherent price coordination effort is even possible. It’s worse than herding cats. Some may raise their prices by $5, others by $500. If furries were organized enough to coordinate something like this, then we’d have a tough time explaining why there are still abusers in the fandom.

Also, it costs very little to learn to draw, yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeoQx9hphBw

Oh, but I’m not done.

The demand for low-priced digital art incentivizes people to reach for theft enabled by large-scale computing (a.k.a. “AI” by its proponents).

A similar demand for cheap, high-quality fursuits (usually at the maker’s expense) will lead to a walmartization of the furry community.

If you listen to these hot takes long enough, you start to notice a pattern of short-sighted selfishness.

When you demand something of the furry community, and don’t think of the long-term consequences of your demands, you’re probably being an idiot. This is true even if it’s actually a good idea.

If me supporting artists somehow prices you out of commissioning your favorite artist, you still have other options: Learning to make your own, finding new artists, saving money, etc.

On the flipside, the artists you admire will suffer less due to money troubles. Fewer artists starving makes the world a more beautiful place.

Center of the Fediverse

If flame war and retoot count relieved desire
In the comment thread someone must have known
That the hottest takes truly leave us tired
‘Cause in the center of the fediverse
We are all alone

With apologies to Kamelot

If you’re on the Fediverse (e.g., Mastodon), and your instance uses a blocklist like TheBadSpace (TBS), you probably cannot see my posts on furry.engineer anymore.

This is because the people running TBS have erroneously decided that any criticism of its curators is anti-blackness.

If you want a biased but detailed (with receipts!) account of the conflicts that led up to furry.engineer‘s erroneous inclusion on their blocklist, Silver Eagle wrote about their experience with TBS, blocklist criticism, and receiving death threats from the friends of TBS curators.

(Spoiler: It was largely prompted by another predominantly LGBTQIA+ instance, tech.lgbt, being erroneously added to the same blocklist, which resulted in criticism of said blocklist curators.)

Be forewarned, though: Linking to Silver Eagle’s blog post was enough for TBS supporters to harass me and directly accuse me, personally, of anti-blackness, so don’t expect any degree of level-headed discussion from that crowd.

Art: CMYKat

What Can We Do About This?

If you cannot see my Fediverse posts anymore, and actually want to see them, message your instance moderators and suggest unsubscribing from TheBadSpace’s blocklist.

If they refuse, your only real recourse is to move to another instance. The great thing about the Fediverse is, you can just do that, and nobody can lock you in.

Personally, I plan on sticking on furry.engineer. I trust its moderators to not tolerate racist and/or fascist bullshit.

The baseless accusations of anti-blackness are, unsurprisingly, false.

Burnout Isn’t Inevitable

A few months ago, I quit a great job with an amazing team because the CEO decided that everyone has to return to working in the office, including people that were hired fully remote before the pandemic. This meant being forced to move more than 3,000 miles, or resigning. I’ve been told the legal term for such a move is “constructive dismissal.”

In hindsight, I was starting to burn out anyway, so leaving when I did was a great move for my mental health and life satisfaction.

Art: CMYKat

I’m an introvert. I have a finite social battery. Because my work was split across three different teams at the same company, I was a necessary participant in a lot of meetings.

More than 5 hours per day of meetings, as an individual contributor. Sometimes as many as 7 hours/day of them. I almost never had a quiet day, even after blocking one day every week so nobody would schedule any meetings and I could get productive work done.

If you’re interested in being a people manager, or have an extroverted personality, you’re probably unperturbed by this account. But I was absolutely miserable. My close friends started to worry if I was suffering from depression, because of how socially exhausted I was all the time.

I took a few weeks off between jobs. My new role doesn’t pointlessly encumber me with unnecessary meetings.

Every day, I feel the burnout symptoms leaving my mind. I feel challenged and stimulated in a good way. I’m learning new technologies and being productive. I’ve never spent more than 3 hours of any given day in a meeting.

Different people burn out in many different ways, for many different reasons.

In my experience, the consequences appear to be reversible if caught early enough. I don’t know if they would be if I held onto my old job for much longer.

The job market’s tough right now, but if you’re deeply unsatisfied with an aspect of your current job, prioritize yourself and make whatever change is necessary.

This doesn’t mean you have to switch jobs like I did, of course. It was a good move for me. Your mileage may vary.

Where’s The Cryptography?

https://youtu.be/4KNzdlc7ZcA?t=59

Somedays I feel like writing about technical topics. Other days, I feel like writing about unimportant or personal topics.

If you’re disappointed in this post, perhaps you also expect everything on this blog to be professionally useful?

Well, worry not, for you’re eligible for a full refund for the amount you paid to read it.

Art: CMYKat

Logging Off

This post has been a collection of unrelated topics on my mind over the past few months. There is one other thing, but I was unsure if it warranted a separate post of its own, or an addendum on this one. Since you’re reading this, you’ll know I ultimately settled on the latter.

I started this blog in 2020 because I thought having a personal blog where I talk about things that interest me (mainly the furry fandom and software security) would be fun. And I wanted to do it in a way that was fun for me.

“Having fun with it” has been the guiding principle of this blog for over 3 years. I never intended to do anything important or meaningful, that sort of happened by accident. I didn’t care about others being able to use my writing in a professional setting (hence, my scoffing at the very notion above).

Lately, posts have slowed to a crawl, because it’s not fun for me anymore. I have a lot of ideas I’d love to write about, but when it comes time to turn an idea into something tangible, I lose all inspiration.

So I’m not going to force it.

This will be the last post on this blog for a while. I recently tried to pick up fiction writing, but I’m not happy with anything I’ve been able to produce yet, so I won’t bore anyone with that garbage.

There are a lot of brilliant people that read my writing. Most of you are more than capable of picking up where I left off and starting your own blogs.

I encourage you to do so.

Have fun with it, too. Just remember, when it’s time to put the pen down and take a rest, don’t be stubborn and burn yourself out.

Happy hacking.

Header is a collage of art from AJ, CMYKat, Kyume, WeaselDumb, and a DEFCON Furs 2023 photo from Chevron.

https://soatok.blog/2023/11/17/this-would-be-more-professionally-useful-if-not-for-the-furry-art/

#fediverse #furries #furry #FurryFandom #furryMusic

Dhole Moments

2021-04-02 11:30:22

If you’ve somehow never encountered an Internet meme before, you may be surprised to learn that the number 69 is often associated with sex (and, more specifically, a particular sex act).

This happens to be the 69th blog post published on Dhole Moments, since I started the blog in April 2020.

You could even go as far as to say it’s the 4/20 +69th post, for maximum meme potential.

42069, get it? (Art by Khia)

However! I make a concerted effort to keep my blog safe-for-work, so if you’re worried about this post being flooded with furry porn (a.k.a. yiff art), or cropped yiff memes, or any other such lascivious nonsense, you won’t find any of that on this blog. (Sorry to disappoint.)

Instead, I’d like to take the opportunity to correct some public misconceptions about human sexuality, identity, and how these topics relate to the furry fandom.

Is Furry a Sex Thing?

I find it difficult to overstate how often people assume the “furry is a sex thing” premise. Especially on technical forums.

But let’s backtrack for a second. What isn’t a sex thing?

Art by Khia.

This turns out to be a difficult question to answer. Even Wikipedia’s somewhat concise list of paraphilias doesn’t leave a lot of topics off the table.

Are shoes a sex thing? Are cigarettes? Poetry?

Comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Hell, one might be tempted to cry foul on the header image used in this blog post for including tentacles, hypnotic eyes, and footpaws in the same image. (Scandalous!) But if you look at the uncropped versions of these images, you’ll quickly realize they aren’t yiffy.

Top Art by AtlasInu.
Bottom: Created by FlashWhite_. Fox is Kiit Lock.
The more you read about this topic, the more you’ll realize this question is inert. Anything can be a sex thing. Humans are largely a sexual species, and sex is deeply ingrained in our culture (which can make life awkward for asexual people).

Instead, the question of whether or not the furry fandom is sexual becomes a bit of a Rorschach test for one’s cognitive biases.

If you’re chiefly concerned with public image–especially when fursuiting in public, where kids can see–you’re incentivized to double down on the fact that the furry fandom is no more inherently sexual than anything else can be. And this is true.

If you’re concerned with cultivating a sex-positive environment where people can live out their sexual fantasies in a safe, sane, and consensual manner, you’re incentivized to insist that furry is a sexual thing. “We have murrsuits for crying out loud! Stop kink-shaming! Down with puritan ideologies on sex!” And this is also true.

Humans are largely sexual, so any activity humans engage in will inevitably involve people sexualizing it. Even tupperware parties, for fuck’s sake! Anyone who believes there is a “Rule 34 of the Internet” tacitly acknowledges this fact, even if it’s inconvenient for a narrative they’re trying to spin.

So while this might be a meaningless question, one has to wonder…

Why Does Everyone Care So Much If Being a Furry (In Particular) Is Sexual or Not?

To understand what’s really happening here, you need to know a few things about the furry fandom.

1. Approximately 80% of furries are LGBTQIA+ (source).
2. Early anti-furry sentiments were motivated by queerphobia, especially on forums like Something Awful–and the influence of early hateful memes can still be seen to this day.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

One of the Something Awful staff eventually acknowledged and apologized for this.

Archived from here. To corroborate, an Internet author named Maddox once parodied SomethingAwful’s hateful obsession with furries.

There was even a movement within the furry fandom history (the “Burned Furs“) that aimed to excise queerness and sex-positivity from the community. It’s no coincidence that a lot of the former Burned Furs joined with the alt-right movement within the furry fandom.

The alt-right is explicitly queerphobic; especially against trans people. But it’s not just queerphobic; it’s also an ableist and racist movement.

Regardless of sexual orientation, a lot of furries are neurodivergent, too.

Simply put: The reason that most people care whether or not furries are sexual is rooted in the propensity of anti-furry rhetoric in Internet culture, which was motivated at its inception by mostly queerphobia with a dash of ableism.

Art by Khia.

The notion that furries are “too sexual” originated as a dog-whistle for “too gay”, and caught on with people who didn’t know the hidden meaning of the idea. Now a lot of people repeat these ideas without intending or even knowing their roots, and many more have internalized shame about the whole situation.

Unfortunately, this even precipitates into the furry fandom itself, which leads to an unfortunate cyclical discourse that takes place largely on Furry Twitter.

Original tweet unavailable

Furry Isn’t a Sexuality. There is no F in LGBT!

If you publicly state “anti-furry rhetoric is largely queerphobic dog-whistles”, you will inevitably hear someone try to retort this way. So let’s be very clear about it.

Furry isn’t its own sexual identity, and I would never claim otherwise.

Unlike transgender people, furries do not experience anything like “species dysphoria” (although therians/otherkin do report experiencing this; don’t conflate the two).

What’s happening here is: Most furries (about 80% of us) have separate sexual/gender identities that deviate from the heteronormative. A lot of queerphobia is easier to sell when you convey it through dog-whistles. So that’s what bigots did.

Polite company that wouldn’t partake in queer-bashing is often willing to laugh at the notion of “Beat A Furry Day“.

Anyone who tries to twist this acknowledgement to mean something ridiculous like an LGBTF movement is either being irrational or a 4chan troll.

Art by Khia.

For related reasons, you shouldn’t ever feel the need to “come out” as a furry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG2DRLimBSM

It’s okay to just really like Beastars, Zootopia, or even the Furry aspects of the Minecraft and Roblox communities. It doesn’t make you a sex-freak.

What’s the Take-Away?

It doesn’t really matter if the furry fandom has a sexual side to it. Everything does! The people who proclaim to care very much about this care for all the wrong reasons. Don’t be one of them.

Art by Swizz.

And remember: Lewd furries aren’t furry trash; we’re yiff-raff!

Sex Isn’t Well-Defined Either

While we’re talking about sex, did you know that biological sex isn’t neatly divided into “male” and “female”? This isn’t an ideological position; it’s a scientific one. Just ask a biologist!

https://twitter.com/JUNIUS_64/status/1054387892624285699

Trans and nonbinary people change gender (which is about your role within society) from what they were assigned at birth, but even sex itself isn’t so concrete.

The next time someone tries to appeal to “science” when talking about trans rights and then vomits up some unenlightened K-12 explanation of human reproduction and biological sex, remind them that science disagrees with their oversimplified and outdated mental model–and they might know this if they kept up with scientists.

Where Can I Learn More About the Sexual Side of the Furry Fandom?

Important: If you’re under the age of 18, you should stay out of adult spaces until you’re old enough to participate. No excuses.

If you’re looking for pornographic furry art (also called “yiff”), most furry art sites (FurryLife, FurAffinity, etc.) have adult content filters that you can turn off when you register an account.

If you’re looking for something more interactive, there’s a swath of furries that develop private VR experiences for 18+ audiences. One of the most well-funded Patreon artists makes adult furry games.

If you’re curious about why and how people express their sexuality when fursuiting (also called “murrsuiting”), there’s a subreddit for that.

It’s really not hard to find. This is one of the advantages of furry being a largely sex-positive community.

Furry YouTuber Ragehound even has a series about Furries After Dark if you want to learn more about these topics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGOlQJDO5no

Finally, similar to how 69 is a meme number for sex, furries have an additional meme number (621) that comes from the name of an adult furry website (e621.net).

You now have enough knowledge to navigate the adult side of the fandom. Just don’t come crying to me when you develop the uncanny knack for recognizing which r/furry_irl posts are actually cropped yiff versus wholly worksafe art.

https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #LGBTQIA_ #Society

Dhole Moments is not a music blog. I will not pretend to be an expert on music, music theory, or music appreciation.

But it goes even further than that: I am so untalented at music that I exert a vacuum pressure on musicians who cross my path at furry conventions.

The end result of this vacuum force looks like this, naturally.
Art: CMYKat

Regular readers of my blog would expect that, should I ever discuss any topic that intersects with computer audio, it would probably involve leaking the contents of encrypted voice chats through, like, compression oracles or something.

Not today, though.

Instead, I’d like to introduce everyone to the Aural Alliance, a furry music label that aims to disrupt the perverted economics of the music industry.

What is the Aural Alliance?

To answer this question, you first need to have a vague sense of how traditional music labels and music industry contracts work: The music industry uses predatory “advances” and crooked accounting to keep artists in debt.

This predatory behavior isn’t exclusively weaponized against black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPoC) artists; it’s used against queer and disabled artists too.

Unless you have star power, you’ll take what you can get, because there are dozens of hungry upstarts ready to seize your opportunity if you hesitate to take it. Chase the carrot, mind the stick.

The Aural Alliance is a rejection of this traditional dynamic.

The Aural Alliance funding pipeline (source)

Traditional music labels will lend you money to cover the production costs of a musical work. Music sales will then be used to pay off your loan before you ever see a dime.

Aural Alliance straight up distributes 60% of its income to all artists, equally, and uses the remaining 40% to cover operations.

https://twitter.com/AuralAlliance/status/1698822020660617217

Why You Should Care About This

Unlike many bloggers, it’s difficult for me to classify my regular audience with one simple label or categorization.

Dhole Moments is a furry blog, sure, but not everyone who reads my writing is a furry. I write about computers, security, and cryptography, yes, but not everyone who reads my blog is particularly interested in those topics either.

It might be tempting to read about a furry music label built on socialist principles, shrug, and say, “So what? I’m not a fan of furry musicians or socialism. Where’s your post about key management you promised, dhole?!”

To understand the impact and significance of the Aural Alliance, some knowledge on current events and technology culture is needed.

AJ

The Enshittification of Music Sales

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe a phenomenon that happens to online platforms. The cycle goes like this:

A new platform is operated at a loss, to gain users. This is usually the Venture Capital funding stage of a “start-up”.

Then once they have enough critical mass to exploit the Network Effect, they sell the startup to the public stock market.

This sale is eventually followed by a shift in priority, where they take away the parts of the platform that users loved (usually following the boiling frog strategy), in order to make it a better deal for their new owners.

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

Cory Doctorow

That’s not the only trick up the sleeves of wealthy business interests.

Enter, Bandcamp

Last year, Epic Games acquired Bandcamp: The only music distribution platform that was fair to indie artists.

Last month, Epic sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, a music licensing service that basically acts as a vampiric middleman: Squeezing money from sellers and buyers alike while providing nothing of value. Songtradr is the outcome of an economist thought experiment, “What if landlords existed for our ear drums?”

Yesterday, Songtradr laid off a significant amount of Bandcamp’s staff.

https://twitter.com/deerhoof/status/1713978947468505133

Songtradr’s business model is the end goal of every Silicon Valley start-up that receives VC funding: Capture near-monopoly power through technology and the network effect, then become a middleman that only exists to add a transaction fee while a tangled web of contractors that compete with each other actually fulfill the services rendered. And they want to do this while driving positive exponential year-over-year growth, to keep investors happy.

Time and again, this happens to industries that affect millions of peoples’ lives, and we’re all the worse for it.

Any company that calls themselves “Uber for ___” is confessing to this business model. Art by AJ.

Exit, Bandcamp

The enshittification of Bandcamp is well underway by its new masters. Independent musicians the world over would benefit greatly from a good alternative.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a recommendation to offer today.

Bandcamp had too much goodwill with its community for a serious competitor to emerge from the noise floor. The Internet got complacent.

In another business vertical, Itch.io currently has a similar vibe with the indie game dev community: It has fostered tremendous goodwill and treats creators fairly.

In 2021, itch.io properties were added to the Epic Games Store launcher. Thus far, it has remained undisturbed. Who knows how long this will hold out?

(Especially considering the abundance of LGBTQIA+ content hosted on itch.io.)

Credit: CMYKat

Opposition and Hope

Cory Doctorow, who coined the term enshittification, has proposed what he calls an audacious plan to halt it, and throw its effects in reverse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

Cryptography luminary Phil Rogaway was asked to deliver a keynote at NIST’s Third Workshop on Block Cipher Modes of Operation. (Slides available now, recording to be available soon. I will share it here when I have a link to it.)

Rather than focus too much on OCB or his other contributions to computer science, he chose to talk about what he called Radical CS: A rejection of the Standard Technological Narrative (STN) that technology is an apolitical tool that only improves things for everyone.

(TODO: Add video here when it’s public.)

PhilosophyTube recently tackled the topic of Ethical AI, which is way more interesting than you may suspect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M

Many of the people behind the hype of large-scale computing (which is what we should be calling it, not AI), whom are trying to influence public opinion and legislation in order to maximize their own profit, are the exact same people that are driving the enshittification of platforms.

They’re also largely the same people that hyped blockchain too. And you best believe I got a video for that one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

Enter, Aural Alliance?

Hackers, queers, and queer hackers have always been part of the resistance to enshittification.

The Aural Alliance isn’t building a new Bandcamp today, they’re merely building a better record label.

If you had to describe your mission in one sentence, what would it be?

Me, to Finn (Founder of the Aural Alliance)

Fostering collective success through respect and collaboration would be the fancy answer I guess haha

Finn

However, sometimes all you need is enough activation energy to get a movement going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxFt1BZiMTw

Silver Eagle is the lead developer of Internet radio software, AzuraCast. They have been working with the Aural Alliance on a furry music database project.

If the Aural Alliance is successful in their goals, it will serve as direct, living proof that a better business model is possible; that artists and musicians can get a fair deal from their craft.

If their projects like the furry music database take off, this may also plant the seed from which tomorrow’s Bandcamp alternative will sprout.

And even if that doesn’t happen, at least some artists will suffer less as a result of the Aural Alliance’s work. That’s a win-win to me.

How You Can Help

A non-exhaustive list of ideas:

• Follow the Aural Alliance on various platforms (yes, including Bandcamp, for now)
• Donate to the Aural Alliance, which benefits all its artists
• Write about the Aural Alliance (especially if you have a blog)
• If you’re interested in the furry music database project, consider donating to Silver Eagle
• Regularly check out the Aural Alliance’s Releases calendar for new songs, albums, etc.
• Request your favorite Aural Alliance artists at your favorite furry convention

Finally, I’d like to close with sharing an excellent work from one of the Aural Alliance musicians, Tonya Song, that every LGBTQIA+ person can definitely relate to.

If none of my words can sell you on the value of what the Aural Alliance is doing, this is sure to do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSi4lkSAPtQ

Header art by AJLovesDinos.

https://soatok.blog/2023/10/17/aural-alliance-furry-music-to-wag-pounce-to/

#AuralAlliance #enshittification #furries #furry #FurryFandom #music

Dhole Moments

2023-10-17 09:27:43

Dhole Moments is not a music blog. I will not pretend to be an expert on music, music theory, or music appreciation.

But it goes even further than that: I am so untalented at music that I exert a vacuum pressure on musicians who cross my path at furry conventions.

The end result of this vacuum force looks like this, naturally.
Art: CMYKat

Regular readers of my blog would expect that, should I ever discuss any topic that intersects with computer audio, it would probably involve leaking the contents of encrypted voice chats through, like, compression oracles or something.

Not today, though.

Instead, I’d like to introduce everyone to the Aural Alliance, a furry music label that aims to disrupt the perverted economics of the music industry.

What is the Aural Alliance?

To answer this question, you first need to have a vague sense of how traditional music labels and music industry contracts work: The music industry uses predatory “advances” and crooked accounting to keep artists in debt.

This predatory behavior isn’t exclusively weaponized against black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPoC) artists; it’s used against queer and disabled artists too.

Unless you have star power, you’ll take what you can get, because there are dozens of hungry upstarts ready to seize your opportunity if you hesitate to take it. Chase the carrot, mind the stick.

The Aural Alliance is a rejection of this traditional dynamic.

The Aural Alliance funding pipeline (source)

Traditional music labels will lend you money to cover the production costs of a musical work. Music sales will then be used to pay off your loan before you ever see a dime.

Aural Alliance straight up distributes 60% of its income to all artists, equally, and uses the remaining 40% to cover operations.

https://twitter.com/AuralAlliance/status/1698822020660617217

Why You Should Care About This

Unlike many bloggers, it’s difficult for me to classify my regular audience with one simple label or categorization.

Dhole Moments is a furry blog, sure, but not everyone who reads my writing is a furry. I write about computers, security, and cryptography, yes, but not everyone who reads my blog is particularly interested in those topics either.

It might be tempting to read about a furry music label built on socialist principles, shrug, and say, “So what? I’m not a fan of furry musicians or socialism. Where’s your post about key management you promised, dhole?!”

To understand the impact and significance of the Aural Alliance, some knowledge on current events and technology culture is needed.

AJ

The Enshittification of Music Sales

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe a phenomenon that happens to online platforms. The cycle goes like this:

A new platform is operated at a loss, to gain users. This is usually the Venture Capital funding stage of a “start-up”.

Then once they have enough critical mass to exploit the Network Effect, they sell the startup to the public stock market.

This sale is eventually followed by a shift in priority, where they take away the parts of the platform that users loved (usually following the boiling frog strategy), in order to make it a better deal for their new owners.

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

Cory Doctorow

That’s not the only trick up the sleeves of wealthy business interests.

Enter, Bandcamp

Last year, Epic Games acquired Bandcamp: The only music distribution platform that was fair to indie artists.

Last month, Epic sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, a music licensing service that basically acts as a vampiric middleman: Squeezing money from sellers and buyers alike while providing nothing of value. Songtradr is the outcome of an economist thought experiment, “What if landlords existed for our ear drums?”

Yesterday, Songtradr laid off a significant amount of Bandcamp’s staff.

https://twitter.com/deerhoof/status/1713978947468505133

Songtradr’s business model is the end goal of every Silicon Valley start-up that receives VC funding: Capture near-monopoly power through technology and the network effect, then become a middleman that only exists to add a transaction fee while a tangled web of contractors that compete with each other actually fulfill the services rendered. And they want to do this while driving positive exponential year-over-year growth, to keep investors happy.

Time and again, this happens to industries that affect millions of peoples’ lives, and we’re all the worse for it.

Any company that calls themselves “Uber for ___” is confessing to this business model. Art by AJ.

Exit, Bandcamp

The enshittification of Bandcamp is well underway by its new masters. Independent musicians the world over would benefit greatly from a good alternative.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a recommendation to offer today.

Bandcamp had too much goodwill with its community for a serious competitor to emerge from the noise floor. The Internet got complacent.

In another business vertical, Itch.io currently has a similar vibe with the indie game dev community: It has fostered tremendous goodwill and treats creators fairly.

In 2021, itch.io properties were added to the Epic Games Store launcher. Thus far, it has remained undisturbed. Who knows how long this will hold out?

(Especially considering the abundance of LGBTQIA+ content hosted on itch.io.)

Credit: CMYKat

Opposition and Hope

Cory Doctorow, who coined the term enshittification, has proposed what he calls an audacious plan to halt it, and throw its effects in reverse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

Cryptography luminary Phil Rogaway was asked to deliver a keynote at NIST’s Third Workshop on Block Cipher Modes of Operation. (Slides available now, recording to be available soon. I will share it here when I have a link to it.)

Rather than focus too much on OCB or his other contributions to computer science, he chose to talk about what he called Radical CS: A rejection of the Standard Technological Narrative (STN) that technology is an apolitical tool that only improves things for everyone.

(TODO: Add video here when it’s public.)

PhilosophyTube recently tackled the topic of Ethical AI, which is way more interesting than you may suspect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M

Many of the people behind the hype of large-scale computing (which is what we should be calling it, not AI), whom are trying to influence public opinion and legislation in order to maximize their own profit, are the exact same people that are driving the enshittification of platforms.

They’re also largely the same people that hyped blockchain too. And you best believe I got a video for that one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

Enter, Aural Alliance?

Hackers, queers, and queer hackers have always been part of the resistance to enshittification.

The Aural Alliance isn’t building a new Bandcamp today, they’re merely building a better record label.

If you had to describe your mission in one sentence, what would it be?

Me, to Finn (Founder of the Aural Alliance)

Fostering collective success through respect and collaboration would be the fancy answer I guess haha

Finn

However, sometimes all you need is enough activation energy to get a movement going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxFt1BZiMTw

Silver Eagle is the lead developer of Internet radio software, AzuraCast. They have been working with the Aural Alliance on a furry music database project.

If the Aural Alliance is successful in their goals, it will serve as direct, living proof that a better business model is possible; that artists and musicians can get a fair deal from their craft.

If their projects like the furry music database take off, this may also plant the seed from which tomorrow’s Bandcamp alternative will sprout.

And even if that doesn’t happen, at least some artists will suffer less as a result of the Aural Alliance’s work. That’s a win-win to me.

How You Can Help

A non-exhaustive list of ideas:

• Follow the Aural Alliance on various platforms (yes, including Bandcamp, for now)
• Donate to the Aural Alliance, which benefits all its artists
• Write about the Aural Alliance (especially if you have a blog)
• If you’re interested in the furry music database project, consider donating to Silver Eagle
• Regularly check out the Aural Alliance’s Releases calendar for new songs, albums, etc.
• Request your favorite Aural Alliance artists at your favorite furry convention

Finally, I’d like to close with sharing an excellent work from one of the Aural Alliance musicians, Tonya Song, that every LGBTQIA+ person can definitely relate to.

If none of my words can sell you on the value of what the Aural Alliance is doing, this is sure to do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSi4lkSAPtQ

---

Header art by AJLovesDinos.

https://soatok.blog/2023/10/17/aural-alliance-furry-music-to-wag-pounce-to/

#AuralAlliance #enshittification #furries #furry #FurryFandom #music

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 people treat biological sex–and then reading to see if you were right or not. Most of the time, you don’t even have to read past the headline to know where the author stands.

Unfortunately, the topic of cryptocurrency is complicated in ways only nerds could envision. And I’m not even talking about the cryptography involved when I say that.

(Art by Khia.)

Cryptocurrency is one of those cans I keep kicking down the road, lest all of its worms escape. I’m neither an enthusiast who wants to pump dogecoin to the moon, nor a detractor who thinks that the idea of digital cash is inherently stupid.

https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/1380576100888281094

The “crypto means cryptography” trope exists because, after Bitcoin’s first price hike, a shitload of speculative investors flooded cryptography forums and drowned out the usual participants’ discussions. I’ve previously said that some gatekeeping is necessary for the maintenance group identity, and that the excess of this minimum amount is what creates toxicity. Unfortunately, this trope has far exceeded the LD50 for healthy discourse.

Some of my friends make their living working on cryptocurrency projects–as researchers, mathematicians, programmers, security engineers, and so on. A lot of the interesting cryptography breakthroughs we’ll see in the next 10-15 years will be, at least in part, the result of cryptographers working in the cryptocurrency space. It’s difficult to talk about zero-knowledge proofs without acknowledging some of the kick-ass research the Electric Coin Company has done in order to launch their privacy-preserving cryptocurrency, and that’s only one example.

Here’s cryptographer Jean-Phillipe Aumasson, whose employer is launching a regulated cryptocurrency marketplace:

https://twitter.com/veorq/status/1384045994413678598

If you’re not familiar with JP’s work, he wrote several cryptography books (including Serious Cryptography), contributed to several hash functions (SipHash, BLAKE2, and BLAKE3), and initiated the Password Hashing Competition that resulted in Argon2.

However, there’s also a lot of bullshit in the cryptocurrency space.

• Years of securities fraud enabled by “Initial Coin Offerings” (ICOs) on the Ethereum blockchain. Most famously: Bitcoiin (yes, with two I’s) whose spokesman was bad movie star, Steven Seagal.
• The plague of hacked Twitter accounts pretending to be Elon Musk, perpetuating a “give me some $ and I’ll give you more back” scam that’s sadly effective.
• The whole cryptoart / NFT debacle.
• Litanies of startups trying to “use blockchain to solve X problem” without ever asking if the problem warrants a blockchain in the first place.
• Every microgram of drama related to John McAfee.

And those are just the items I can list off, off the top of my head. The awfulness surrounding cryptocurrency is like a fractal: The deeper you look at it, the more shit you see.

Cryptocurrency Subculture: A Tale of Too Shitty

The world’s most successful cryptocurrency to date, Bitcoin, was created in 2008 by an anonymous cryptographer who liked to be known as Satoshi Nakamoto and distributed on metzdowd.com, a mailing list created by a group of cryptoanarchists that called themselves “cypherpunks”.

At the risk of being overly reductive, cryptoanarchists are people who believe strongly in a right to privacy and therefore the right to use cryptography to protect communications from others–be it governments, corporations, or jealous ex-lovers. The cypherpunks were a group of cryptoanarchists that also wrote code. It’s a wordplay on “cyberpunk”.

It’s difficult to speculate about the intentions or politics of Satoshi Nakamoto, considering they said very little of substance about their private beliefs, and no longer answer emails from random strangers. However, given their presence on metzdowd, it’s reasonable to propose they were at least sympathetic to the cypherpunks’ cause.

Most outspoken cryptocurrency enthusiasts today are not like Satoshi Nakamoto. They don’t understand or frankly give a shit about complex, nuanced points about privacy and the government machinations underpinning public safety–let alone how that intersects with the racist history of the institutions charged with keeping the public safe. They’re largely anarcho-capitalists who want to make as much money as they can and, in turn, pay as little as possible in taxes.

How do you make money in cryptocurrency?
By obtaining some amount of a coin, then convincing other people to buy it to drive up the demand, and therefore the price, and then sell at a later date. Then you can sell your coins at a higher price than you paid (either directly, or through energy costs from “mining”) and pocket your profits.

Don’t let the name fool you: anarcho-capitalists (a.k.a. ancaps) aren’t anarchists (and furthermore, cryptocurrency-manic ancaps aren’t cryptoanarchists). Here’s a helpful video to disambiguate the terms involved:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOTlxsn8tWc

If I said that large swaths of the cryptocurrency community was generally shitty, I would not be the first to make this observation. The earliest Bitcoin events were caricatures of the kind of toxic sexist excess that dominates chauvinistic power fantasies. (“When lambo?”)

It’s not just the bad politics or the stark contrast between cryptocurrency in practice and cryptocurrency as envisioned by the earliest architects on the metzdowd cryptography mailing list.

Last year I wrote about a dumb attack against the second hash function used by the cryptocurrency, IOTA. After I wrote this story, my Twitter mentions and DMs were flooded with astroturfing attempts by IOTA enthusiasts. Nearly a year later, most of those have been deleted–presumably because of an account suspension.

https://twitter.com/HapaRekk/status/1283485380004597760

Before IOTA, Monero enthusiasts used to engage in bad faith with anyone that dared criticize their favorite cryptocurrency project on Reddit or Hacker News.

To be clear: I don’t think that cryptocurrency projects or their developers are ever necessarily responsible for the behavior of their users. Sometimes you find toxic assholes like Sergey Ivancheglo (the IOTA developer that threatened security researchers) at the helm, and then immediately jettison it until they leave (to great fanfare of the non-toxic part of their community).

I don’t want to overstate my case here. A lot of blockchainiacs are just downright awful people. The absolute worst. But I’ve found over the years that, the less a person talks about cryptocurrency as a financial endeavor (e.g. speculative trading), the less likely they are to be shitty. It’s not a law of the universe, but it’s a useful measuring stick.

But with all that in mind, an obvious question emerges.

If there’s so much awful shit surrounding cryptocurrency, why would furries (a subculture that constantly receives endless helpings of flak from society at large) ever venture near cryptocurrency?

The Politics Inherent to Furry Identity

Art by Swizz.

A lot of Americans like to think of themselves as “Free Speech” proponents. Some of them get all sweaty over whether or not they should be allowed to broadcast, and profit from, bigoted or hateful content laden with slurs.

And yet, the most censored people in American society are, without a doubt, sex workers. And you rarely hear any so-called “Free Speech” proponents give an iota of shit about the plight of sex workers. They can’t even freely engage in commerce here.

Sex work is explicitly banned by most financial service providers, such as PayPal. It’s exceedingly difficult for sex workers to make ends meet without constantly having to worry about their accounts being frozen and funds inaccessible.

There are a lot of reasons why the plight of sex workers is so bad in America. At the top of the list is the intersection of conservative politics and evangelical Christianity, which overall condemns healthy and consensual expressions of human sexuality. (Ever noticed how the only people who think they have a “sex addiction” are religious or right-wing? Not a coincidence.)

Do you know who else is a target of evangelicals and conservatives?

Furries, as you might know, are widely considered an LGBTQIA+ subculture (although not all of us are LGBTQIA+; only about 80%). But we’re more than just an LGBTQIA+ subculture. We’re also a vibrant community filled with skilled artists. Some of this art is pornographic in nature. It turns out, when queer people aren’t forced into the closet, they tend to embrace shameless authenticity and celebrate their romantic and sexual attractions with pride.

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/992819169593716737

A few years ago, the Death Eaters in Congress passed two bills (FOSTA and SESTA) that were advertised as an attempt to crack down on “sex trafficking”.

In practice, these laws killed Pounced.org–the only furry “dating” site at the time that wasn’t a sketchy cash grab (FurryMate, FurFling, etc.). Pounced.org died because the cost to avoid being criminally prosecuted under these laws was so exorbitant that they couldn’t sustain the website anymore, and it probably wasn’t the only small dating site to be killed by poor legislation. Only the big players could really have front-loaded these costs.

Which leads to the meat of this issue…

Why Furries Might Be Interested in Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency can be very attractive to members of the furry fandom because of the bullshit baked into the societies and cultures we exist in.

Cryptocurrency promises to be permissionless and decentralized; to bank the unbanked. If you make your living filling up someone else’s spank bank, the idea of creepy rich white men not being able to exercise targeted censorship against you or your family is, frankly, irresistible.

“Can’t use PayPal for your trade? Just setup a cryptocurrency wallet and give a different address to each of your clients, and instructions on how to access some vaguely reputable cryptocurrency exchange.”

Granted, most furries aren’t sex workers or porn artists, but some of our friends are, and we want to see them protected. But there’s another threat that cryptocurrency promises to alleviate: Chargeback fraud.

The prevalence of chargeback fraud is why I always tip artists. It helps to offset some of the harm caused by shitty behavior.
(Art by Khia)

This is the usual story (although exceptions do exist) I heard from my artist friends:

Someone under 18 decides they want to commission an artist they cannot personally afford, so they steal their parent’s credit card and use it to pay for a commission. Later–often after the work has been completed and delivered to the client–their parent notices the unauthorized charge on their credit card, and issues a chargeback.

Not only does this steal from the artist, but it incurs a $35 fee and increases the risk of their account being permanently suspended by their payment provider–thereby preventing them from accessing the funds paid to them by legitimate customers.

“Thanks for the free art! Now you’re at least $35 poorer and maybe lost your only lifeline out of perpetual poverty.”

— Assholes

And thus, the Siren Song repeats once again!

Cryptocurrency doesn’t prevent chargeback fraud, but it does shift the risk from independent artists that have no capital or political power and onto billion dollar financial institutions like Coinbase.

Once the cryptocurrency has been transferred from the Coinbase wallet to the furry artist, it cannot be unspent. Bad faith behavior might still happen, but the artist doesn’t risk their livelihood because of it.

And that’s why, when furry auction site The Dealer’s Den announced a plan to rebuild with “Blockchain Technology”, I didn’t even bat an eye. It seems like an obvious solution to a pervasive unsolved problem to me.

Sure, it’d be great if we could solve this problem with sensible civil policy. But when is that going to finally happen? After all, we’re talking about the same governments that bungled COVID-19 last year, and the AIDS crisis last century, and so on…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJtvKSUPICA

However, and this bears emphasizing, the CryptoArt / NFT trend is not a valid reason to get involved in cryptocurency! As I said on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370045499122843654

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370046285798064128

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370047071949033472

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370047509314297862

So, super long preamble aside, what I thought I’d do today is talk a bit about cryptocurrency and how to engage with the topic responsibly, especially if you’re trying to mitigate the damage of the systems we inherited.

Cryptocurrency For Furries

I’m going to be very light on technical jargon, in the interests of accessibility, but at the risk of being imprecise.

No two cryptocurrencies are created equal. If you’re hoping to use one to mitigate systemic harms to our community, I implore you to learn the technical details in depth.

Decentralized Consensus

Cryptocurrencies can be classified by something called their consensus mechanism, which is how they can maintain a consistent ledger without being centralized. It doesn’t really matter, for the purpose of this article, how any of them work. I’m happy to dive into that in a future blog post, should anyone want it.

What you need to know is that Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithms are designed to maximize energy waste across the entire cryptocurrency network. That’s how it maintains its security against different kinds of esoteric-sounding attacks.

When you “mine” a Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency, what you’re doing is solving a computationally hard puzzle (e.g. find a number that, when combined with the previous block’s hash and your address and hashed, produces a specific number of leading 0 bits determined by an algorithm to ensure this happens at a set average frequency of time), which results in the entire network agreeing that your address gets the “block reward” (a fixed amount of whatever currency) plus transaction fees.

Cryptocurrency discussions frequently invite conversations about the environmental impact of mining. Proof-of-Work is the cause for this excess energy use which certainly contributes to global climate change.

So, if you’re going to get involved with cryptocurrency without contributing to global climate disaster, you’re going to want to avoid Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies. There are several other options to choose from.

Proof-of-Stake is popular among my cryptocurrency nerd friends, although it receives a fair bit of criticism from experts (especially the “nothing at stake” problem). Ask your cryptographer. It’s probably not me.

On-Chain Privacy

The vaunted “blockchain” is a public, transparent record of all transactions.

When you use a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, it’s sort of like tweeting your financial activities for the world to see.

“But nobody knows who owns this address,” Bitcoin maximalists might argue. To which I point out: Nobody is supposed to know your sockpuppet Twitter accounts either, but when you use them to harass someone right after they block your main account, we know it’s you.

The people whom this applies to know who they are, and should stop.
(Art by Khia)

Some cryptocurrencies, like Zcash, try to provide something like TLS for your transactions. When you use shielded Zcash addresses, the transaction amounts and recipients are encrypted, and this ciphertext is accompanied by a zero-knowledge proof to ensure the total amount in the shielded and unshielded pools remains consistent.

I highly implore you to choose a cryptocurrency that has on-chain privacy, especially if your target audience includes queer people and/or sex workers.

Mainstream Appeal

Finding a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency that doesn’t equate to Global Warming Bucks is a tall order, but if you want people to actually use a cryptocurrency, it needs to be accessible.

By accessible, I mean available on all the mainstream cryptocurrency exchange platforms (Coinbase, Binance, Bitfinex, etc.).

This might sound like pointless gatekeeping, but remember: They have the money and lawyers to negotiate with the economic powerhouses of the world, while sex workers and furry artists do not.

Cryptographic Security

Any regular reader of Dhole Moments probably saw this section coming a mile away, but an important consideration for a cryptocurrency to build upon is whether or not it’s actually secure.

This is where things get tricky. Weird or poor choices in cryptographic algorithm don’t seem to matter much.

Bitcoin uses ECDSA over Koblitz curves. IOTA shipped two broken hash functions, threatened researchers, and then tried to claim the first broken hash function was backdoored for “copy protection”. The CryptoNote currencies (n.b. Monero) tried to build on EdDSA but introduced a double spend attack.

I’m certainly not qualified to audit an entire cryptocurrency and say “yes/no” on its security. But any cryptocurrency you consider should at least pass a smoke test from your cryptographer.

Which Cryptocurrency Should I Choose?

If you’re looking for a cryptocurrency that’s secure, accessible, privacy-preserving, and doesn’t waste a fuck ton of energy all the time, the short answer is that there is none. You’re going to have to make a trade-off.

Shocking, I know.
(Art by Khia)

I’m sure there are cryptocurrency projects that use privacy-preserving technologies without a Proof-of-Work algorithm, and their design and implementation might even be secure! But, to date, I’m not aware of any such projects that also have mainstream accessibility on large exchange platforms.

You’ll notice that I didn’t mention price volatility in my list above. There’s two reasons for that:

1. I’m not a financial expert. For all I know, price volatility might be something you want out of your cryptocurrency, especially if you’re LARPing a day trader.
2. It’s hard enough to make this choice without adding more complications to the formula.

If Zcash ever adopted a consensus algorithm that wasn’t Proof-of-Work, it’d be a shoe-in for me to recommend. It checks all the other boxes neatly and is one of the most interesting cryptography projects on the Internet, after all.

In the meantime, maybe some other project will fill this niche and become widely accessible for everyone. There’s a lot of exciting and/or scary things happening with cryptocurrency research.

If you’re stuck with a hard decision, honestly, just do the best you can and be very transparent about the trade-offs you’re making and why you’re making them. Then ask a friend or expert to check your reasoning before you commit to it. “Do nothing” also needs to be publicly considered, no matter how absurd it might seem.

Disclaimers and Other Remarks

I do not work with cryptocurrency in my dayjob. I’d like to say that, consequently, I don’t have a conflict of interest, but all humans have subconscious biases, and a lot of my favorite people in cryptography do work in or with cryptocurrency. I want my friends to be able to continue to do awesome work without feeling ashamed.

https://twitter.com/cryptolexicon/status/1331712883403722752

Thus, I don’t care if you invest in Bitcoin or Dogecoin or whatever. Shoot for the moon while you awoo at the moon. Just be careful; for every winner, there’s at least one loser.

Fact: Dholes are also known as “Whistling Dogs”
(Art by Khia)

I’m a fan of transparency logs–which are often compared to blockchains, but without the currency aspect. If you’re not familiar, read up on Trillian and Chronicle. Notably, Trillian is the backbone of Certificate Transparency, which helps keep the CA infrastructure honest and consequently makes HTTPS safer for everyone.

https://soatok.blog/2021/04/19/a-furrys-guide-to-cryptocurrency/

#Cryptocurrency #furries #furry #furryArtists #FurryFandom #Politics #Society

Dhole Moments

2021-04-02 11:30:22

If you’ve somehow never encountered an Internet meme before, you may be surprised to learn that the number 69 is often associated with sex (and, more specifically, a particular sex act).

This happens to be the 69th blog post published on Dhole Moments, since I started the blog in April 2020.

You could even go as far as to say it’s the 4/20 +69th post, for maximum meme potential.

42069, get it? (Art by Khia)

However! I make a concerted effort to keep my blog safe-for-work, so if you’re worried about this post being flooded with furry porn (a.k.a. yiff art), or cropped yiff memes, or any other such lascivious nonsense, you won’t find any of that on this blog. (Sorry to disappoint.)

Instead, I’d like to take the opportunity to correct some public misconceptions about human sexuality, identity, and how these topics relate to the furry fandom.

Is Furry a Sex Thing?

I find it difficult to overstate how often people assume the “furry is a sex thing” premise. Especially on technical forums.

But let’s backtrack for a second. What isn’t a sex thing?

Art by Khia.

This turns out to be a difficult question to answer. Even Wikipedia’s somewhat concise list of paraphilias doesn’t leave a lot of topics off the table.

Are shoes a sex thing? Are cigarettes? Poetry?

Comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Hell, one might be tempted to cry foul on the header image used in this blog post for including tentacles, hypnotic eyes, and footpaws in the same image. (Scandalous!) But if you look at the uncropped versions of these images, you’ll quickly realize they aren’t yiffy.

Top Art by AtlasInu.
Bottom: Created by FlashWhite_. Fox is Kiit Lock.
The more you read about this topic, the more you’ll realize this question is inert. Anything can be a sex thing. Humans are largely a sexual species, and sex is deeply ingrained in our culture (which can make life awkward for asexual people).

Instead, the question of whether or not the furry fandom is sexual becomes a bit of a Rorschach test for one’s cognitive biases.

If you’re chiefly concerned with public image–especially when fursuiting in public, where kids can see–you’re incentivized to double down on the fact that the furry fandom is no more inherently sexual than anything else can be. And this is true.

If you’re concerned with cultivating a sex-positive environment where people can live out their sexual fantasies in a safe, sane, and consensual manner, you’re incentivized to insist that furry is a sexual thing. “We have murrsuits for crying out loud! Stop kink-shaming! Down with puritan ideologies on sex!” And this is also true.

Humans are largely sexual, so any activity humans engage in will inevitably involve people sexualizing it. Even tupperware parties, for fuck’s sake! Anyone who believes there is a “Rule 34 of the Internet” tacitly acknowledges this fact, even if it’s inconvenient for a narrative they’re trying to spin.

So while this might be a meaningless question, one has to wonder…

Why Does Everyone Care So Much If Being a Furry (In Particular) Is Sexual or Not?

To understand what’s really happening here, you need to know a few things about the furry fandom.

1. Approximately 80% of furries are LGBTQIA+ (source).
2. Early anti-furry sentiments were motivated by queerphobia, especially on forums like Something Awful–and the influence of early hateful memes can still be seen to this day.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

One of the Something Awful staff eventually acknowledged and apologized for this.

Archived from here. To corroborate, an Internet author named Maddox once parodied SomethingAwful’s hateful obsession with furries.

There was even a movement within the furry fandom history (the “Burned Furs“) that aimed to excise queerness and sex-positivity from the community. It’s no coincidence that a lot of the former Burned Furs joined with the alt-right movement within the furry fandom.

The alt-right is explicitly queerphobic; especially against trans people. But it’s not just queerphobic; it’s also an ableist and racist movement.

Regardless of sexual orientation, a lot of furries are neurodivergent, too.

Simply put: The reason that most people care whether or not furries are sexual is rooted in the propensity of anti-furry rhetoric in Internet culture, which was motivated at its inception by mostly queerphobia with a dash of ableism.

Art by Khia.

The notion that furries are “too sexual” originated as a dog-whistle for “too gay”, and caught on with people who didn’t know the hidden meaning of the idea. Now a lot of people repeat these ideas without intending or even knowing their roots, and many more have internalized shame about the whole situation.

Unfortunately, this even precipitates into the furry fandom itself, which leads to an unfortunate cyclical discourse that takes place largely on Furry Twitter.

Original tweet unavailable

Furry Isn’t a Sexuality. There is no F in LGBT!

If you publicly state “anti-furry rhetoric is largely queerphobic dog-whistles”, you will inevitably hear someone try to retort this way. So let’s be very clear about it.

Furry isn’t its own sexual identity, and I would never claim otherwise.

Unlike transgender people, furries do not experience anything like “species dysphoria” (although therians/otherkin do report experiencing this; don’t conflate the two).

What’s happening here is: Most furries (about 80% of us) have separate sexual/gender identities that deviate from the heteronormative. A lot of queerphobia is easier to sell when you convey it through dog-whistles. So that’s what bigots did.

Polite company that wouldn’t partake in queer-bashing is often willing to laugh at the notion of “Beat A Furry Day“.

Anyone who tries to twist this acknowledgement to mean something ridiculous like an LGBTF movement is either being irrational or a 4chan troll.

Art by Khia.

For related reasons, you shouldn’t ever feel the need to “come out” as a furry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG2DRLimBSM

It’s okay to just really like Beastars, Zootopia, or even the Furry aspects of the Minecraft and Roblox communities. It doesn’t make you a sex-freak.

What’s the Take-Away?

It doesn’t really matter if the furry fandom has a sexual side to it. Everything does! The people who proclaim to care very much about this care for all the wrong reasons. Don’t be one of them.

Art by Swizz.

And remember: Lewd furries aren’t furry trash; we’re yiff-raff!

Sex Isn’t Well-Defined Either

While we’re talking about sex, did you know that biological sex isn’t neatly divided into “male” and “female”? This isn’t an ideological position; it’s a scientific one. Just ask a biologist!

https://twitter.com/JUNIUS_64/status/1054387892624285699

Trans and nonbinary people change gender (which is about your role within society) from what they were assigned at birth, but even sex itself isn’t so concrete.

The next time someone tries to appeal to “science” when talking about trans rights and then vomits up some unenlightened K-12 explanation of human reproduction and biological sex, remind them that science disagrees with their oversimplified and outdated mental model–and they might know this if they kept up with scientists.

Where Can I Learn More About the Sexual Side of the Furry Fandom?

Important: If you’re under the age of 18, you should stay out of adult spaces until you’re old enough to participate. No excuses.

If you’re looking for pornographic furry art (also called “yiff”), most furry art sites (FurryLife, FurAffinity, etc.) have adult content filters that you can turn off when you register an account.

If you’re looking for something more interactive, there’s a swath of furries that develop private VR experiences for 18+ audiences. One of the most well-funded Patreon artists makes adult furry games.

If you’re curious about why and how people express their sexuality when fursuiting (also called “murrsuiting”), there’s a subreddit for that.

It’s really not hard to find. This is one of the advantages of furry being a largely sex-positive community.

Furry YouTuber Ragehound even has a series about Furries After Dark if you want to learn more about these topics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGOlQJDO5no

Finally, similar to how 69 is a meme number for sex, furries have an additional meme number (621) that comes from the name of an adult furry website (e621.net).

You now have enough knowledge to navigate the adult side of the fandom. Just don’t come crying to me when you develop the uncanny knack for recognizing which r/furry_irl posts are actually cropped yiff versus wholly worksafe art.

https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #LGBTQIA_ #Society

Can’t get enough of blog posts written by furries?

This post aims to curate some of the other blogs written by furries that are worth sharing with my regular readers.

Many (but not all) of these furry blogs are focused on technology in some way.

Background Information

Many years ago, I wrote a post titled The World Needs More Furry Bloggers. In that post, I suggested I would write a blog post to promote other furry bloggers, so that people that enjoy my work might discover theirs too.

And then life got really busy, so I haven’t kept up with it since 2020. Oops.

CMYKat

So, instead of one post per furry blogger, I thought I would consolidate my effort into a single post that covers multiple. That way, if I don’t update this category for another 4 years, I don’t feel so weird later.

Featured Furry Blogs

This list is incomplete. You can help by expanding it.

Each header contains a link to the blog in question. The order is somewhat random (but certainly not cryptographically random).

Fang, Feather, & Fin

Fang, Feather, & Fin, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to tracing and archiving the history of the furry fandom. While furries have been around for a long time, understanding our history means capturing the diverse spaces and media we’ve romped around in through the years: zines, journals, magazines, newspapers, websites, conventions spaces (and on and on). Our goal is to capture that history through interviews, blog posts on specific subjects, and an ever-growing archive of furry materials.

Fang, Feather, & Fin is a project by Chipper Wolf, Gale Frostbane, and Tofte Alpaca. They dive deep into a lot of furry history topics, so it’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in that at all.

Indigo’s den

Soblow Xaselgio is an indog dragoness that blogs about various topics that interest her.

She also has a rich collection of links (including 88×31 buttons!) to various critters’ web presences.

If you were curious, mine looks like this:

S-Config

S-Config has been blogging for over a decade about hardware and other technology topics.

Amazingly, they also publish their blog directly to the Tor and I2P networks.

• http://xjfbpuj56rdazx4iolylxplbvyft2onuerjeimlcqwaihp3s6r4xebqd.onion
• http://atlkfvuwwpgvnw24dkwyyxf5psrueozxb3i6zgebymjuquuquvqq.b32.i2p

This is a badass move and I’d love to see more bloggers do the same (if reasonably practical).

Insane Rambles About Technology

Nocoffei mostly writes about technology topics, but has a few posts about furry topics:

• Commercial Grade Robotic Prehensile Limbs
• Modern Cosplay Design from Scratch

Arcana Labs

Patch Arcana is an embedded/software developer, hacker, author, and Twitch streamer. His main hub for writing is Arcana Labs.

Colourful Words and Phrases

Maff is a Scotish furry blogger and sysadmin.

Gabriel Simmer a.k.a. Arch

Arch is a good dog. You should absolutely read his blog (which he promises to make more overtly furry in the future).

Logo Pending by Kawa

Kawa has two blogs: Logo Pending and a Tumblr blog.

Skyler’s Cove

Skyler Stardrift has been blogging longer than I have. He covers various topics from furry conventions to streaming to YouTube vlogging.

He also uses a cute protogen in some of his blog posts, like I do with my dhole:

Base by @FelisRandomis. Recoloured by @CasperClawell.

If that’s not incentive enough to check his work out (or anyone’s on this list, really), then I don’t actually know why you read my blog either.

Steffo.dev Blog

Steffo blogs in multiple languages about multiple topics.

Yet Another Tech Gemlog

Nytpu isn’t just a winged furry with a deep technical background. He’s also a notable Geminaut (link requires a Gemini client to read).

The Abyssal Sea

Lina is an agender queer furry that currently works in the video game industry.

Lotte’s Attic

Lotte is a raccoon therian from Germany. It blogs about system administration, software development, and hardware design.

Wren Mouse

Wren is involved in a lot of creative outlets: DJing, photography, VRChat, electronics, and programming are some of his hobbies.

He also blogs about said hobbies, hence the inclusion on this page.

Finnley’s Audio Adventures

Journey through the ocean of sound, finding forgotten records and their hidden secrets. Dive into a nostalgic adventure of discovery!

Are you interested in audio preservation? Finnley Dolfin has a blog (and accompanying YouTube channel) for you.

Loebas personal weblog

Loebas hails from the Netherlands and works in refurbishing discarded computers.

GothPanda’s Devlog

GothPanda is a panda, on the Internet.

Ky Bean

An upcoming furry blogger with a RoboYeen fursona.

Inconsistent Software

Foxis The Cookie Dragon writes about inconsistent software and how to improve it. He also takes part in an event called Blaugust.

(I briefly considered making this link the only one not set to open in a new tab, as a joke on the blog’s name, but ultimately decided against it.)

Uvoks Blog

Uvok is a snow cheetah furry that writes in both English and German about technology (and also publishes his blog on Tor).

Regalia’s blog

Regalia is a puppygirl who rants about, among other things, the problems with today’s implementations of federated technology (especially if you’re a minor trying to respect people’s boundaries with their 18+ accounts).

yosh@unix.dog

Yosh writes about a lot of technical topics. This website is a wealth of information and has one of the coolest designs I’ve seen on the Internet in a long time.

Anpuankhses’ Art

Anpuankhses is a digital artist and graphic designer.

Wow, that’s a lot of furry blogs

There could be even more, should more furries choose to pick up blogging.

I highly recommend reading through some of the blogs linked above. Some will give you inspiration. On the flipside, others may irritate you into writing rebuttals.

Blogging at scale is a highly chaotic matter, really.

I will be adding to this post over time.

However, I will not be keeping a detailed changelog, because that’s a lot of needless overhead for something very few people will care about.

CMYKat

“How can I get my blog listed here?”

Just let me know it exists! Email, comment, Fediverse mention. I can’t promise I’ll get to it on a timely manner, of course.

Note: I will probably not link to any “company blogs”.

This is meant to celebrate the work of individual furries, not furry[-adjacent] businesses.

https://soatok.blog/2024/07/21/featured-furries/

#blogs #featured #furries #furry #FurryFandom

Dhole Moments

2020-06-15 08:26:54

Despite the awesomeness and diversity that the furry fandom offers the world, there is a very narrow subset of furry content creation that has attained popular appeal within our community.

If you want to create and share furry art, there are at least a half dozen furry websites dedicated to furry art (including FurAffinity). If you want to watch people perform skits in fursuit, you have the Furry YouTube scene. If you want to watch furries play video games live, you have the Furry Twitch community (main hub: Furry Watch). There’s a thriving network of furries on social media websites like Twitter (which is where I’m most active). Hell, we even have successful authors who have published multiple books in our community (i.e. Kyell Gold).

But what we don’t see a lot of are furry bloggers. And I think that’s a mistake we should seek to correct.

Why Bother?

Social media companies are pretty terrible, and having your entire community centralized and dependent on companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter is at best a fragile equilibrium.

Ask yourself this: When was the last time someone attacked furries–in a thinly-veiled attempt to attack LGBTQIA+ people but using furries as a dog-whistle so their queerphobia can fly under the radar–on one of these platforms, and never faced any consequences (account suspension, content removal, etc.)?

How many times have your queer friends had their accounts suspended for telling bigots to fuck off, but the bigots’ accounts remain privileged?

Hell, I have friends who work for those companies, and even they can’t stem the flow of hate speech or neutralize harassment campaigns. (Art by Khia.)

The sad truth is that, when it comes to social media, we are not their customers. We are the product being sold to advertisers.

To put it bluntly: If hate speech is ever proven to make ad campaigns more successful, social media companies will explicitly allow it. But even more than that: You can expect these companies to punish us instead.

This is as true for Furry Twitter as it is for Furry YouTube, Furry Twitch, Furry TikTok, Furry Amino, Furry Facebook, and even Furry LinkedIn. (No, I’m not kidding.)

That’s why furries should consider starting, and maintaining, their own blog. Yes, even you!

Why Blogs Are a Game-Changer

Starting a blog gives you control over your own message, without being subject to the whims of a soulless corporation (and/or venture capitalists).

You can absolutely use social media to share and promote the content you would otherwise be sharing exclusively with those social media companies. But those apps and platforms will cease to be the primary source for the work you pour your time and heart into.

If Jack Dorsey ever went full fascist and decided to ban all queer folks from Twitter, approximately 75% of the furry fandom would disappear from their platform overnight–including the most popular furries in each niche.

But if you had your content hosted on your own blog, your online presence would survive his Thanos snap.

Furry Blogs Provide Clearer Self-Expression

Furry Twitter users: Raise your paw if you’ve never had a tweet get taken out of context or misread by another person, and had to deal with the consequences of said miscommunication.

Short bursts of information are not always a reliable means to communicate an idea. Some things require a lot of framing, context, and nuance to express clearly.

Sometimes Twitter users like to work around this by writing a series of tweets (sometimes called “tweetstorms”). But this is a brittle strategy at best: What if one of the tweets in your thread fails to load, or gets taken down by malicious users sending false reports?

Either way, if your audience is presented with your words without the intended context, who can blame them for thinking you’re a terrible person who supports something terrible?

Blog posts don’t carry this risk: Long-form articles are very all-or-nothing.

Yes, you can still write carelessly. Yes, your audience can still misinterpret something. But this is always a risk with communication. Platforms like Twitter exacerbate the inherent risk with technical failures.

Without Furry Bloggers, We’re Left Out of the Conversation

There are a lot of bloggers and citizen journalists in the world. Every once in a while, one of them covers our community in a one-off article.

Not all bloggers are well-intentioned.

If we want the general public to stop acting shitty towards us (and especially towards younger furs), letting those bloggers have complete control over the public perception of our community is a huge fail.

Is There Already a Furry Blog Community?

Yes, but it’s not very large (yet).

The only furry blogs I’ve seen in the past few months (n.b. since I started Dhole Moments in April 2020) include:

• Dogpatch Press
• Eduardo Soliz
• Furry Times
• Furry Writers’ Guild
• Fuzzballstorytime.com
• Radicoon Register
• Rune’s Furry Blog
• The Productive Wuff
• Tiger Tales
• YellowZebra Sports

The furry fandom has a population easily in excess of 1 million worldwide, yet only about a dozen of us are actively blogging in 2020.

But My Interests Are Too Niche, Nobody Will Ever Want to Read About Them!

You have no way of knowing that unless you try!

I mostly write about cryptography, which isn’t exactly the most popular topic to read about on the Internet. And yet:

There is nothing intrinsically better about Dhole Moments than the blog you could be starting right now.

Regardless of how boring you might think your interests are to other people, writing about them is a win-win because:

1. Blogging is an excellent way to express your passion for your interests.
2. Writing is a skill that tends to improve with experience and deliberate practice.
3. You will eventually find other people who share your interests, especially if one of your blog posts ranks high on search engines for oddly-specific search queries.

There’s almost no reason not to blog.

(Laziness isn’t a valid reason; they’re extremely easy to set up and most of you were already sharing content on social media websites to begin with.)

How Dhole Moments Will Help

Whether you’ve been convinced to start a blog by this article, or already had one and have been neglecting it, I want to help you get started.

I recently created a category called Featured Furries in order to feature a post on Fuzzballstorytime.com.

If you’re a furry who wants to blog, let me know your blog exists and I will feature one article from your blog in that category.

Disclaimer: If you support racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. you are not welcome to be featured on Dhole Moments, and can in fact go fuck yourself.

Don’t think for a second that I’ll ever support hate speech! (Art by Swizz.)

---

Header art was made by me! Isn’t it terrible? Now you know why I commission artists instead of trying to draw stuff myself.

But I chose to use my own sketches to illustrate a point with this article: It doesn’t matter very much if you’re not presently very good at something. Sure, if you do it, you’ll certainly improve your skills, but more importantly:

Impostor syndrome sucks, and we do everyone a service by resisting it within ourselves. It’s okay if your earliest blog posts are a little shitty.

If you want to make an impact on the world, you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to consistently show up.

https://soatok.blog/2020/06/15/the-world-needs-more-furry-bloggers/

If you’ve somehow never encountered an Internet meme before, you may be surprised to learn that the number 69 is often associated with sex (and, more specifically, a particular sex act).

This happens to be the 69th blog post published on Dhole Moments, since I started the blog in April 2020.

You could even go as far as to say it’s the 4/20 +69th post, for maximum meme potential.

42069, get it? (Art by Khia)

However! I make a concerted effort to keep my blog safe-for-work, so if you’re worried about this post being flooded with furry porn (a.k.a. yiff art), or cropped yiff memes, or any other such lascivious nonsense, you won’t find any of that on this blog. (Sorry to disappoint.)

Instead, I’d like to take the opportunity to correct some public misconceptions about human sexuality, identity, and how these topics relate to the furry fandom.

Is Furry a Sex Thing?

I find it difficult to overstate how often people assume the “furry is a sex thing” premise. Especially on technical forums.

But let’s backtrack for a second. What isn’t a sex thing?

Art by Khia.

This turns out to be a difficult question to answer. Even Wikipedia’s somewhat concise list of paraphilias doesn’t leave a lot of topics off the table.

Are shoes a sex thing? Are cigarettes? Poetry?

Comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Hell, one might be tempted to cry foul on the header image used in this blog post for including tentacles, hypnotic eyes, and footpaws in the same image. (Scandalous!) But if you look at the uncropped versions of these images, you’ll quickly realize they aren’t yiffy.

Top Art by AtlasInu.
Bottom: Created by FlashWhite_. Fox is Kiit Lock.
The more you read about this topic, the more you’ll realize this question is inert. Anything can be a sex thing. Humans are largely a sexual species, and sex is deeply ingrained in our culture (which can make life awkward for asexual people).

Instead, the question of whether or not the furry fandom is sexual becomes a bit of a Rorschach test for one’s cognitive biases.

If you’re chiefly concerned with public image–especially when fursuiting in public, where kids can see–you’re incentivized to double down on the fact that the furry fandom is no more inherently sexual than anything else can be. And this is true.

If you’re concerned with cultivating a sex-positive environment where people can live out their sexual fantasies in a safe, sane, and consensual manner, you’re incentivized to insist that furry is a sexual thing. “We have murrsuits for crying out loud! Stop kink-shaming! Down with puritan ideologies on sex!” And this is also true.

Humans are largely sexual, so any activity humans engage in will inevitably involve people sexualizing it. Even tupperware parties, for fuck’s sake! Anyone who believes there is a “Rule 34 of the Internet” tacitly acknowledges this fact, even if it’s inconvenient for a narrative they’re trying to spin.

So while this might be a meaningless question, one has to wonder…

Why Does Everyone Care So Much If Being a Furry (In Particular) Is Sexual or Not?

To understand what’s really happening here, you need to know a few things about the furry fandom.

1. Approximately 80% of furries are LGBTQIA+ (source).
2. Early anti-furry sentiments were motivated by queerphobia, especially on forums like Something Awful–and the influence of early hateful memes can still be seen to this day.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

One of the Something Awful staff eventually acknowledged and apologized for this.

Archived from here. To corroborate, an Internet author named Maddox once parodied SomethingAwful’s hateful obsession with furries.

There was even a movement within the furry fandom history (the “Burned Furs“) that aimed to excise queerness and sex-positivity from the community. It’s no coincidence that a lot of the former Burned Furs joined with the alt-right movement within the furry fandom.

The alt-right is explicitly queerphobic; especially against trans people. But it’s not just queerphobic; it’s also an ableist and racist movement.

Regardless of sexual orientation, a lot of furries are neurodivergent, too.

Simply put: The reason that most people care whether or not furries are sexual is rooted in the propensity of anti-furry rhetoric in Internet culture, which was motivated at its inception by mostly queerphobia with a dash of ableism.

Art by Khia.

The notion that furries are “too sexual” originated as a dog-whistle for “too gay”, and caught on with people who didn’t know the hidden meaning of the idea. Now a lot of people repeat these ideas without intending or even knowing their roots, and many more have internalized shame about the whole situation.

Unfortunately, this even precipitates into the furry fandom itself, which leads to an unfortunate cyclical discourse that takes place largely on Furry Twitter.

Original tweet unavailable

Furry Isn’t a Sexuality. There is no F in LGBT!

If you publicly state “anti-furry rhetoric is largely queerphobic dog-whistles”, you will inevitably hear someone try to retort this way. So let’s be very clear about it.

Furry isn’t its own sexual identity, and I would never claim otherwise.

Unlike transgender people, furries do not experience anything like “species dysphoria” (although therians/otherkin do report experiencing this; don’t conflate the two).

What’s happening here is: Most furries (about 80% of us) have separate sexual/gender identities that deviate from the heteronormative. A lot of queerphobia is easier to sell when you convey it through dog-whistles. So that’s what bigots did.

Polite company that wouldn’t partake in queer-bashing is often willing to laugh at the notion of “Beat A Furry Day“.

Anyone who tries to twist this acknowledgement to mean something ridiculous like an LGBTF movement is either being irrational or a 4chan troll.

Art by Khia.

For related reasons, you shouldn’t ever feel the need to “come out” as a furry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG2DRLimBSM

It’s okay to just really like Beastars, Zootopia, or even the Furry aspects of the Minecraft and Roblox communities. It doesn’t make you a sex-freak.

What’s the Take-Away?

It doesn’t really matter if the furry fandom has a sexual side to it. Everything does! The people who proclaim to care very much about this care for all the wrong reasons. Don’t be one of them.

Art by Swizz.

And remember: Lewd furries aren’t furry trash; we’re yiff-raff!

Sex Isn’t Well-Defined Either

While we’re talking about sex, did you know that biological sex isn’t neatly divided into “male” and “female”? This isn’t an ideological position; it’s a scientific one. Just ask a biologist!

https://twitter.com/JUNIUS_64/status/1054387892624285699

Trans and nonbinary people change gender (which is about your role within society) from what they were assigned at birth, but even sex itself isn’t so concrete.

The next time someone tries to appeal to “science” when talking about trans rights and then vomits up some unenlightened K-12 explanation of human reproduction and biological sex, remind them that science disagrees with their oversimplified and outdated mental model–and they might know this if they kept up with scientists.

Where Can I Learn More About the Sexual Side of the Furry Fandom?

Important: If you’re under the age of 18, you should stay out of adult spaces until you’re old enough to participate. No excuses.

If you’re looking for pornographic furry art (also called “yiff”), most furry art sites (FurryLife, FurAffinity, etc.) have adult content filters that you can turn off when you register an account.

If you’re looking for something more interactive, there’s a swath of furries that develop private VR experiences for 18+ audiences. One of the most well-funded Patreon artists makes adult furry games.

If you’re curious about why and how people express their sexuality when fursuiting (also called “murrsuiting”), there’s a subreddit for that.

It’s really not hard to find. This is one of the advantages of furry being a largely sex-positive community.

Furry YouTuber Ragehound even has a series about Furries After Dark if you want to learn more about these topics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGOlQJDO5no

Finally, similar to how 69 is a meme number for sex, furries have an additional meme number (621) that comes from the name of an adult furry website (e621.net).

You now have enough knowledge to navigate the adult side of the fandom. Just don’t come crying to me when you develop the uncanny knack for recognizing which r/furry_irl posts are actually cropped yiff versus wholly worksafe art.

https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #LGBTQIA_ #Society

Dhole Moments

2020-04-21 10:46:39

Dhole Moments

Writings about information security, cryptography, software, and humanity, from a member of the furry fandom.

About This Blog

From the Furry Fandom…

Featured Furries

Can’t get enough of blog posts written by furries? This post aims to curate some of the other blogs written by furries that are worth sharing with my regular readers. Many (but not all) of these furry blogs are focused on technology in some way. Background Information Many years ago, I wrote a post titled…

July 21, 2024August 15, 2024

Soa Talks (Latest Posts)

Ambition, The Fediverse, and Technology Freedom

If you’re new to reading this blog, you might not already be aware of my efforts to develop end-to-end encryption for ActivityPub-based software. It’s worth being aware of before you continue to read this blog post. To be very, very clear, this is work I’m doing independent of the W3C or any other standards organization…

October 12, 2024October 12, 2024

Why are furry conventions offering HIV testing to attendees?

Spoiler: It’s nothing scandalous or bad. Every once in a while, someone posts this photo on Twitter to attempt to dunk on furries: Over the years, I’ve seen this discourse play out several times. The people that post this photo usually don’t elaborate on why they think this photo is meaningful, they just let it…

September 30, 2024October 3, 2024

Cryptographic Innuendos

Neil Madden recently wrote a blog post titled, Digital Signatures and How to Avoid Them. One of the major points he raised is: Another way that signatures cause issues is that they are too powerful for the job they are used for. You just wanted to authenticate that an email came from a legitimate server, but now…

September 20, 2024September 20, 2024

@soatok@furry.engineer

https://soatok.blog/

I have been a begrudging user of Telegram for years simply because that’s what all the other furries use, despite their cryptography being legendarily bad.

When I signed up, I held my nose and expressed my discontent at Telegram by selecting a username that’s a dig at MTProto’s inherent insecurity against chosen ciphertext attacks: IND_CCA3_Insecure.

Art: CMYKat

I wrote about Furries and Telegram before, and included some basic privacy recommendations. As I said there: Telegram is not a private messenger. You shouldn’t think of it as one.

Recent Developments

Telegram and Elon Muck have recently begun attacking Signal and trying to paint it as insecure.

Matthew Green has a Twitter thread (lol) about it, but you can also read a copy here (archive 1, archive 2, PDF).

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789688236933062767

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789689315624169716

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789690652399170013

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789691417721282958

Et cetera.

This is shitty, and exacerbates a growing problem on Telegram: The prevalence of crypto-bros and fascist groups using it to organize.

Why Signal is Better for Furries

First, Signal has sticker packs now. If you want to use mine, here you go.

For years, the main draw for furries to Telegram over Signal was sticker packs. This is a solved problem.

Second, you can setup a username and keep your phone number private. You don’t need to give your phone number to strangers anymore!

(This used to be everyone’s criticism of Signal, but the introduction of usernames made it moot.)

Finally, it’s trivial for Americans to setup a second Signal account using Twilio or Google Voice, so you can compartmentalize your furry posting from the phone number your coworkers or family is likely to know.

(Note: I cannot speak to how to deal with technology outside of America, because I have never lived outside America for any significant length of time and do not know your laws. If this is relevant to you, ask someone in your country to help figure out how to navigate technological and political issues pertinent to your country; I am not local to you and have no fucking clue.)

The last two considerations were really what stopped furries (or queer people in general, really) from using Signal.

Why Signal?

There are two broadly-known private messaging apps that use state-of-the-art cryptography to ensure your messages are private, and one of them is owned by Meta (a.k.a., Facebook, which owns WhatsApp). So Signal is the only real option in my book.

That being said, Cwtch certainly looks like it may be promising in the near future. However, I have not studied its cryptography in depth yet. Neither has it been independently audited to my knowledge.

It’s worth pointing out that the lead developer of Cwtch is wrote a book titled Queer Privacy, so she’s overwhelmingly more likely to be receptive to the threat models faced by the furry community (which is overwhelmingly LGBTQ+).

For the sake of expedience, today, Signal is a “yes” and Cwtch is a hopeful “maybe”.

How I Setup a Second Signal Account

I own a Samsung S23, which means I can’t just use the vanilla Android tutorials for setting up a second profile on my device. Instead, I had to use the “Secure Folder” feature. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has more guidance worth considering.

If you don’t own a Samsung phone, you don’t need to bother with this “Secure Folder” feature (as the links above will tell you). You can just set up a work profile and get the same result! You probably also can’t access the same feature, since that’s a Samsung exclusive idiom. Don’t sweat it.

I don’t know anything about Apple products, so I can’t help you there, but there’s probably a way to set it up for yourself too. (If not, maybe consider this a good reason to stop giving abusive corporations like Apple money?)

The other piece of the puzzle you need is a second phone number. Google Voice is one way to acquire one; the other is to setup a Twilio account. There are plenty of guides online for doing that.

(Luckily, I’ve had one of these for several years, so I just used that.)

Why does Signal require a phone number?

The historical reason is that Signal was a replacement for text messaging (a.k.a., SMS). That’s probably still the official reason (though they don’t support SMS anymore).

From what I understand, the Signal development team has always been much more concerned about privacy for people that own mobile phones, but not computers, than they were concerned about the privacy of people that own computers, but not mobile phones.

After all, if you pick a random less privileged person, especially homeless or from a poor country, they’re overwhelmingly more likely to have a mobile phone than a computer. This doesn’t scratch the itch of people who would prefer to use PGP, but it does prioritize the least privileged people’s use case.

Their workflow, therefore, optimized for people that own a phone number. And so, needing a phone number to sign up wasn’t ever a problem they worried about for the people they were most interested in protecting.

Fortunately, using Signal doesn’t immediately reveal your phone number to anyone you want to chat with, ever since they introduced usernames. You still need one to register.

Tell Your Friends

I understand that the network effect is real. But it’s high time furries jettisoned Telegram as a community.

Lazy edit of the “Friendship Ended” meme

Finally, Signal is developed and operated by a non-profit. You should consider donating to them so that we can bring private messaging to the masses.

Addendum (2024-05-15)

I’ve been asked by several people about my opinions on other platforms and protocols.

Specifically, Matrix. I do not trust the Matrix developers to develop or implement a secure protocol for private messaging.

I don’t have an informed opinion about Signal forks (Session, Molly, etc.). Generally, I don’t review cryptography software for FOSS maximalists with skewed threat models unless I’m being paid to do so, and that hasn’t happened yet.

https://soatok.blog/2024/05/14/its-time-for-furries-to-stop-using-telegram/

#endToEndEncryption #furries #FurryFandom #privacy #Signal #Telegram

Dhole Moments

2021-06-22 07:06:12

Update (2024-05-14): It’s time for furries to move away from Telegram.

A question I often get–especially from cryptography experts:

What is it with furries and Telegram?

https://twitter.com/Monochromemutt/status/1407005415099883527

No, they’re almost certainly not talking about that.

Most furries use Telegram to keep in touch with other members of our community. This leads many to wonder, “Why Telegram of all platforms?”

The answer is simple: Stickers.

(Art by Khia.)

Telegram was the first major chat platform that allowed custom sticker packs to be uploaded and used by its users. This led to the creation of a fuckton of sticker packs for peoples’ fursonas.

How many furry sticker packs are there? Well, my friend Nican started a project to collect and categorize them all. You can find their project online at bunnypa.ws.

https://twitter.com/Nican/status/1200229213627801600

As of this writing, there are over 230,000 stickers across over 7,300 sticker packs (including mine). It also supports inline search!

https://twitter.com/BunnyPawsBot/status/1345902008339898371

Additionally, there’s a very strong network effect at play: Furries are going to gravitate to platforms with a strong furry presence.

With that mystery out of the way, I’d like to share a few of my thoughts about Telegram as a platform and how to make it manageable.

Don’t Use Telegram As a Secure Messenger

Despite at least one practical attack against MTProto caused by its poor authentication, Telegram refuses to implement encryption that’s half as secure as the stuff I publish under my furry identity.

Instead, they ran a vapid “contest” and point to that as evidence of their protocol’s security.

If you’re a cryptography nerd, then you probably already understand that IND-CCA2 security is necessary for confidential messaging. You’re probably cautious enough to not depend on Telegram’s MTProto for privacy.

If you’re not a cryptography nerd, then you probably don’t care about any of this jargon or what it means.

It doesn’t help that they had another vulnerability that a renowned cryptography expert described as “the most backdoor-looking bug I’ve ever seen”.

(Art by Khia.)

So let’s be clear:

Telegram is best treated as a message board or a mailing list.

Use it for public communications, knowing full well that the world can read what you have to say. So long as that’s your threat model, you aren’t likely to ever get burned by the Durov family’s ego.

For anything that you’re not comfortable with being broadcast all over the Internet, you should use something more secure. Signal is the current recommended choice until something better comes along.

(Cwtch looks very good, but it’s not ready yet.)

Enable Folders to Make Notifications Reasonable

Last year, Telegram rolled out the ability to collect conversations, groups, and chats into folders. Most furries don’t know about this feature, because it doesn’t enable itself by default.

First, open the hamburger menu (on desktop) or click on your icon (on mobile), then click Settings.

Next, you’ll see an option for Folders.

You should see a button that says “Create New Folder”.

From here, you can include Chats or general types of Chats (All Groups, All Channels, All Personal Conversations) and then exclude specific entries.

Give it a name and press “Create”. After a bit of organizing, you might end up with a setup like this.

Now, here’s the cool thing (but sadly doesn’t exist on all clients–use Telegram Desktop on Windows and Linux if you want it).

Once you’re done setting up your folders, back out to the main interface on Desktop and right click one of the folders, then press “Mark As Read”.

Finally, an easy button to zero out your notifications. Serenity at last!

Inbox Zero on Telegram? Hell yes!
(Art by Khia.)

Note: Doing this to the special Unread folder is congruent to pressing Shift + ESC on Slack. You’re welcome, Internet!

Make Yourself Undiscoverable

In the default configuration, if anyone has your phone number in their address book (n.b. queerphobic relatives) and they install Telegram, you’ll get a notification about them joining.

As you can imagine, that’s a bit of a terrifying prospect for a lot of people. Fortunately, you can turn this off.

Under Settings > Privacy and Security > Phone Number, you can limit the discovery to your contacts (n.b. in your phone’s address book).

Turn Off Notifications for Pinned Messages

Under Settings > Notifications, you will find the appropriate checkbox under the Events heading.

A lot of furry Telegram groups like to notify all users whenever they pin a message. These notifications will even override your normal preferences if you disabled notifications for that group.

Also, you’re probably going to want to disable notifications for every channel / group / rando with very few exceptions, or else Telegram will quickly get super annoying.

Increase the Interface Scale

The default font size for Telegram is tiny. This is bad for accessibility.

Fortunately, you can make the font bigger. Open the Settings menu and scroll down past the first set of options.

Set the interface scale to at least 150%. It will require Telegram to re-launch itself to take effect.

Don’t Rely on Persistent Message History

This is just a cautionary footnote, especially if you’re dealing with someone with a reputation for gaslighting: The other participant in a conversation can, at any point in time, completely or selectively erase messages from your conversation history.

However, this doesn’t delete any messages you’ve already forwarded–be it to your Saved Messages or to a private Channel.

Aside: This is why, when someone gets outed for being a terrible human being, the evidence is usually preserved as forwarded messages to a channel.

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Although Telegram isn’t in the same league as Signal and WhatsApp, its user experience is good–especially if you’re a furry.

I hope with the tips I shared above, as well as resources like bunnypa.ws, the Furry Telegram experience will be greatly improved for everyone that reads my blog.

Addendum: Beware the Furry Telegram Group List

A few people have asked me, “Why don’t you tell folks about furry-telegram-groups.net and/or @furlistbot?”

The main reason is that a lot of the most popular groups on that listing are either openly or secretly run by a toxic personality cult called Furry Valley that I implore everyone to avoid.

https://soatok.blog/2021/06/22/a-furrys-guide-to-telegram/

#chat #communication #furries #furry #FurryFandom #privacySettings #stickers #Technology

Art by Kyume.

Search engines have this feature where if you start to type a question, it will attempt to predict your question based on what other people have asked.

This has some hilarious consequences.
The PDF file format is apparently the world’s one of the world’s four most popular religions, or so the meme goes.
Sometimes this feature gets gamed by large hordes of shitty people (read: 4chan) typing provocative questions into search engines.

Let’s take a look at some of the questions that real people and/or astroturfing trolls have asked Google about the furry fandom and its members.

Questions in This Page

• Do Furries Have Rights?
• Do Furries Say UwU?
• Do Furries Deserve Rights?
• Do Furries Talk?
• Do Furries Want to Be Animals?
• Do Furries Go to Comic Con?
• Do Furries Go to the Vet?
• Why Do Furries Matter?
• Why Do Furries Use Telegram?
• Why Do Furries Like Foxes?
• Why Do Furries Like Wolves?
• Why Do Furries Wear Fursuits?
• Why Do Furries Say OwO?
• How Do Furries Talk?
• How Do Furries Work?
• How Do Furries Feel About Cats?
• How Do Furries Make Money?
• How Do Furries Go to the Bathroom?
• Can I Hunt Furries?
• Are Furries Legal?
• Are Furries Into Animals?
• Are Furries a Gender?
• Are Furries a LGBTQIA+ Identity?

Answers to Questions People Asked Google About Furries

Note: This is just a subset of all the questions that showed up in Google’s autocomplete for various questions about furries. A lot of the questions are inappropriate or are framed so poorly that they’re not worth answering in the first place.

Soatok is here to answer your burning curiosity.

Do Furries Have Rights?

Yes. Specifically: The same rights as anyone else in the country they live in.

Do Furries Say UwU?

UwU

Do Furries Deserve Rights?

Yes.

I’m glad that matter’s settled, aren’t you?

Do Furries Talk?

If we didn’t, people wouldn’t be so desperate to shut us up, now would they?

But some fursuiters do choose to remain silent in fursuit.

Do Furries Want to Be Animals?

We already are animals: Humans are animals.

I mean, really, the only other options are vegetable, mineral, fungus, or microbe.

Do Furries Want to Be Non-Human Animals?

Much better question!

Generally, no.

The people who believe they are (spiritually or otherwise) a non-human animal are called otherkin or therian, not furries.

Do Furries Go to Comic Con?

Yes.

https://twitter.com/Zarafagiraffe/status/1161033643860455424

This really shouldn’t surprise anyone. Furries are nerds. Nerds go to cons.

Do Furries Go to the Vet?

No.

Not only do we not go to the vet, but we’ve historically done a poor job of vetting the people who rise in popularity in our community… which usually resulted in completely avoidable PR disasters that trolls happily abuse, to this day, to try to astroturf the general public into thinking we’re horribly depraved people.

See what I did there? :3

Why Do Furries Matter?

That’s a rather nihilistic question to ask, and it was the most popular “why?” question, to boot.

Why, indeed, do any of us matter?

Art by circuitslime

In a societal sense, I would argue that furries matter because of all the reasons I outlined in this blog post.

Namely, the furry fandom saves lives, provides a support system for a lot of LGBTQIA+ people, and is home to some of the best humans you’ll ever meet (including many that are absolutely vital to modern telecommunications infrastructure, i.e. the Internet).

But at the end of the day, this is a deeply personal question and will ultimately boil down to individual opinion and thus is unanswerable.

Why Do Furries Use Telegram?

Counter-question: Have you ever heard of the network effect?

Telegram supported custom stickers before any other major communication medium, so they’ve been accumulating furries for many years before the other platforms caught up.

What other platform makes it easy to respond with this image when socially appropriate? Sticker by Khia, Telegram sticker pack here.

The main reasons furries choose Telegram today are:

1. Their friends are already using it
2. They can effectively reply to messages with custom stickers of their fursona, rather than just plaintext or emoji

That being said, many furries these days use Discord too. Main reasons: Gaming and streaming.

If you’d like to learn more about furries and Telegram, and furries using Telegram, and how to make Telegram bearable, check out A Furry’s Guide to Telegram.

Why Do Furries Like Foxes?

Oh contrare!

Just kidding! This sticker’s meaning is “I’m not a fox!” not “Down with foxes!”

There really isn’t a good answer to this question.

The best approximation you’ll find is that: Foxes used to be an extremely popular choice in cartoon animal character design (Disney’s Robin Hood, Star Fox 64, Sajin Komamura from Bleach, etc.).

Also: Wolves are actually more popular than foxes by a significant margin.

Why Do Furries Like Wolves?

Have you ever read a Jack London novel?

Enough said.

Why Do Furries Wear Fursuits?

Answers to this question will vary depending on who you ask. Some common responses:

1. Because it’s fun to physically present to other people as a character you personally identify with.
2. Because it brings genuine joy to other people.
3. Because it helps the fursuiter cope with social anxiety and shyness.
4. Because some people think they look cool.
5. Because they’re literally a piece of art you can (and are encouraged to) wear to parties.
6. Because it’s a hobby and looking further into it is either misleading or reductive.

But most furries (roughly 75%) don’t own a fursuit. (They ain’t cheap!)

Why Do Furries Say OwO?

It’s an emoticon! OwO is like a sideways :3 face, but with surprised eyes. It comes from copypasta started by a shitpost mocking the typical behavior and communication style of furry roleplayers.

How Do Furries Talk?

Rather well, thank you.

Oh wait, you wanted to know about the anatomy that enables speech? Ask a biologist with a passing interest in science fiction and/or werewolves.

How Do Furries Work?

The same way most of us work these days:

https://twitter.com/UberGeekGirl/status/1237492868693938176

How Do Furries Feel About Cats?

Severely allergic. But that’s just me.
Photo by Kurdan.
Feline fursonas (cats of all sizes) are almost as common as canid fursonas (wolves, foxes, etc.).

If you’re expecting to see us fight like cats and dogs, you’re in for some disappointment.

How Do Furries Make Money?

A lot of us work in tech!

Soatok, the author of this blog.

But not all furries work in tech. You can find us in pretty much every vocation and profession imaginable.

Some furries work full-time as artists and content creators for the rest of the community. All of the art you’re seeing on this page of my fursona was the result of other artists’ work.

How Do Furries Go to the Bathroom?

Generally, fursuiters have to undress before they can do their business, then redress after.

Non-fursuiters? Same as anyone else.

Can I Hunt Furries?

No, that’s stupid.

Furries are humans (and humans are animals).

Wanting to hunt furries is completely sociopathic and immoral.

You’re effectively asking if it’s okay to commit murder against a predominantly LGBTQIA+ community.

But Since Furries Want to Be Animals, We Should Be Allowed to Hunt Them!

No, of course not. Not unless we can hunt you too, anyway!

“All is fair in love and vore,” or so they say. Art by ruemaw

No, but seriously, if you feel like you should be allowed to “hunt” other people, there is something deeply wrong with you and you should seek therapy before you hurt an innocent person.

Are Furries Legal?

Yes. Why wouldn’t we be?

There may be a lot of nuances to this question. (Are fursuits legal in $venue? That will depend on mask laws, etc.)

I am not a lawyer. Ask Boozy instead.

Are Furries Into Animals?

No. Furries are not “into” real animals, especially if you use that term idiomatically to refer to sexual attraction.

A lot of people assume otherwise, including some depraved people who are “into” animals and think the furry community will support their proclivities.

But the simple answer is: Sick people like that don’t belong in furry.

Me, to animal abusers: “GTFO!”

Are Furries a Gender?

Categorically no, but if someone wants to use a fursona to express their gender, more power to them.

Gender and fandom interests are orthogonal.

Are Furries an LGBTQIA+ Identity?

No, but most of us happen to be some other LGBTQIA+ identity, so a lot of hateful people like to target furries as a dog-whistle for their actual bigotry.

The author is demi/gay, if anyone was wondering ;3 – Art by Swizz

Those are all the appropriate and interesting questions I could find through Google’s search prediction feature. If I missed any that are worth including, let me know on Twitter or Telegram.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/29/furiosity-thrilled-the-cat-questions-people-ask-about-the-furry-fandom/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #Google #predictiveSearch #questions #searchEngine

Dhole Moments

2020-04-24 02:43:25

My recent post about the alleged source code leaks affecting Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive made the rounds on Twitter and made someone very mad, so I got hate DMs.
No more Angry Whoppers for you, mister!
…Look, I only said I got hate DMs, not that I got interesting or particularly effective hate DMs! Weak troll is weak, I know.

A lot of people online claim they “hate furries”, but almost none of them quite understand how prolific our community is, let alone how important we are to the Internet. As Stormi the Folf puts it…

I guarantee you the internet would collapse in a most horrific manner if all the furries in the world got Thano's snapped.

They *run* the internet in more ways than most people realize

— 🦊Stormi the Folf🐺 🔜FWA (@StormiFolf) April 23, 2020

Stormi is the Potato of Knowledge and Floof
What Stormi’s alluding to is true, and that’s a tale best told by an outsider to our community.

Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day. https://t.co/k1UqOv5kpd

— Ẑ͚͔͍̻̤̟ä̶̼̗̟͔́̿̾̓n̬͙̫̿͑͊̈̚d̡̰̭̞͖̟̖̟ͬ̚ê̺͖̂ͩ̀̉ͣrͪ̓ (@mmsword) November 28, 2019

Their follow-up tweet that elaborates on furry involvement is here.
So I’d like take the time to explain why nobody should ever underestimate the ingenuity or positivity of the furry community.

The Furry Fandom Has Saved Lives

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3h9sO17CV9A?feature=oembed
This is just one of many anecdotes. You can find many more here.
Although the furry fandom is widely misunderstood, it’s difficult to overstate how many lives have been saved and enriched by our community.

I wanted to share this touching moment. @Reo_Grayfox was telling me his story, and said those lines while staring straight into his fursuit's eyes. Hearing personal stories like this makes you appreciate the vastly diverse reasons why the furry fandom is essential to so many. pic.twitter.com/fD09Wmv6mf

— Joaquín Baldwin (@joabaldwin) January 22, 2018

Furries Provide Much-Needed Comfort to Others

In 2016, refugees from the civil war in Syria ended up in a hotel in Canada. This would have been an utterly remarkable fact if it wasn’t the same hotel and weekend as the local furry convention, Vancoufur.

The kids loved it.

This isn’t an isolated incident either. Our community is well-known for kindness and generosity in spades.

https://charcoalthings.tumblr.com/post/132996328881/i-will-defend-furries-to-my-grave

https://wakor.tumblr.com/post/126072529744/ok-you-know-what

What’s there to hate?

The Furry Fandom is Collectively Pretty Bad-Ass

Art by RueMaw.
No, not like that.

The fandom is bad-ass in as many ways as the fandom is incredibly diverse.
Image source and backstory of this meme: Dogpatch Press

90s furries built the Internet pic.twitter.com/Gicxme2HkT

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2019

SwiftOnSecurity knows the truth about more than just corn.

So one of my friends said furries pretty much run the US nuclear response communication networks. Just in case you're worried about Trump.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 12, 2016

Seriously.

Some of the Most Talented People You’ll Ever Meet Are Furries

eSports Champions:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWhrECl6zOY?feature=oembed

Musicians:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/4NlXsjKmcWegIfQEI0JzHK?utm_source=oembed

Artists and costume makers: I could literally link to hundreds of artists here. Follow me on Twitter; I retweet a lot of cute stuff.

Pretty much everything you could aspire to be that isn’t also terrible, if you look hard enough, you’ll find furries in the leaderboards having a fun time with it all.

The only reason to hate furries is thinly-veiled homophobia, because only about 25% of furries are heterosexual.

Why So Curious?

If I’ve made you curious about our community, and now you want to learn more about us, I’ve got you.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/K2XeOxWW2oY?feature=oembed

Psychology Today: What’s the Deal with Furries?

Furry Fandom Documentary When?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cF9DQQsUcs0?feature=oembed

Ash Coyote is releasing a documentary about our subculture soon, titled The Fandom. You can find out more about it on her YouTube channel.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/23/never-underestimate-the-furry-fandom/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #hateMail #positivity #Society

Update (2024-05-14): It’s time for furries to move away from Telegram.

A question I often get–especially from cryptography experts:

What is it with furries and Telegram?

https://twitter.com/Monochromemutt/status/1407005415099883527

No, they’re almost certainly not talking about that.

Most furries use Telegram to keep in touch with other members of our community. This leads many to wonder, “Why Telegram of all platforms?”

The answer is simple: Stickers.

(Art by Khia.)

Telegram was the first major chat platform that allowed custom sticker packs to be uploaded and used by its users. This led to the creation of a fuckton of sticker packs for peoples’ fursonas.

How many furry sticker packs are there? Well, my friend Nican started a project to collect and categorize them all. You can find their project online at bunnypa.ws.

https://twitter.com/Nican/status/1200229213627801600

As of this writing, there are over 230,000 stickers across over 7,300 sticker packs (including mine). It also supports inline search!

https://twitter.com/BunnyPawsBot/status/1345902008339898371

Additionally, there’s a very strong network effect at play: Furries are going to gravitate to platforms with a strong furry presence.

With that mystery out of the way, I’d like to share a few of my thoughts about Telegram as a platform and how to make it manageable.

Don’t Use Telegram As a Secure Messenger

Despite at least one practical attack against MTProto caused by its poor authentication, Telegram refuses to implement encryption that’s half as secure as the stuff I publish under my furry identity.

Instead, they ran a vapid “contest” and point to that as evidence of their protocol’s security.

If you’re a cryptography nerd, then you probably already understand that IND-CCA2 security is necessary for confidential messaging. You’re probably cautious enough to not depend on Telegram’s MTProto for privacy.

If you’re not a cryptography nerd, then you probably don’t care about any of this jargon or what it means.

It doesn’t help that they had another vulnerability that a renowned cryptography expert described as “the most backdoor-looking bug I’ve ever seen”.

(Art by Khia.)

So let’s be clear:

Telegram is best treated as a message board or a mailing list.

Use it for public communications, knowing full well that the world can read what you have to say. So long as that’s your threat model, you aren’t likely to ever get burned by the Durov family’s ego.

For anything that you’re not comfortable with being broadcast all over the Internet, you should use something more secure. Signal is the current recommended choice until something better comes along.

(Cwtch looks very good, but it’s not ready yet.)

Enable Folders to Make Notifications Reasonable

Last year, Telegram rolled out the ability to collect conversations, groups, and chats into folders. Most furries don’t know about this feature, because it doesn’t enable itself by default.

First, open the hamburger menu (on desktop) or click on your icon (on mobile), then click Settings.

Next, you’ll see an option for Folders.

You should see a button that says “Create New Folder”.

From here, you can include Chats or general types of Chats (All Groups, All Channels, All Personal Conversations) and then exclude specific entries.

Give it a name and press “Create”. After a bit of organizing, you might end up with a setup like this.

Now, here’s the cool thing (but sadly doesn’t exist on all clients–use Telegram Desktop on Windows and Linux if you want it).

Once you’re done setting up your folders, back out to the main interface on Desktop and right click one of the folders, then press “Mark As Read”.

Finally, an easy button to zero out your notifications. Serenity at last!

Inbox Zero on Telegram? Hell yes!
(Art by Khia.)

Note: Doing this to the special Unread folder is congruent to pressing Shift + ESC on Slack. You’re welcome, Internet!

Make Yourself Undiscoverable

In the default configuration, if anyone has your phone number in their address book (n.b. queerphobic relatives) and they install Telegram, you’ll get a notification about them joining.

As you can imagine, that’s a bit of a terrifying prospect for a lot of people. Fortunately, you can turn this off.

Under Settings > Privacy and Security > Phone Number, you can limit the discovery to your contacts (n.b. in your phone’s address book).

Turn Off Notifications for Pinned Messages

Under Settings > Notifications, you will find the appropriate checkbox under the Events heading.

A lot of furry Telegram groups like to notify all users whenever they pin a message. These notifications will even override your normal preferences if you disabled notifications for that group.

Also, you’re probably going to want to disable notifications for every channel / group / rando with very few exceptions, or else Telegram will quickly get super annoying.

Increase the Interface Scale

The default font size for Telegram is tiny. This is bad for accessibility.

Fortunately, you can make the font bigger. Open the Settings menu and scroll down past the first set of options.

Set the interface scale to at least 150%. It will require Telegram to re-launch itself to take effect.

Don’t Rely on Persistent Message History

This is just a cautionary footnote, especially if you’re dealing with someone with a reputation for gaslighting: The other participant in a conversation can, at any point in time, completely or selectively erase messages from your conversation history.

However, this doesn’t delete any messages you’ve already forwarded–be it to your Saved Messages or to a private Channel.

Aside: This is why, when someone gets outed for being a terrible human being, the evidence is usually preserved as forwarded messages to a channel.

Although Telegram isn’t in the same league as Signal and WhatsApp, its user experience is good–especially if you’re a furry.

I hope with the tips I shared above, as well as resources like bunnypa.ws, the Furry Telegram experience will be greatly improved for everyone that reads my blog.

Addendum: Beware the Furry Telegram Group List

A few people have asked me, “Why don’t you tell folks about furry-telegram-groups.net and/or @furlistbot?”

The main reason is that a lot of the most popular groups on that listing are either openly or secretly run by a toxic personality cult called Furry Valley that I implore everyone to avoid.

https://soatok.blog/2021/06/22/a-furrys-guide-to-telegram/

#chat #communication #furries #furry #FurryFandom #privacySettings #stickers #Technology

Dhole Moments

2024-05-14 16:26:41

I have been a begrudging user of Telegram for years simply because that’s what all the other furries use, despite their cryptography being legendarily bad.

When I signed up, I held my nose and expressed my discontent at Telegram by selecting a username that’s a dig at MTProto’s inherent insecurity against chosen ciphertext attacks: IND_CCA3_Insecure.

Art: CMYKat

I wrote about Furries and Telegram before, and included some basic privacy recommendations. As I said there: Telegram is not a private messenger. You shouldn’t think of it as one.

Recent Developments

Telegram and Elon Muck have recently begun attacking Signal and trying to paint it as insecure.

Matthew Green has a Twitter thread (lol) about it, but you can also read a copy here (archive 1, archive 2, PDF).

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789688236933062767

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789689315624169716

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789690652399170013

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789691417721282958

Et cetera.

This is shitty, and exacerbates a growing problem on Telegram: The prevalence of crypto-bros and fascist groups using it to organize.

Why Signal is Better for Furries

First, Signal has sticker packs now. If you want to use mine, here you go.

For years, the main draw for furries to Telegram over Signal was sticker packs. This is a solved problem.

Second, you can setup a username and keep your phone number private. You don’t need to give your phone number to strangers anymore!

(This used to be everyone’s criticism of Signal, but the introduction of usernames made it moot.)

Finally, it’s trivial for Americans to setup a second Signal account using Twilio or Google Voice, so you can compartmentalize your furry posting from the phone number your coworkers or family is likely to know.

(Note: I cannot speak to how to deal with technology outside of America, because I have never lived outside America for any significant length of time and do not know your laws. If this is relevant to you, ask someone in your country to help figure out how to navigate technological and political issues pertinent to your country; I am not local to you and have no fucking clue.)

The last two considerations were really what stopped furries (or queer people in general, really) from using Signal.

Why Signal?

There are two broadly-known private messaging apps that use state-of-the-art cryptography to ensure your messages are private, and one of them is owned by Meta (a.k.a., Facebook, which owns WhatsApp). So Signal is the only real option in my book.

That being said, Cwtch certainly looks like it may be promising in the near future. However, I have not studied its cryptography in depth yet. Neither has it been independently audited to my knowledge.

It’s worth pointing out that the lead developer of Cwtch is wrote a book titled Queer Privacy, so she’s overwhelmingly more likely to be receptive to the threat models faced by the furry community (which is overwhelmingly LGBTQ+).

For the sake of expedience, today, Signal is a “yes” and Cwtch is a hopeful “maybe”.

How I Setup a Second Signal Account

I own a Samsung S23, which means I can’t just use the vanilla Android tutorials for setting up a second profile on my device. Instead, I had to use the “Secure Folder” feature. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has more guidance worth considering.

If you don’t own a Samsung phone, you don’t need to bother with this “Secure Folder” feature (as the links above will tell you). You can just set up a work profile and get the same result! You probably also can’t access the same feature, since that’s a Samsung exclusive idiom. Don’t sweat it.

I don’t know anything about Apple products, so I can’t help you there, but there’s probably a way to set it up for yourself too. (If not, maybe consider this a good reason to stop giving abusive corporations like Apple money?)

The other piece of the puzzle you need is a second phone number. Google Voice is one way to acquire one; the other is to setup a Twilio account. There are plenty of guides online for doing that.

(Luckily, I’ve had one of these for several years, so I just used that.)

Why does Signal require a phone number?

The historical reason is that Signal was a replacement for text messaging (a.k.a., SMS). That’s probably still the official reason (though they don’t support SMS anymore).

From what I understand, the Signal development team has always been much more concerned about privacy for people that own mobile phones, but not computers, than they were concerned about the privacy of people that own computers, but not mobile phones.

After all, if you pick a random less privileged person, especially homeless or from a poor country, they’re overwhelmingly more likely to have a mobile phone than a computer. This doesn’t scratch the itch of people who would prefer to use PGP, but it does prioritize the least privileged people’s use case.

Their workflow, therefore, optimized for people that own a phone number. And so, needing a phone number to sign up wasn’t ever a problem they worried about for the people they were most interested in protecting.

Fortunately, using Signal doesn’t immediately reveal your phone number to anyone you want to chat with, ever since they introduced usernames. You still need one to register.

Tell Your Friends

I understand that the network effect is real. But it’s high time furries jettisoned Telegram as a community.

Lazy edit of the “Friendship Ended” meme

Finally, Signal is developed and operated by a non-profit. You should consider donating to them so that we can bring private messaging to the masses.

Addendum (2024-05-15)

I’ve been asked by several people about my opinions on other platforms and protocols.

Specifically, Matrix. I do not trust the Matrix developers to develop or implement a secure protocol for private messaging.

I don’t have an informed opinion about Signal forks (Session, Molly, etc.). Generally, I don’t review cryptography software for FOSS maximalists with skewed threat models unless I’m being paid to do so, and that hasn’t happened yet.

https://soatok.blog/2024/05/14/its-time-for-furries-to-stop-using-telegram/

#endToEndEncryption #furries #FurryFandom #privacy #Signal #Telegram

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

One of the reoccurring topics of the Discourse on Furry Twitter is those gosh-darned popufurs–loosely defined as “anyone with a higher follower account than you”.

I’ve written an analysis post back when I posted on Medium that covered friendship and popufurs, which inspired Stormi to create a YouTube video about the topic:

https://youtu.be/sEJ3usS7bb4

I’ve never experienced popularity, but I’ve been close personal friends with a few people who do, and I’ve witnessed the fallout of parasocial relationships. Archantael did a really good video on that subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXGyKaOEz8I

Loneliness

One of the most dangerous falsehoods that too many furries believe about popularity is that you can’t be popular and lonely at the same time.

Loneliness was already an epidemic before COVID-19, and the prolonged social isolation has led to a lot of relationship strain, to say the least.

In the past year, we’ve seen a lot of long-term, loving relationships end abruptly. We’ve seen people who were coping with mental health issues suddenly succumb to them. Tempers hasten. Patience shorten. It’s been a royal clusterfuck, and at least in America, there’s no end to it in sight.

Friendship

I think a big problem that rarely gets talked about is that our society is plagued by weird beliefs about what friendship is or ought to be.

The “Friend Zone” Myth

One of the most deplorable myths about friendship is the so-called “friend zone”. The story goes something like this:

• When you meet someone, they’re a stranger. No arguments there.
• Once you and them start to gain familiarity, they become an acquaintance.
• After you’ve spent some time as an acquaintance, they become a friend.
• At this point, if your gender identities and sexual orientations are compatible, you’re expected to move onto some sort of romantic interest–be it a friendship “with benefits”, romantic partner, or something in-between.
• Once you’ve courted a number of flings, you progress towards a higher caliber of relationship. Namely: Marriage.

The reasoning goes: If you befriend a potential romantic partner, and remain friends, you’re somehow stuck on a less valuable step than what you should desire, and therefore should feel bad about it.

That’s what people say when they accuse someone of being in the “friend zone” by another person.

This mental model of viewing relationships is just dripping with the sort of hetero-normative patriarchy that feminists famously oppose, but not enough people actually listen to long enough to realize they also have your best interests in heart when they levy their critiques.

The belief in the Friend Zone leads to the cheapening of friendships in pursuit of sexual and romantic fulfillment. It’s inherently exclusionary to platonic expressions of love, asexuality, and polyamory.

Just say “no” to the entire concept of a Friend Zone.

Toxic Positivity

Life sometimes sucks.

Sometimes, the only way to cope with the suckage of life is to commiserate to your friends.

A good friend will listen, empathize with your experiences, and maybe even share their own. Friendship is rooted in shared vulnerability and appreciation.

But sometimes you encounter one of the Toxic Positivity proponents. “You’re bringing me down.” “Why are you depressed all the time?” We’ve heard it all before.

But toxic positivity is often more subtle than that. I’ll give you an example:

A good friend will tell you when you’re being an asshole, and try to talk you down from making foolish mistakes that will only hurt your future happiness.

Sometimes these conversations are tense and stressful. Sometimes you have to seem cruel to be kind. People are complicated.

And while I can understand not wanting to deal with high levels of stress all the damn time, there comes a time when you have to deal with the problems in front of you. Negative peace leads to a net negative.

Social Climbing and Disposable Friends

This one’s straight out of the “Actions Speak Louder Than Words” genre, and often follows from toxic positivity.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where that goes. (Art by Khia.)

Some people try to walk the social graph in order to position themselves near popular members of the community so they might benefit from others’ popularity.

Some people treat their friends as disposable and temporary, moving from group to group over the years, rather than face accountability for their own terrible behavior.

Some people do both of those things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI0lfO9_BAc

Happiness

Friendship and community are essential for humans to be happy. This is the conclusion of The Happiness Hypothesis.

Happiness does not come from within. It’s not something that you can summon into existence through sheer force of will.

Happiness does not come from without. It’s not a lost treasure that you have to go forth and dig up somewhere.

Happiness comes from in-between; from the strong and weak bonds in our lives. It’s our sense of closeness and vulnerability to others within our close friendships and broader communities that lead to happiness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU

Asking Ourselves “Why?”

Why do people pursue romance at the expense of friendships?

Why do people construct filter bubbles based on superficial positivity?

Why do people try to use others as stepping stones towards their ambitions or treat their friendships as disposable and temporary?

Why do we as a social species do all of this when we need friendships and communal bonds to be happy?

I think a lot of the time, the answer boils down to “ego”.

Ego

We as a species pay lip-service to friendship when it serves our self-interest, but discard its importance the second friendship becomes inconvenient.

Our ego–especially if we practice monogamous relationships–dictate that the only way to be “successful” in sex and love is to be in a committed relationship and friendship is just a stepping stone on the way to the real goal.

Our ego gets bruised when our friends show us tough love by speaking the truth.

Our ego drives us to strive for bigger numbers and stronger dopamine hits, even if it means using and abusing people along the way.

That’s what I take it to mean when Buddhists say that desire and ignorance lie at the root of suffering.

We want things, and we don’t know why we want them, but we do. And we will destroy ourselves and everyone we profess to love in pursuit of it. We’ll even destroy the habitability of our only planet in service to these desires.

Or we could, simply, not do that. If there’s one thing our ego loves, it’s to be reminded that we have a choice. That we’re in control.

As a hacker, exploiting a mechanism to undermine its normal goals is something I find a lot of beauty in. Hijacking the self-destructive nature of your own ego in service of your better nature is a masterpiece.

Choice

You are the protagonist of your own story. You can’t control what the universe throws as you, but you do get to decide what it means for you. Why not choose a better lesson?

And that’s usually enough to lead us to making better decisions, showing greater affection and appreciation for the people in our lives, and being more capable at coping with the endless hellscape that is other, often shitty, people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSM3Uml4Xpo

Soatok’s Friends

I’m fortunate to know a lot of excellent people, both within and without the furry fandom. Most of my closest friends don’t have enormous social media followings. Some of my friends do!

I believe it’s important for friendships to be genuine and not transactional.

Belmont / Doomalorian

My oldest friend recently made a fursona, so he can be more involved with my participation in the furry fandom.

Most of you don’t know him yet, but if you think I’m cool, you’ll almost certainly like him too. We’ve been friends for over 12 years and live together.

His furry account is @BelmontLion.

Art by INIGO.

He also has a non-fandom account, @Doomalorian, which is also his Twitch.tv channel.

https://twitter.com/Doomalorian

In the future, I’ll be picking up Twitch streaming again. I’ll probably play a bunch of games with my friends and generally just have a lot of fun with it. If that sort of thing interests you, stop by his streams and maybe give him a follow.

https://soatok.blog/2020/10/22/nearly-everyone-underestimates-the-importance-of-good-friendships/

#friends #friendship #furries #furry #FurryFandom #Society

Dhole Moments

2020-07-02 21:22:50

As America prepares for record-breaking infection statistics on a daily basis, many of us are looking at other countries safely reopening and wondering, “Why can’t we have nice things?”

What you see if you type “COVID-19 statistics” into a search engine. Data sourced from Wikipedia.

Of course, everyone has their favorite target to blame for this catastrophe. Democrats blame Republicans. Republicans blame Democrats.

I’m not interested in blame. Regardless of who takes the blame in the end, the responsibility for fixing this problem is shared among everyone. Instead, I’m more interested in answering the “Why?” question.

Why Did Things Get This Bad?

Art by circuitslime.

There are a lot of popular theories–many of them politically useful–about why the COVID-19 crisis is particularly bad in the United States.

A Failure of Trump’s Leadership?

Let’s get this one out of the way:

Was the current hellscape we found ourselves in a direct consequence of Donald J Trump’s failure to ethically and responsibly use his power as President of the United States in the best interest of the people?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/svrxYLvJYto?feature=oembed
“It’ll miraculously go away in April!” – Morons
It’s certain that Trump has totally failed at leadership, but I don’t think that’s a satisfactory explanation for the current crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/s9vzT-0hchw?feature=oembed

That is not to say that Trump is without fault! Just that the problem is bigger than one idiot in a three piece suit.

Challenges Due to Scale?

A lot of the countries that performed better at responding to COVID-19 had smaller populations and occupied smaller land masses than the United States. Is that a reasonable explanation for why the USA suffers?

No, it isn’t.

Per-capita analyses and samples from other countries with similar populations and occupied surface area would be consistent with the USA if that was the reason. This problem is mostly uniquely American.

Are the Protesters at Fault?

COVID-19 has an incubation period of up to two weeks.

The first signs of an uptick in COVID-19 infections was visible early into the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which implicates an earlier cause. The most likely one was the Memorial Day weekend celebrations that took place before George Floyd’s murder sparked widespread outrage.

Indeed, a further analysis did not show an uptick of COVID-19 infections even 4 weeks into the nationwide protests (which is two incubation periods).

Instead, the sharp spike in COVID-19 infections–factoring in the incubation period–coincided with states reopening their bars and restaurants. (Especially Florida.)

Why Things Are So Bad Today

The problem that America faces is the same one we’ve been faced with for many decades: Rampant Anti-Intellectualism.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bZnBL2dFgyI?feature=oembed

American anti-intellectualism is the juxtaposition of proud ignorance and conspiracy theories.

Let me ask all you female mask wearing ASSHOLES… are you ready to put a burka on next?

That mask is NOT about your safety…. it's about MIND CONTROL

The only reason I know masks are worthless is because Andrew Cuomo keeps telling EVERYONE to wear one

Stick it up your ass!

— 🇺🇸🍺TRUMP WON🍺🇺🇸 (@PISDI94_96) June 30, 2020

Tweet is also archived in case it gets deleted.
Anti-intellectualism takes many forms:

Every single time y'all tell me you're not ready to submit a talk on a subject you've been researching for months, I want you to think about "I don't actually ride in Ubers" internet-commentator guy. pic.twitter.com/aK2LAcFtzb

— Lesley Carhart (@hacks4pancakes) July 1, 2020

People are so willing to die on the hill of their ignorance that even literally dying doesn’t deter them from campaigning for self-destruction.

RIGHT NOW: Dozens are marching in Sanford chanting “My body. My choice.” They are protesting after a mask order went into place in Seminole County today. pic.twitter.com/kMT7EebDKN

— Stephanie Buffamonte (@StephBuffamonte) July 1, 2020

The reason that things are so bad in the United States of America boils down to the following:

1. Too many Americans are proud to be ignorant, and in many cases, argue in support of “my ignorance is just as good as your facts”.
2. Too many Americans are susceptible to bullshit conspiracy theories.
3. Too many Americans are so selfish and short-sighted that they’d rather go to bars and waste money they don’t have on alcohol and shallow conversation than save the lives of the people they profess to love and care about.
4. Conservative politics and media is a death cult that literally turned “wearing a mask to stop COVID-19” into a culture war issue.
5. The people I’ve described in points 1-4 vote in every election, to make sure someone representing their bullshit has a seat at the political table.

It’s far too tempting to scapegoat the sitting President–especially when they’re as terrible as Donald J Trump. But if you do that, you’re ignoring the reason that he’s in the oval office to begin with.

Willful Ignorance Kills

I’ve talked about this before, when I used to write on Medium:

1. https://medium.com/@soatok/american-ignorance-in-2020-c72c78d11dbb
2. https://medium.com/@soatok/dear-furries-bullshit-and-misinformation-will-hurt-you-4a6f531d62bd

The sole cause for the situation we’re in is the same anti-intellectualism that Isaac Asimov complained about back in 1980.

Even if you want to solely blame Donald Trump, about 40% of Americans currently approve of his presidency (archive).

How to Escape This Hellscape

Art by Swizz.

The only way to get out of the mess we’re in today is to stop tolerating ignorance and bullshit in your daily life. (Yes, this means you too, furry fandom! It’s not “all fun and games” anymore.)

That means, at a minimum:

• Not spreading the Myers-Brigg personality test bullshit
• Not giving the anti-LGBTQIA+ bigots at Chick-Fil-A any money
• Listening to experts (this means: SCIENTISTS, not talk show hosts or politicians)
• Being willing to admit “I don’t know” and then being curious enough to seek the truth
• Stop reading or financially supporting biased news media

Even if we manage to get out of the current COVID-19 hellscape without addressing these flaws, the next catastrophe will hit us just as hard.

Can People’s Minds Be Changed?

No. I don’t think most of the willfully ignorant assholes currently living in America that favor Trump’s presidency today are willing and capable of redemption.

There will be exceptions, and we should remain open to the possibility of some people coming around, but in general most of these jerks will dig their heels in when pressured.

Instead, we’re going to have to wait for them to die off naturally.

What we can do in the meantime is promote better education for the American kids.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ILQepXUhJ98?feature=oembed

A nation of enlightened free-thinkers fully capable of critical thought would be a good thing (even if Carlin thinks it will never happen). And we can get there, eventually.

All it takes is everyone deciding to be humble and actually verify what other people tell them (n.b. by referencing reputable sources).

It might not make a difference today, but in 10 or 20 years, a consistent effort to enable younger Americans to become smarter, wiser, and more empathetic than their parents and grandparents will change the political landscape of our country–and maybe even the world–for the better.

Art by Khia

Of course, the Powers That Be know that, which is why we see bullshit like this keep happening during a pandemic:

With a stroke of his veto pen, Gov. Ron DeSantis wiped out the entire $29.4 million budget for a suite of online education services that have become critical to students and faculty during the Covid-19 outbreak https://t.co/6PMop4SIPv

— POLITICO (@politico) June 30, 2020

Remember, DeSantis is the governor of the state whose COVID-19 infections-per-day graph looks like this:

You can see a clear data pattern with Florida's COVID-19 with a lull each Sunday. I've computed the baseline for this week (Sunday's numbers) and the last two weeks' increase relative to Sunday. We're easily on track to hit 10,000 new cases Friday-ish, maybe even higher. pic.twitter.com/8pnXF5uEwR

— 💙💛 "Dog Boy" Nex' 💙💛 (@NexJql) July 1, 2020

It won’t be easy. Bullshit is everywhere. But it’s doable.

---

Addendum: A Carnival of Stupid

In case you still had any doubt about the potent lethality of American anti-intellectualism, look no further than this story:

Florida teen dies after conspiracy theorist mom takes her to church ‘COVID party’ and tries to treat her with Trump-approved drug: report – https://t.co/Bw3SMVitxx

— Jeffrey Levin 🇺🇦 (@jilevin) July 6, 2020

We have to demand better of ourselves before we can demand better of others. But damn if the bar isn’t really, really low to begin with.

I believe someday we'll open up textbooks and find this screenshot under the definition of "cognitive dissonance". pic.twitter.com/n535Obq6SB

— 🦊 Ennex is trying this again! 🦊 (@EnnexTheFox) July 7, 2020

The White House Press Secretary on Trump's push to reopen schools: "The science should not stand in the way of this."

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) July 16, 2020

https://soatok.blog/2020/07/02/how-and-why-america-was-hit-so-hard-by-covid-19/

#Politics

My recent post about the alleged source code leaks affecting Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive made the rounds on Twitter and made someone very mad, so I got hate DMs.
No more Angry Whoppers for you, mister!
…Look, I only said I got hate DMs, not that I got interesting or particularly effective hate DMs! Weak troll is weak, I know.

A lot of people online claim they “hate furries”, but almost none of them quite understand how prolific our community is, let alone how important we are to the Internet. As Stormi the Folf puts it…

I guarantee you the internet would collapse in a most horrific manner if all the furries in the world got Thano's snapped.

They *run* the internet in more ways than most people realize

— 🦊Stormi the Folf🐺 🔜FWA (@StormiFolf) April 23, 2020

Stormi is the Potato of Knowledge and Floof
What Stormi’s alluding to is true, and that’s a tale best told by an outsider to our community.

Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day. https://t.co/k1UqOv5kpd

— Ẑ͚͔͍̻̤̟ä̶̼̗̟͔́̿̾̓n̬͙̫̿͑͊̈̚d̡̰̭̞͖̟̖̟ͬ̚ê̺͖̂ͩ̀̉ͣrͪ̓ (@mmsword) November 28, 2019

Their follow-up tweet that elaborates on furry involvement is here.
So I’d like take the time to explain why nobody should ever underestimate the ingenuity or positivity of the furry community.

The Furry Fandom Has Saved Lives

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3h9sO17CV9A?feature=oembed
This is just one of many anecdotes. You can find many more here.
Although the furry fandom is widely misunderstood, it’s difficult to overstate how many lives have been saved and enriched by our community.

I wanted to share this touching moment. @Reo_Grayfox was telling me his story, and said those lines while staring straight into his fursuit's eyes. Hearing personal stories like this makes you appreciate the vastly diverse reasons why the furry fandom is essential to so many. pic.twitter.com/fD09Wmv6mf

— Joaquín Baldwin (@joabaldwin) January 22, 2018

Furries Provide Much-Needed Comfort to Others

In 2016, refugees from the civil war in Syria ended up in a hotel in Canada. This would have been an utterly remarkable fact if it wasn’t the same hotel and weekend as the local furry convention, Vancoufur.

The kids loved it.

This isn’t an isolated incident either. Our community is well-known for kindness and generosity in spades.

https://charcoalthings.tumblr.com/post/132996328881/i-will-defend-furries-to-my-grave

https://wakor.tumblr.com/post/126072529744/ok-you-know-what

What’s there to hate?

The Furry Fandom is Collectively Pretty Bad-Ass

Art by RueMaw.
No, not like that.

The fandom is bad-ass in as many ways as the fandom is incredibly diverse.
Image source and backstory of this meme: Dogpatch Press

90s furries built the Internet pic.twitter.com/Gicxme2HkT

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2019

SwiftOnSecurity knows the truth about more than just corn.

So one of my friends said furries pretty much run the US nuclear response communication networks. Just in case you're worried about Trump.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 12, 2016

Seriously.

Some of the Most Talented People You’ll Ever Meet Are Furries

eSports Champions:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWhrECl6zOY?feature=oembed

Musicians:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/4NlXsjKmcWegIfQEI0JzHK?utm_source=oembed

Artists and costume makers: I could literally link to hundreds of artists here. Follow me on Twitter; I retweet a lot of cute stuff.

Pretty much everything you could aspire to be that isn’t also terrible, if you look hard enough, you’ll find furries in the leaderboards having a fun time with it all.

The only reason to hate furries is thinly-veiled homophobia, because only about 25% of furries are heterosexual.

Why So Curious?

If I’ve made you curious about our community, and now you want to learn more about us, I’ve got you.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/K2XeOxWW2oY?feature=oembed

Psychology Today: What’s the Deal with Furries?

Furry Fandom Documentary When?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cF9DQQsUcs0?feature=oembed

Ash Coyote is releasing a documentary about our subculture soon, titled The Fandom. You can find out more about it on her YouTube channel.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/23/never-underestimate-the-furry-fandom/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #hateMail #positivity #Society

Dhole Moments

2020-04-22 22:13:34

There are two news stories today. Unfortunately, some people have difficulty uncoupling the two.

1. The Team Fortress 2 Source Code has been leaked.
2. Hackers discovered a Remote Code Execution exploit.

The second point is something to be concerned about. RCE is game over. The existence of an unpatched RCE vulnerability, with public exploits, is sufficient reason to uninstall the game and wait for a fix to be released. Good on everyone for reporting that. You’re being responsible. (If it’s real, that is! See update at the bottom.)

The first point might explain why the second happened, which is fine for the sake of narrative… but by itself, a source code leak is a non-issue that nobody in their right mind should worry about from a security perspective.

Anyone who believes they’re less secure because the source code is public is either uninformed or misinformed.

I will explain.
Professor Dreamseeker is in the house. Twitch Emote by Swizz.

Why Source Code Leaks Don’t Matter for Security

You should know that, throughout my time online as a furry, I have been awarded thousand dollar bounties through public bounty programs.

How did you earn those bounties?
By finding zero-day vulnerabilities in those companies’ software.

But only some of those were for open source software projects. CreditKarma definitely does not share their Android app’s source code with security researchers.

How did you do it?
I simply reverse engineered their apps using off-the-shelf tools, and studied the decompiled source code.

Why are you making that sound trivial?
Because it is trivial!

If you don’t believe me, choose a random game from your Steam library.

Right click > Properties. Click on the Local Files tab, then click “Browse Local Files”. Now search for a binary.
Me, following these steps to locate the No Man’s Sky binary.
If your game is a typical C/C++ project, you’ll next want to install Ghidra.

Other platforms and their respective tools:

• Java games (.jar files): Luyten
• .NET games: ILSpy
• Android apps: dex2jar then Luyten (as per Java)

If you see a bunch of HTML and JS files, you can literally use beautifier.io to make the code readable.

Open your target binary in the appropriate reverse engineering software, and you can decompile the binary into C/C++ code.
Decompiled code from No Man’s Sky’s NMS.exe file on Windows.
Congratulations! If you’ve made it this far, you’re neck-and-neck with any attacker who has a leaked copy of the source code.

Every Information Security Expert Knows This

Almost literally everyone working in infosec knows that keeping a product’s source code a secret doesn’t actually improve the security of the product.

There’s a derisive term for this belief: Security Through Obscurity.

The only people whose job will be made more difficult with the source code leak are lawyers dealing with Intellectual Property (IP) disputes.

In Conclusion

Remote Code Execution is bad.

The Source Code being public? Yawn.
Pictured: Soatok trying to figure out why people are worried about source code disclosure when he publishes everything publicly on Github anyway (2020). Art by Riley.
Update: Shortly after I made this post, I was made aware of another news story worthy of everyone’s attention far more than FUD about source code leaks.

With the Source leaks happening today, I think everyone is missing the most important part: how much does Valve swear? I tallied up instances of these words in the leak*:

"fuck": 116
"shit": 63
"damn": 109

*There was some non-Valve stuff in the leak; I didn't count it

— @tj (@tjhorner) April 22, 2020

Well damn if that doesn’t capture my interest.
Now this is the kind of story that makes Twitter worthwhile!

Is the RCE Exploit Even Real?

Update 2: I’ve heard a lot of reports that the alleged RCE exploit is fake. I haven’t taken the time to look at Team Fortress 2 or CS:GO in any meaningful way, but the CS:GO team did have this to say about the leaks:

We have reviewed the leaked code and believe it to be a reposting of a limited CS:GO engine code depot released to partners in late 2017, and originally leaked in 2018. From this review, we have not found any reason for players to be alarmed or avoid the current builds.

— CS2 (@CounterStrike) April 22, 2020

Fake news and old news are strange (yet strangely common) bedfellows.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/22/source-code-leak-is-effectively-meaningless-to-endpoint-security/

#commonSense #informationSecurity #infosec #misinformation #reverseEngineering #security #securityThroughObscurity #sourceCode