News from the World (May 2016)
FurAffinity, the fandom’s biggest social website & art gallery, has once again had computer-related problems, being unavailable for several days, and later reverting back to older backups. With ever-delayed upgrades and occasional server issues, FurAffinity is famous for both its questionable stability, and its non-relenting established dominance over other similar websites.
A vulnerability in the widely-used library ImageMagick was exploited to obtain the full source code of FurAffinity, code that was later distributed anonymously on a handful of USB pen drives located throughout the Biggest Little Fur Con (Nevada, US). A later attack deleted user profiles, submissions, and others (source⇒).
FurAffinity community manager Dragoneer, as well as its staff, responded to worrisome statements by explaining the issue, and later restoring the website. The site remains until Monday 23rd in read-only mode while they continue their security audit. At the same time, traffic on Inkbunny and Weasyl has spiked considerably (source⇒). The more recent Furry Network website (link⇒) asks no invitation now to register, so anyone can make an account. It also has an extremely easy-to-use tool to migrate art & watches from FurAffinity.
In the short amount of time FurAffinity was fully functional after the attack, some users published journals on how to reach them or their art through other different websites. Some (source⇒) consider FurAffinity the “Microsoft Windows” of furry websites: while it’s not the best, it established itself at a key moment in time, so pretty much everyone uses it now either way. Except Microsoft Windows has never gone 10 years without a code rewrite.
If you continue to use FurAffinity, it’s strongly advised that you change your password to a unique string of characters, as there has been some attempts at compromising external e-mail accounts. This can only be done once the website stops being in read-only mode. Also, remember that all messages on the website, either private or public, are stored in plain text format (not encrypted). Artists should not rely on FA’s private message system to handle commissions.
Furry animator Fredryk Phox / Matthew Gafford has released A Fox in Space, an episodic show of Star Fox fan-inspired adventures. Star Fox is Nintendo’s main character from the videogame series Star Fox. Some call the character Fox McCloud (not anyone else but himself, see episode.) The show is a funny and authentic take on its universe, and it’s a surprisingly high-quality production despite the limited budget & staff involved. The first episode is close to reaching a million views on YouTube.
The project has a Patreon website (link⇒) and regular streamings of the whole creative process (link⇒).
Spanish furry audiovisual communications guy & announcer Ribbs (link⇒) has professionally dubbed the original English voices to Spanish (so now ‘Pew Pew’ sounds like ‘Pñao Pñao’, amongst other improvements.)
Furrnion registration is now open! (link⇒) The Spanish furry convention will be held through the 27th to the 29th January 2017. Registration opened on May 1st at a discounted price (the discount will continue for an unspecified amount of time.) The convention will soon have a promotional video of fursuiters doing silly fursuiter things at the venue.
And now for something completely different! Korean furry blogger Basdog, at blog.naver.com/fueholic (link⇒), contacted Furry Chronicles, interested in translating many of our articles to Korean! He runs a blog which is meant to give an inside view into the world of furry to those Koreans unfortunate enough to not understand English. Thus we are united in our wish to spread furry culture all over the world! We are adding Basdog’s website to our ‘Partners in Press’ section on the top right menu, along other furry news websites we use to document our own. To those interviewed here at Furry Chronicles, do not feel surprised to be sent fan comments in Engrish!
