You can tell a lot about a civilization by how it treats its experts. This is America in 2020: Nation's top coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci forced to beef up security as death threats… Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's top medical expert on the coronavirus pandemic and a member of President Donald…www.cnn.com Nation’s top coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci forced to beef up security as death threats increase

When someone says, “I hate furries,” that’s a dog-whistle for anti-queer bigotry. If it’s not immediately clear why this is the case, I’ll explain why this is true. Observation: Homophobia is typically not tolerated on most platforms, due to it being classified as hate speech. Even if the platform tolerates…

In Computer Science, we have a technique for automatic memory management called garbage collection. In social media, we often refer to conflict between toxic people and a community as “the trash taking itself out”. I find it amusing and appropriate that these two disparate ideas can have similar underlying terminology. …

I believe skepticism and critical thinking are highly valuable traits, but sometimes I worry that most people don’t know what it really means to be skeptical. Too often, they confuse it with something bad. I Don’t Believe Your Story or Your Biography I’d like to share with you a story from the information security community on Twitter. It…

Or: Why that “Popufur” won’t answer your messages (but that doesn’t mean they’re a bad person) — I have a lot of Internet friends. Quite a few of them are furries. Some of my friends have a sizable platform. We’re talking quarter-million Twitter followers sizable; or tens of thousands of YouTube subscribers. A handful are even Twitch partners (or on the cusp of qualifying). Most of my…

Update (2021–03–05): I wrote a better article about this topic that captures the nuance better on my new blog. The article is titled No Gates, No Keepers. So, let me tell you a little bit about myself before I get to the point. I’m the owner of a group called…

Over the weekend, the YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay posted this video (part 1 of a 3-part series) discussing coordinated inauthentic behavior (via crappy content generation) to manipulate YouTube’s algorithm. As a cryptography engineer (who, in my professional…

Some of you will hate me for what you’re about to read. That is, of course, assuming you even read all of it. A lot of people won’t, and will just hate me for publishing this under my furry fandom identity. …

Normally I write stuff on my website. Sometimes, I want to create something a bit more traditional, closer to a real news article. Rather than work out the CSS for myself, and write everything in Markdown, I figured I’d just use Medium’s UX. I could also use Patreon for that, but, I’d rather not publish everything in a way that suggests people give me money. (It’s always appreciated, but never obligatory.)