I'm very thankful that infosec is tolerant if not outright welcoming to all types. I've found it to be the kind of environment where I don't have to pretend to be something I'm not, and can easily strike up a conversation with basically anybody at in-person events. But I worry when "just so" stories get wrapped into personal narratives and perpetuated into a cultural understanding.
I think there are a few broad statements bland enough to be taken as connective tissue between furries and hacking. The computer security community started well before industry took security seriously at large, and this led to a community that cares about learning, sharing and personality more than credentialism and conformance to a reserved professionalism. And that the internet has been key to the growth of furdom and the prevalence of furs in various subcultures is correlated with heavily-online subcultures.
I don't find that trying to tie too many disparate threads together makes for a good understanding of culture. I've seen time and time again people leave a con and extrapolate minor details from their personal experience and essentialize them into sweeping statements about the community. I see it in the press, and I hear it in personal stories after the fact. So much so that I'm distrustful of the statements that seem true to me, not just the ones that are obviously wrong.
I didn't intend to submit this one to technical news sites like HN. I hold my technical blog posts to a higher bar than my opinion pieces, and this is definitely the latter category. I don't mind that someone else decided to submit it, but it's one I intentionally omitted.
I get asked a lot, "Why are there so many furries in infosec?" and "Is everyone secretly a furry?" a lot. This post was meant to share my observations on the inside, rather than make a strong argument about society at large or provide lessons that can be extrapolated outward.
I think there are a few broad statements bland enough to be taken as connective tissue between furries and hacking. The computer security community started well before industry took security seriously at large, and this led to a community that cares about learning, sharing and personality more than credentialism and conformance to a reserved professionalism. And that the internet has been key to the growth of furdom and the prevalence of furs in various subcultures is correlated with heavily-online subcultures.
I don't find that trying to tie too many disparate threads together makes for a good understanding of culture. I've seen time and time again people leave a con and extrapolate minor details from their personal experience and essentialize them into sweeping statements about the community. I see it in the press, and I hear it in personal stories after the fact. So much so that I'm distrustful of the statements that seem true to me, not just the ones that are obviously wrong.