Soatok
@soatok.bsky.social
2.2K followers 340 following 1.3K posts
30-something gay furry with an interest in cryptography and software security. Mastodon: https://furry.engineer/@soatok Blog: https://soatok.blog 🎨 https://mrjimmydafloof.bsky.social
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soatok.bsky.social
Dhole Moments (a play on "dull moments") is my blog.

Here's a short thread about it, some of its highlights, and noteworthy things that have happened related to it.

(Some are at least mildly interesting, I promise.)

soatok.blog
Dhole Moments - Software, Security, Cryptography, and Furries
Writings about information security, cryptography, software, and humanity, from a member of the furry fandom with a dhole fursona.
soatok.blog
Reposted by Soatok
junlper.beer
yesterday on twitter, some of the biggest far right doxxing users were suspended and then elon musk caught wind, and reinstated them. get everyone you can off twitter. it is firmly a pro-doxxing-if-you’re-far-right platform
Reposted by Soatok
junlper.beer
the most unsurprising thing in the world is now every rightwinger, all yhe way up to JD vance, have explicitely defended this and the statements made by those in this group. and that’s by design, every single rightwinger is now an extremist nazi
junlper.beer
these people know how extreme they are
Reposted by Soatok
phillewis.bsky.social
“The Defense Department has confiscated the badges of the Pentagon reporters from virtually every major media organization in America,” the Pentagon Press Association said

Oct. 15, 2025
PENTAGON PRESS ASSOCIATION
STATEMENT
Today, the Defense Department confiscated the badges of the Pentagon reporters from virtually every major media organization in America. It did this because reporters would not sign onto a new media policy over its implicit threat of criminalizing national security reporting and exposing those who sign it to potential prosecution.
The Pentagon Press Association's members are still committed to reporting on the U.S. military. But make no mistake, today, Oct. 15, 2025 is a dark day for press freedom that raises concerns about a weakening U.S. commitment to transparency in governance, to public accountability at the Pentagon and to free speech for all.
PPA
Reposted by Soatok
soatok.bsky.social
The Dreamseeker’s Vision of Tomorrow

Since I have your attention for the moment, I'd like you to ask yourself a question: What is it that drives you in life? Do you yearn for the feeling of safety? By seeking power, status, wealth, and fame? Is it cravings for pleasure that motivate your actions?…
The Dreamseeker’s Vision of Tomorrow
Since I have your attention for the moment, I'd like you to ask yourself a question: What is it that drives you in life? Do you yearn for the feeling of safety? By seeking power, status, wealth, and fame? Is it cravings for pleasure that motivate your actions? Does a sense of obligation to others, or even your past self, that informs your decisions?
soatok.blog
Reposted by Soatok
purekoor.art
This is every conservative "furry" private-ish telegram group chat lol
politico.com
EXCLUSIVE: Thousands of leaked messages show leaders of Young Republican groups joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape in a private Telegram chat.

Inside rising GOP leaders’ racist chats — obtained by POLITICO and spanning more than 7 months👇
‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat
Thousands of private messages reveal young GOP leaders joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape.
www.politico.com
Reposted by Soatok
santiagomayer.com
Young Democrats: hey maybe don’t kidnap my international friends

Young Republicans:
Reposted by Soatok
sailorrooscout.bsky.social
Well now, would you look at that?

A massive study of NEARLY 300,000 people in the United States found that receiving an updated 2024-2025 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine REDUCED people’s risk of severe disease AND death in ALL age groups, REGARDLESS of immunity from prior infection or vaccination.
soatok.bsky.social
Which is to say:

They pair well together.
soatok.bsky.social
I mean, anonymous credentials and ZK implementations both tend to involve pairings in practice.
Reposted by Soatok
billstewart.bsky.social
Doesn't even have to get as fancy as full ZK;
Chaum's "Credentials Without Identity" can do most of the things that want Is-A-Human and Is-Old-Enough.
soatok.bsky.social
It's just deeply horrifying when people who are working on this sort of problem eschew ZK entirely D:
soatok.bsky.social
"Human identification" problem sounds sinister when you share chatrooms with cyberpunk therians.
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
The “age verification” and the “human identification” problem are the same problem. It upsets me to be around people who think they’re working on the first, but don’t understand they’re actually working on the second.
a woman in a purple sweater says they are the same picture
ALT: a woman in a purple sweater says they are the same picture
media.tenor.com
Reposted by Soatok
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
And right now I’m seeing very little deep thought about this stuff. We’re putting more tech and legislative and policy energy into stablecoins and TikTok than we are into how the entire Internet will work over the next 50 years. That should change!
Reposted by Soatok
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
We already leak a lot of this data, but critically *relatively little of it has been centralized and exploited* in the ways end-users are afraid of (they pretend to care about ads, but they don’t.) If we’re moving into this new world we need to think hard about tech and policy.
Reposted by Soatok
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
This is the world we’re moving into. It’s one where every online interaction of any small commercial value will be tied to a precise human identity, and that’s the only thing that will make the Internet even remotely usable in the future. Questions of privacy and accountability in that world matter.
Reposted by Soatok
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
You’re building the architecture for how humans will interact online for the next several decades, and you don’t understand what task you’re engaged in, and you’re not thinking hard about how to do this privately? You actually think it’s about keeping 15 year olds from seeing salacious TikToks?
Reposted by Soatok
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
But some of the people working on this tech seem to think that age verification is what this tech is for. I ask a question like “how will you handle [some type of fraud]” and they say “oh that problem doesn’t matter for verifying ages.” And it shocks me.
Reposted by Soatok
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
Google recently released a toolkit to enable anonymous credentials and web authentication using zero-knowledge. This will likely be in Android and hopefully Apple will adopt it, which is a good thing! I’m not complaining! This will enable people to prove age privately. blog.google/technology/s...
Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology to promote privacy in age assurance
Today, we open sourced our Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries, fulfilling a promise and building on our partnership with Sparkasse to support EU age assurance.
blog.google
Reposted by Soatok
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
Most of that tech stuff is already well under way. Several states already let you bind your driver’s license to your phone, for purposes that are (at present) entirely unconvincing. The interesting “hard” problems are all around privacy and fraud-resistance.
A Maryland driver’s license on my iPhone.
Reposted by Soatok
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
So how do we do this? Presumably by tightly binding physical identity to your device and then proving possession (with some other bells and whistles). Not coincidentally that’s exactly what age verification is. Weird how corporate and gov’t priorities suddenly align, right?
Reposted by Soatok
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
To be really clear: it’s pretty obvious that the central (Internet communication) problem of our time is going to be determining whether the stranger you’re talking to (or delivering ads to) is a person or a bot. And every existing tech we have for doing this will fail.
Reposted by Soatok
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
The “age verification” and the “human identification” problem are the same problem. It upsets me to be around people who think they’re working on the first, but don’t understand they’re actually working on the second.
a woman in a purple sweater says they are the same picture
ALT: a woman in a purple sweater says they are the same picture
media.tenor.com
Reposted by Soatok
soatok.bsky.social
If you were curious abour what all my cryptography projects are ultimately working towards, my latest blog post spells it out.
soatok.bsky.social
The Dreamseeker’s Vision of Tomorrow

Since I have your attention for the moment, I'd like you to ask yourself a question: What is it that drives you in life? Do you yearn for the feeling of safety? By seeking power, status, wealth, and fame? Is it cravings for pleasure that motivate your actions?…
The Dreamseeker’s Vision of Tomorrow
Since I have your attention for the moment, I'd like you to ask yourself a question: What is it that drives you in life? Do you yearn for the feeling of safety? By seeking power, status, wealth, and fame? Is it cravings for pleasure that motivate your actions? Does a sense of obligation to others, or even your past self, that informs your decisions?
soatok.blog