Securing Sexuality Conference & Other Things

Side Note: I swear, unsplash has the weirdest stock images available

The IoD is back on the road. We will be at the Securing Sexuality conference in Detroit on October 19th and 20th. First of it's kind conference bringing together Sex therapists, technologists, hackers and others together to understand and discuss the various technolgies, the challenges in their use, and how they might benifit their users more.  It's really quite the venn diagram of people attending. If you can go, you should.

In preparation for this, we discovered that a number of toys acquired over the years were not on the Dong List. That has been corrected.  We also discovered while making some materials for the Securing Sexuality Conference that several companies like BKK and Vibratissimo (who were found to have a laundry list of vulnerabilities in 2018) didn't make it out of the pandemic and now appear to be defunct.  We also found that the request list and software links were woefully out of date.  Wouldn't it be great if someone maintained a list of all known connected adult devices, their URLs, capabilites and Buttplug.io and Xtoys.app support status?

Well, turns out someone did just that.

The Internet of Sex Tech Index is a curated list of every known adult connected device they could find any reference to is in there. Crowdsource prototypes that never got made, and even some April Fools jokes are in there. It's extremely complete and will be used as a reference from now on.

And now something a bit personal.

The pandemic affected all of us in ways we didn't expect. I would have thought in 2019 that a couple years of being locked at home would have allowed me a ridiculous amount of time to work on IoD stuff.  Considering how the tech took off to keep people intimatly connected when we couldn't be physically together, it was a golden moment.  

Sadly, the grim nature of losing loved ones and seeing society lose it's collective mind because of being asked to do something to protect your fellow humans was not something I think any of us was prepared for. I know I wasn't.  I turned inward and let a lot of things languish in favor of focusing on my home, my family, and my day job.  That left little time or drive to hack at IoD projects and other things and keep it updated.  I still kept abreast of goings on, but the energy to do something was just not there.  To be honest, it's still not back, but there is a need and there are few who are in a position to do anything about it. So I'm happy to be doing the Securing Sexuality Conference and getting back out there interacting and advocating. It will be interesting to see if some of that spark that was missing was because of lack of interacting with people and meaningful exchanges.  I look forward to finding out.  This update and the other updates on the site are a small step to getting back into things.

Thanks for the support.