After ~16 years of running this blog in its various forms, the time has come to move on.

Metafetish, and Slashdong that preceded it, were a great way for me to explore what I'm looking for in the wild world of sex tech. While I have not fully answered that question yet, I can definitely say that reporting on sex toys/tech ain't it.

One of the fun parts of becoming an expert in a subject is that you may realize you're bringing more to the subject than the subject is bringing to you. I will probably never not be "the buttplug guy", but really, I don't have nearly the same interest in sex toys and sex tech that most consumers and manufacturers do.

This doesn't mean I'm going to stop working with sex tech, but rather that I need to take it more in my own direction than I have been in the past. Developing Buttplug has been a great first step for this, and I look forward to continuing my work there as well as possible striking out on new adventures, possibly not related to sex tech or even tech at all.

I'll be moving my content and analysis over to the new Nonpolynomial Blog. This will contain a mix of technical content and critical analysis, folding in topics related to sex tech when appropriate. This new blog gives me a far more open content field to romp around in than I had with my purely sex focused properties.

In terms of who I'm passing this torch onto, I'm... not actually sure there is anyone? There are multiple sex tech news sites out there now, but they're mostly news for announcements sake (which I see as a feature and a bug at the same time). There's as diverse a set of sex toy reviewers as there's ever been, which is fantastic, as sex tech is now getting covered from many unique perspectives (though some of those perspectives may be paid for by companies, but people gotta get paid).

Hitting a search engine will find you these if you need them, I'm not linking here because I don't have anyone I specifically endorse, and I don't want to update this post when outlets inevitably die. This is about me reducing my own workload, after all.

Metafetish as it stands now will stay, as it's not costing me anything to keep it running, and it's all static content. The site is linked from many places, and I'd like to make sure those links stay live as long as possible, though all content should be mirrored through the Internet Archive at this point. Have fun poking through the ruins.

The site is also just a fun bit of history that I like to share, as this blog was basically my research notebook from the beginnings of my career in whatever it is I do now.

So long, and thanks for all the buttplugs, * Kyle Machulis (qDot)

New episode of Buttpluggin' With qDot is up! I've created a new series/playlist called qDot Speaks, where I'll be archiving my sex tech presentations from the past.

The first episode features my Arse Elektronika talk from 2007. This talk has been online in various forms for years, but I've taken the time to remaster it so that it looks slightly better at 1080p. There's only so much I can do with DV resolution video and 1024 x 768 slides, though.

I was a bit... edgier and engineery-er when I made this presentation, so there's some visual content I've had to filter for youtube. I'm currently trying to figure out what the best way to post this uncensored, and will make a followup post once I figure that out.

Buttplug C# 0.3.0 is out!

Note that this is only the library, applications like the Buttplug Server and Game Vibration Router still need to be updated. There will be another post later about that.

This release includes lots of new things to hopefully make developer's lives easier, most of which you can read about in the CHANGELOG, but as a quick overview:

• More C#y C#!
• Completely overhauled Client API!
• Support for the Kiiroo Titan!
• Tests! Documentation! EXAMPLES OF HOW THINGS SHOULD WORK!

Note: If you are currently developing Buttplug applications using the Buttplug.Core, Buttplug.Client, and/or Buttplug.Server packages, those will all be deprecated now, in favor of the new single Buttplug nuget package. Yay less packages!

Now, on to fixing up buttplug-js, working on C# Unity support, making some python bindings, and about a million other projects!

Now that the teledildonics patent is expired, I promised everyone that I'd teach them how to teledildonics. So here we go.

I've stood up a generic Teledildonics server at

https://metafetish-white-label-teledildonics-server.glitch.me

This is a small, websocket based Omegle style chat server, meaning that you will be paired with another anonymous user, and assuming one or both of you has compatible Buttplug devices, you can share device access with each other if you really, really want.

Before we all run off and hand the keys to our buttplugs to strangers, some warnings:

• There is no security on this server. I didn't even try. I just hacked up another project. This is a stunt. Treat it as such.
• Random people are random. I highly recommend standing up your own server on glitch and inviting someone you know by giving them the URL. If you're the only 2 people on the server, you'll just be matched with each other. There's instructions on doing this at the server github repo. Again, do not mistake this for security or reliability.
• Things may not work or crash horribly. Who knows. You are on your own.
• If you are on Windows 7-10 and don't have a sex toy we support handy, the Buttplug Windows Server Software also supports Xbox Gamepad Vibration, so you can have other people make your gamepad vibrate! We will also support VR controller and Nintendo Switch JoyCon vibration soon.

To use the server:

• Go to the URL above
• Click the "Find Partner" button
• Once you are matched with a partner, together you can fumble through a world of online intimate experience exploration using a clumsy, hacked together interface. Imagine having sex while wearing full body condoms and oven mits and blindfolds and also each of you are on different planets.

A more in-depth tutorial for this server is available at this post on our message boards. If you have any questions, feel free to ask there.

The White Label Teledildonics Server is a generic version of YiffSpot, an open source roleplay server for furries. As furries have a lot of their own terminology that may not apply to the generic user who just wants to have generic sex, the White Label server has scrubbed away all identifying traits, allowing users the most generic of experiences possible so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of teledildonics participants with an overabundance of the word "Yiff".

All source code for the server is available on github. Thanks go out to Kisuka for making the server this work is based off of, which allowed me to hack this together in a stupid amount of time without having to consider the chat or UI parts.

Now, onto the technical explanation of what is going on in a simple teledildonics server like this. You can skip this section if you're not interested in the technical details of how we make all of this work.

Teledildonics usually requires:

• A way to match participants
• A way for those participants to control each others toys.

The White Label/YiffSpot software does this by:

• Creating a node.js based Websocket server that listens for connections from a website.
• A client website users can visit, which sets up the Websocket connection and matches them with other users.
• Once the match is set up and the users are connected, they can use buttplug-js to connect to toys locally, then share that control with the user on the other end.

Teledildonic communication through Buttplug happens via special IRC style messages between users, which turn into JSON to go to the Buttplug server, as defined by the Buttplug Protocol Spec.

Let's say one user has shared their toy with another:

• The user controlling the toy has access to a slider control which can set vibration levels of a toy.
• Once they move the slider, a message like this is send to the other user

/buttplug vibrate 0 0.5

• This command means "Tell the other user's vibrator (at device index zero) to run at 50% speed". Most ranges in Buttplug are floating point from 0-1, as we have to support everything from vibrators with on-off all the way to HD level 16/32-bit control ranges.
• Once the user with the toy receives the command, the White Label server translates it from IRC style into Buttplug style JSON, specifically a VibrateCmd message. This would look like

{ 
  "VibrateCmd": 
  { 
    "Id": 1,
    "DeviceIndex": 0,
    "Speeds": 
    [
      {
        "Index": 0,
        "Speed": 0.5
      }
    ]
  }
}

• Breaking that down for those that don't want to read the spec: This is a generic vibrate command, which can send many commands to many vibrators on a device (we currently support some devices that have 6+ vibrators). The Id field is the ID of the message itself, used for matching message pairs during remote communication. The DeviceIndex tells the server which device we want to command. The Speeds portion takes a list of objects, each with an index of the specific vibration motor we want to control, and a speed to set that motor at.
• This message is then translated by Buttplug into the device specific, proprietary message to be sent over Bluetooth, USB, or some other local communications bus. Let's say we're controlling someone's Lovense toy. Lovense toys have 20 vibration levels, and their vibration commands look like

Vibrate:X;

• Where X is some number between 0-20. Since we're using 0.5 as our speed, this would mean we'd set this to 20 * 0.5, or 10. So the final command we send over bluetooth to the lovense toy is

Vibrate:10;

• And that's Teledildonics!

So, there you go. A free, open source, if wildly insecure and weirdly pairing teledildonics server, and an explanation of how we get commands from point A to point B.

As you can see, there's a few moving parts here, and a lot of places where we have to trust that things won't go wrong. The server could crash, the network could go down, there's going to always be communication lag because the speed of light is an asshole. If these aren't things you normally think about while having sex, then teledildonics is going to be a wild new frontier of anger and pain for you!

In the future, I'll be posting updates on the new, more formalized teledildonics projects happening in the Buttplug project, including a server actually designed with security and scalability in mind, as well as using APIs like WebRTC for pairing and real time communication.

Now go out and teledildonics!

Update: The patent is dead now! After you're done reading my rant, check out this post on how to set up your own teledildonics server.

The 268 Teledildonics patent, fucking up internet buttplugs in the US since 1997, expires in a few hours.

My earliest mention of it seems to be from a project announcement I wrote in 2005, so I've been sitting with this for at least 13 years. The open source teledildonics network mentioned in that post never even got started, though now I have Buttplug, which is far more useful.

If you want a brief timeline of what this patent has fucked up, check out this article on FutureOfSex, as well as the recent followup that includes interviews of those affected by the lawsuits. I also recommend reading David Parisi's fantastic work on RealTouch history. Finally, there's an article from today by Maxine Lynn, an Actual IP Lawyer, about the expiration..

After you've done all that, check out this article on VirtuaDolls, one of the lesser covered losses of the patent wars.

Except VirtuaDolls wasn't a victim of the 268 patent, it's another patent on interactive technologies. If you think the end of the 268 patent is the beginning of a sex tech revolution, you're gonna have a Real Bad Time once you find out about all of the provisional patents filed throughout the last few years. Modern sex tech companies have set up an environment of mutually assured legal destruction while making damn sure no new players will rise just because as of 2018/08/17 you can UDP some vibrations to someone somewhere else and not have to pay a license for it in the US.

Don't get me wrong, the expiration of the 268 patent is fantastic, even though it's sad it wasn't brought down through invalidation against prior art like the Wachspress device or the Safe Sex Plus. This is (or, well, was) a patent making it difficult to run a business around a nebulous definition of remote communication, stifling innovation and possibly not allowing important, useful products to make it to market.

However, this is all about US patents. Everything mentioned so far has been about blocking products in one country of 350 million or so people. That leaves ~194 countries and ~7.1 billion other people left to build toys and do whatever with them and maybe just not sell them in the US.

They're definitely out there doing just that.

Ok, not all ~7.1 billion of them, but at least a few.

Companies have been building networks and toys in Europe and Asia. Vibease got out of the TZU 268 lawsuit because they're mostly selling to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore (and that is one hell of a marketing feat, considering some of the conservative cultures throughout those countries). If you search for "bluetooth vibrator" on AliExpress, it's quite obvious this patent hasn't stopped China from manufacturing all sorts of absolutely wild shit and packaging it with remote control capabilities. Japan had Segment in the late 2000s, has Vorze/Rends now, and probably other companies I'm not even aware of.

None of the products I've encountered have universal praise. Most of them find niche communities of use and that's it.

I'm not aware of any killer app of sex toys or teledildonics that the US is missing out on right now. I'm not sure it requires US innovation to come up with one, either. People in all countries fuck, otherwise there wouldn't be people in all countries. The US doesn't have a monopoly on sexy times, or engineering, or engineering of sexy times.

RealTouch is an example that comes up pretty often when talking about 268 patent losses, but RealTouch was around for years before they released RealTouch Interactive and ran into patent issues. It's not like they had a stranglehold on the market that whole time, or that they were a household name when they were forced out. There's enough people who think we're going to get Jude Law style sex robots next year to fuel constant media articles around it. Patent or no, sex tech remains a fairly unknown field with a small amount of inexperienced companies just putting out what they can 'cause neither the manufacturer nor customers know better, and the customers don't have much choice of what to buy otherwise.

Not only that, teledildonics is remote control of sex toys. What about local control? I would argue that the sex tech engineering community (myself included) sucks at making interfaces period. The Teledildonics patent held up other people controlling your toy, but sometimes you don't have that other person, and there's local interfaces that might be interesting. It's not fair to say that 268 stopped all innovation, but masturbation just doesn't sell as well either.

Even when companies have the money to license the patent in the US, they implement remote control but fuck up on privacy and data storage. This is why there are class action suits against Standard Innovation and Lovense.

Stifling innovation means many people don't want to put in the work because they can't turn their idea into money. In a capitalist society where you pay for your own healthcare, that's literally a question of life and death. It leaves the industry to those that got in early, that start out well off enough to fend off lawsuits, or who are weirdos like me who will happily produce shit and release it for free.

One less roadblock in one country with an admittedly large market presense is good, but it's not a panacea. I'm not even sure it's going to fix much.

Not gonna act like I don't have dreams, though.

I'm probably more realistically optimistic about sex tech now than I've ever been.

Despite the patent there's a lot of commercial companies building products of varying levels of quality now. We've got projects like Open Privacy doing work to create trustable, private networks, and Internet Of Dongs helping companies not fuck up with the security of sensitive data storage.

The biggest blow of the 268 patent, for me, was the loss of potential of companies like Comingle, and that's why I'm glad there's one less weapon for assholes to clear the market with. If we want the singing/dancing/fucking perfectly humanoid sex robots all of the trash media articles say we're getting next year (we're not), we have to start somewhere and work slowly from there.

Comingle was a good start. They wanted to give people a platform to build their own sexual experience without having to start from scratch. I believe we need more educational sex tech, more ways for people to explore their own wants and needs. I want the producers of that tech to worry about ethics and privacy and ergonomics and how we communicate intimacy and consent through the sewer pipes of the internet. I want them free of the burden of winding through a forest of shitty patents, in the US or anywhere else.

I realize a lot of people are angry that RealTouch made a good blowjob robot and you can't get it anymore due to patents and maybe that'll be less of a problem now, but I'd much rather have hundreds or thousands of people educated about sex tech and how to ethically, properly create it. Then they can go on building the next hundreds or thousands of [insert act of sex or intimacy] robot instead.

The 268 patent held back mass market sex tech. While I think there's a lot wrong with mass market sex tech, Buttplug wouldn't exist without it. That said, don't wait on the mass market to free up enough to make your own solutions viable as a product. Sex is extremely personal act, and the internet has proven that almost no one is alone in the way they enjoy it. The most vibrant, interesting sexual communities online never gave a fuck about 268 or any other patent. The energy and excitement of those communities is part of why this blog is still around after all of these years.

Fuck patents. Fuck products. If you're interested in sex tech, find your community. If you have the skills, build with them. Communicate with those building things, because it turns out engineers don't know everything and usually need guidance. Produce one-offs via AdaFruit and Shapeways and Tindie if you have the funds, or set up Patreons or Indiegogos to do small runs, not crazy huge launches. If you're afraid of possible legal repercussions, reach out, to me, to lawyers like Maxine Lynn. You may have less to worry about than you think, but you should do your homework nonetheless.

If you make money, fantastic. If you break even, great. Hopefully you don't lose money on it, but that's definitely the situation to plan for.

Communicate and publish, if you can. Make sure your projects live on somehow. Please tell me when you do so I can yell about your work on here, on twitter, on mastodon, wherever. If you don't want to be the face of it, that's fine, I can work with you on ways to anonymize things. I cannot begin to convey how much interesting, personal DIY sex tech we've lost due to issues of shame and "just anonymously throwing things on a message board thread" that gets pushed down due to history then the board dies.

Don't expect this patent expiration to just solve sex tech and flood the market with perfect products. No one gets magically better at producing sex tech at midnight tonight. There's still a fuckton of work to put in.