It’s becoming increasingly apparent that one of the reasons why tech companies are so enthusiastic about shoving AI into every product and service is that they fundamentally do not understand why people dislike AI. I will elaborate. I was recently made aware of the Jetbrains deve … | Continue reading
The history of this blog might very well be a cautionary tail (sic) about scope creep. The Original Vision For Dhole Moments Originally, I just wanted a place to write about things too long for Twitter (back when I was an avid Twitter poster). I also figured, if nothing else, it … | Continue reading
The types of people that proudly call themselves “influencers,” and describe what they create merely as “content,” are so profoundly allergic to authenticity that it bewilders the mind. Don’t believe me? Look no further than the usage of “unalive” in the modern lexicon. The verb … | Continue reading
Internet discussions about end-to-end encryption are plagued by misunderstandings, misinformation, and some people totally missing the point. Of course, people being wrong on the Internet isn’t exactly news. Yesterday, a story in The Atlantic alleged that the Trump Administration … | Continue reading
(With severe apologies to Miles Davis.) Post-Quantum Cryptography is coming. But in their haste to make headway on algorithm adoption, standards organizations (NIST, IETF) are making a dumb mistake that will almost certainly bite implementations in the future. Sophie Schmieg wrot … | Continue reading
Towards the end of last year, we learned that a group (allegedly affiliated with the Chinese government, referred to as “Salt Typhoon”) breached T-Mobile and other telecommunications companies and caused all sorts of havoc. This isn’t really a blog post about that incident, but i … | Continue reading
Content Warning: This blog post talks about adult themes and sexuality. If you’re under 18, sit this one out. If you’ve been around the furry fandom for a while, you will notice that discourse tends to have a cyclical nature to it. I’ve written about this topic before. More than … | Continue reading
Last year, I urged furries to stop using Telegram because it doesn’t actually provide them with any of the privacy guarantees they think it gives them. Instead of improving Telegram’s cryptography to be actually secure, the CEO started spreading misleading bullshit about Signal®. … | Continue reading
Overconfident developers that choose to write their own cryptography code have plagued the information security industry since before it was even an industry. This in and of itself isn’t inherently a bad thing, despite the infosec truisms about never doing exactly that. Writing c … | Continue reading
It’s really not my place to ever command respect from anyone; and that’s not just because I’m a furry–which has always been towards the bottom of the geek hierarchy. I am well aware how little weight my words truly carry, even to other furries, as well as how little I really matt … | Continue reading
Last week, I wrote a blog post succinctly titled, Don’t Use Session. Two interesting things have happened since I published that blog: A few people expressed uncertainty about what I wrote about using Pollard’s rho to attack Session’s design (for which, I offered to write a proof … | Continue reading
Last year, I outlined the specific requirements that an app needs to have in order for me to consider it a Signal competitor. Afterwards, I had several people ask me what I think of a Signal fork called Session. My answer then is the same thing I’ll say today: Don’t use Session. … | Continue reading
Let’s talk about the Collatz Conjecture, which is like mathematicians’ original version of this programmer joke: The Collatz conjecture is an infamous trap for the young and ambitious. Despite its simple construction, it has evaded proofs and general solutions for nearly a centur … | Continue reading
I wrote what I thought would be the final blog post of 2024 last week, and was looking forward to starting 2025 strong with a blog I’d been drafting since July 2023. But then, a little after Midnight on Christmas, I received the following unsolicited email from “the muhu team”: N … | Continue reading
I’ve spent the better part of 2023 and 2024 trying to imagine the specific changes we technology nerds could make to improve things somewhat. I’ve shared some of my ideas and musings throughout the past year. Briefly: You are not required to read any of these blog posts. In fact, … | Continue reading
5 free ideas that Soatok doesn't have the time or energy to execute on. | Continue reading
What is it about being queer that makes loneliness, isolation, and rejection so much more intense than enduring than what our straight friends and family purport to experience? Are we just being sensitive, or egoistic? Do they perhaps feel these emotions with the same severity as … | Continue reading
Recently, I shared my thoughts on the Twitter Exodus. The short of that post is: Even though I’m quite happy on the Fediverse, I think the best outcome is for Bluesky to “win” the popularity contest today. It’s also in a good position to do so: People yearning for “old Twitter” f … | Continue reading
In 2010, Coda Hale wrote How To Safely Store A Password which began with the repeated phrase, “Use bcrypt”, where the word bcrypt was linked to a different implementation for various programming languages. This had two effects on the technology blogosphere at the time: At the tim … | Continue reading
This post is the first in a new series covering some of the reasoning behind decisions made in my project to build end-to-end encryption for direct messages on the Fediverse. (Collectively, Fedi-E2EE.) Although the reasons for specific design decisions should be immediately obvio … | Continue reading
Another wave of Twitter users are jettisoning the social media website in favor of alternatives. Some are landing in the Fediverse (Mastodon and other ActivityPub-enabled software). Others are going to BlueSky. Some are just outright abandoning social media entirely, disillusione … | Continue reading
It’s been more than five years since The PGP Problem was published, and I still hear from people who believe that using PGP (whether GnuPG or another OpenPGP implementation) is a thing they should be doing. It isn’t. The part of the free and open source software community that th … | Continue reading
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 th … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
Every hype cycle in the technology industry continues a steady march towards a shitty future that nobody wants. The Road to Hell Once upon a time, everyone was all hot and bothered about Big Data: Having lots of information–far too much to process with commodity software–was supp … | Continue reading
In 2022, I wrote about my plan to build end-to-end encryption for the Fediverse. The goals were simple: The primary concern at the time was “honest but curious” Fediverse instance admins who might snoop on another user’s private conversations. After I finally was happy with the c … | Continue reading
Ever since the Invisible Salamanders paper was published, there has been a quiet renaissance within my friends and colleagues in applied cryptography for studying systems that use Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) constructions, understanding what implicit assu … | Continue reading
I need everyone to understand something: This doesn’t matter. Dhole Moments is not the official outlet of anything that will affect you or your daily life. It carries no financial weight or political power. It doesn’t represent any company, organization, or government agency. To … | Continue reading
There are two mental models for designing a cryptosystem that offers end-to-end encryption to all of its users. The first is the Signal model. Predicated on Moxie’s notion that the ecosystem is moving, Signal (and similar apps) maintain some modicum of centralized control over th … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, I wrote about planned effort to design a federated Key Transparency proposal. The end goal for this work was constrained to building end-to-end encryption into a new type of Direct Message on the Fediverse, with other protocols and services being a stretch goal … | Continue reading
I don’t consider myself exceptional in any regard, but I stumbled upon a few cryptography vulnerabilities in Matrix’s Olm library with so little effort that it was nearly accidental. It should not be this easy to find these kind of issues in any product people purportedly rely on … | Continue reading
XMPP is a messaging protocol (among other things) that needs no introduction to any technical audience. Its various implementations have proliferated through technical communities for decades. Many large tech companies today used to run XMPP servers. However, the basic protocol t … | Continue reading
A lot of recent (and upcoming) blog posts I’ve written, and Fediverse discussions I’ve participated in, have been about the security of communication products. My criticism of these products is simply that, from a cryptography and security perspective, they’re not a real competit … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
My inaugural blog post went live on April 21, 2020. This post is scheduled to go live on Sunday, July 21, 2024. If you are reading this post, then at least 1,552 days have transpired since my first blog post went live. The Confederacy lasted from February 6, 1861 to May 9, 1865, … | Continue reading
A common narrative on discussion boards like Hacker News is that my inclusion of my fursona on my technical blog posts somehow makes them unsuitable for consumption in a business setting. (This claim is made despite the fact that I’ve never posted pornographic art on this blog.) … | Continue reading
Four years ago, I wrote a (surprisingly popular) blog post about the notion of wear-out for symmetric encryption schemes. Two years ago, I wrote a thing about extending the nonce used by AES-GCM without introducing foot-guns. This was very recently referenced in one of Filippo Va … | Continue reading
In late 2022, I blogged about the work needed to develop a specification for end-to-end encryption for the fediverse. I sketched out some of the key management components on GitHub, and then the public work abruptly stalled. A few of you have wondered what’s the deal with that. T … | Continue reading
Many of the most annoying and pervasive problems with the furry fandom–from the cyclical nature of Twitter discourse to the increasingly frustrating issue of furry convention main hotel registrations selling out immediately after opening–are entirely predictable if you know even … | Continue reading
I have been a begrudging user of Telegram for years simply because that’s what all the other furries use. 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 attac … | Continue reading
Thanks to Samantha Cole at 404 Media, we are now aware that Automattic plans to sell user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com (which is the host for my blog) for “AI” products. In response to journalists probing this shady decision from Automattic leadership, the company said noth … | Continue reading
There is, at the time of this writing, an ongoing debate in the Crypto Research Forum Group (CFRG) at the IETF about KEM combiners. One of the participants, Deirdre Connolly, wrote a blog post titled How to Hold KEMs. The subtitle is refreshingly honest: “A living document on how … | Continue reading
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 stupid … | Continue reading
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. Regular readers … | Continue reading
If you’ve paid attention to Hacker News or various technology subreddits in recent years, you may have noticed the rise of VPN companies like Tailscale and ZeroTier. At the core of their networking products is a Noise-based Protocol (often WireGuard). If you haven’t been paying a … | Continue reading
A few days ago, I wrote a personal blurb about my experience with Return-to-Office, Forced Relocation, and top-down Corporate Bullshit. This was a departure from my usual fare in two ways: I had figured that quick write-up would fill the void while I work on the more ambitious te … | Continue reading
I quit my job towards the end of last month. When I started this blog, I told myself, “Don’t talk about work.” Since my employment is in the rear view mirror, I’m going to bend that rule for once. And most likely, only this one time. Why? Since I wrote a whole series about how [… … | Continue reading