Liz Denys

From October to December of last year, I saw a lot of shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music - specifically, I saw all 26 of the Next Wave Festival productions.

I've been coming to BAM regularly since I moved to New York in 2011, and Next Wave is always an exciting time of year because there are so many different types of productions that highlight a wide range of forms and perspectives. A few of my favorite performances this past Next Wave were Circa's intimate and lyrical Humans, Folkoperan & Cirkus Cirkör's meditative production of Philip Glass's Satyagraha, Jesper Just's immersive Interpassivities, and Dorrance Dance's marvellously playful Elemental, though I honestly can say I took away something different and meaningful from every production.

I documented my pre-show and post-show impressions and talked more about why I chose to see every 2018 Next Wave production on BAM's blog.

The latest Loose Leaf Security is out, a handful of Geoffrey and my own security adventures, including concerns about Twitter's "favorites" evolved into "likes," and some juicier news stories:

Security stories: surveillance databases, unlocking apps, unexpected photo booths, and evolving data

In a special holiday episode, Liz and Geoffrey take a look at some recent security stories in more detail, from surveillance databases facilitating identity theft to unexpected facial recognition at concerts to changes in the meaning of social network activity. They also discuss how to properly secure high-value apps on your phone and some of their own plans to improve their security over winter break.

For the full audio, the transcript, and our detailed show notes, head over to Loose Leaf Security or click the link above. As always, you can subscribe to Loose Leaf Security in your favorite podcatcher and follow the project on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Four more episodes of Loose Leaf Security are out, a series about securing your laptop and desktop computers:

Physical attacks to your computers and disk encryption

Liz and Geoffrey are back with a look at physical computer security - just how much trouble could someone cause if they got access to your laptop for a few minutes? - and what sorts of problems disk encryption can and cannot solve. Also, security issues at popular social media services cause trouble for 90 million Facebook users and every Google+ user.

Backups

Backups are an important part of keeping your devices secure - as mentioned last episode, backups not only help with lost devices but also let you easily and confidently wipe a compromised computer and get back to work quickly. Liz and Geoffrey take a look at different types of backups, including cloud versus local backups.

Malware, antivirus, and safe downloads

Malware, viruses, worms, adware - whatever you call them, you don't want them on your computer. But how do you keep them away? We take a look at the surprisingly involved process of downloading software from a trustworthy source, as well as the history of why desktop OSes are so vulnerable. Also, Liz talks Geoffrey out of running for office in Japan.

Built-in dangers: physical ports, OS defaults, and remote access

From the fancy new USB-C or Thunderbolt ports on your laptop to the software and settings that came with your operating system, there are a lot of potential security concerns with recent computers. Liz and Geoffrey finish up their series on desktop and laptop security by looking at some of the latest threats - and why computers with old-style USB ports aren't much safer. Plus, some new scams to avoid and the scoop on some juicy internal Facebook documents.

Head over to Loose Leaf Security or click the links above for the full audio and our detailed show notes. We also added a new archives page, so you can find all our various content - podcast episodes, zines, reference pages, etc. - quickly.

As always, you can subscribe to Loose Leaf Security in your favorite podcatcher and follow the project on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

When you create a new Google Doc, you have the option to share it with others to view or edit. Viewing permission is straightforward, just view access, but by default, editors have the ability not just to edit the content of the document but also to edit sharing permissions. If you grant edit access for a private document to a collaborator and don't check the box for "Prevent editors from changing access and adding new people" in Advanced > Owner settings, they can share the document, edit history and all, with someone else.

Linking document editing to editing sharing permissions by default is particularly unintuitive to me in the context of documents where anyone with the link to the document can edit it: even in that case, anyone with edit permission - anyone who gets the link either from you or from someone else who had it sharing it, so potentially anyone on the internet - can change who has access to the document. Anyone with the link can limit access to the document, and that might subtly cause confusion when people who you'd expect to be able to view it suddenly can't.

Fortunately, no one can revoke access from the owner of the document, so once you're aware someone is locked out who shouldn't be, the owner can fix the sharing settings and decide whether or not to tick the "Prevent editors from changing access and adding new people" box.

Since discovering this accidentally, I always tick the "Prevent editors from changing access and adding new people" box when creating a new Google Doc, but that would probably have been more intuitive to have checked by default.

If I actually wrote about XOXO 2018 last weekend like I had intended to do, I would have tried to write an article titled "XOXO strives to be what the internet should strive to be," and I probably would have never finished it. It's not that I don't still think XOXO tries to be what the internet ought to try to be; rather, it's that I have a misguided desire to separate what I feel from who I am, especially when I am creating, so that my words could find some unattainable universality and divorce themselves from my not particularly important existence compared with people substantially more eloquent and interesting.

This is particularly ironic for me in the context of XOXO. I've been lucky enough to get to go to every XOXO since 2014, and people I've met in XOXO's community have consistently valued my personal experiences and reminded me that I am happier and create better when I bring my whole self to creating.

It's even more ironic when I think back on the talks at this past XOXO, especially the one that resonated with me the most: Open Mike Eagle's discussion of his creative process and how difficult creating can be. Much of his talk was devoted to how he struggles to explain his creations to others when he himself is still not entirely sure how to succinctly describe the work he's created. He also touched on how creating with an eye on how an audience will receive what you're creating can hinder creating itself - the precise problem I narrowly dodged by procrastinating writing this essay!

***

XOXO Festival describes itself as "an experimental festival for independent artists and creators who work on the internet." This year's festival was my fourth XOXO, and the first one where I felt I could claim the words "independent creator" as words that described me. I finally had not just one non-trivial independent project, but two! I make two podcasts! Podcasts are on the internet! I could put things I was proud of on my badge! I finally felt like I created real things that meant I really deserved to be there, instead of being that person who was still working on creating the metaphorical space in their life for creating, someone who snuck in and was twiddling their thumbs until someone noticed.

This year's festival was attended by nearly twice as many people as the other three I've had the fortune of attending, and it was the first festival since I started to help moderate XOXO's lively Slack community. I don't know if it was because of either of those things or because of something else, but this festival was somehow the first one where I didn't feel like my creating brought much to the festival. I had substantially fewer conversations about what other attendees were working on, what I was working on, and creating in general than at past festivals.

XOXO was also at a new venue located in a different area of Portland, one much less surrounded by a bunch of restaurants within walking distance, and despite the increased in attendees, there didn't seem to be an increase in food carts on site. The Andys (Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, the festival's creators) put in extra work to prioritize businesses owned by chefs of color, which is fantastic, and I'm sure worrying about the budget deficit didn't make it any easier to coordinate with the vendors they did secure. Unfortunately, the vegetarian and vegan options ended up being very limited, and there wasn't breakfast other than Pip's (delicious) donuts on site like there was in previous years. Between eating most meals offsite because many of my friends at XOXO are vegetarian or vegan, not having the excuse to meet up on site for breakfast before the talks, and getting to the main stage early because many of the seats weren't comfortable for myself and my friends, I found myself finding very little of a specific, rare type of serendipity in meeting awesome new people I had come to associate with XOXO.

***

XOXO Festival may describe itself as "an experimental festival for independent artists and creators who work on the internet," but for many people, especially marginalized people, XOXO is a lot more than interesting talks and performances by highly talented artists and creators: it tries - and often succeeds - to create a safe space for those traditionally left behind. XOXO has had a strong community code of conduct since at least as long as I've participated, and the Andys have discussed its enforcement openly at the festival and within the Slack community. But it takes a lot more than a solid, enforced code of conduct to create that sort of space. It requires recognizing your biases and actively thinking about inclusion - prioritizing diversity when creating the lineup; a fairer registration policy than first-come, first-served through surveys collected over more than a week; caring about physical, emotional, and financial accessibility; normalizing socialization without alcohol through the extensive, free non-alcoholic drinks menu while charging for alcohol; denormalizing assumptions like gender and pronouns through pronoun pins; and confronting the history of the lands you're standing on and the people you've displaced.

I used to joke that my gender was "a woman in tech" because I've never truly felt like a woman outside of society gendering me as one. During the past few months, I've come to realize I'd been hiding my feelings about gender behind humor. Demi Adejuyigbe brought an excellent talk on hiding behind humor to XOXO 2018, and one line really stuck out to me:

If I make fun of me, then it won't matter when other people do.

Demi wasn't speaking about gender, but when he spoke that line, feelings about how I've previously interacted with my gender flooded my existence. If I said that I was a woman, then it wouldn't hurt me when other people did.

I started to understand that I am non-binary, probably primarily agender, in no small part because of the space the XOXO community provides me to safely be who I am. For a time, XOXO was the only space I was actively out in. While I continue to deeply feel that acceptance and safety within the XOXO community Slack, I didn't truly feel that safety deep in my gut at the festival. If I sat and thought about it, I felt safe because I had my partner Matt and other friends who would help me navigate potential issues and because I felt the Andys would take those issues seriously, should something happen.

But it was a very intellectual form of safety, not the instinctual one I'd known in the past. Maybe it was the lack of gender neutral bathrooms that was corrected slowly as the conference went on, and being involved in figuring out how to fix that oversight took no small amount of emotional labor and energy from me, someone who was directly hurt by it. Maybe it was what seemed to be an increase in white tech dudes, many of whom complained about XOXO's inclusion of content warnings because they thought it was "simply 'for independent artists and creators who work on the internet'" - as though that isn't descriptive enough because XOXO tries to value and prioritize marginalized people.

***

During past XOXOs, I have always cried - sometimes during talks, others back in my hotel room after experiencing days where I've felt radically seen as a person in ways I am not used to. But I'm the sort of person who cries a lot, and I've come to accept and expect that.

I didn't cry during XOXO 2018. I did cry a little after I flew home.

It's not that I didn't enjoy my time at XOXO - I did. I got to see a bunch of close, old friends, and I got to spend time in person with some newer ones. I listened to a bunch of fantastic talks, saw truly excellent performances, and played a variety of engaging arcade games. I just wasn't expecting the expectation mismatch after experiencing three other XOXO festivals.

***

A week before this year's XOXO, another attendee started a lovely discussion about being a survivor by asking:

What's a motto that holds meaning for you? A line from a book or song or movie that expresses the difficulty of learning to thrive after years of surviving?

I immediately thought of a line I love from a Tori Amos song I don't really love anymore:

I'm okay when everything is not okay.

***

After the closing concert (Lizzo was incredible, by the way), I finally made my way to Dear Future Me, Alice Lee's interactive mural installation. Participants wrote postcards to their future selves that will be mailed a year later.

I knew I wanted to participate, but I kept putting it off because I didn't know what I wanted to write. I kept worrying about who future me would be, and how they would receive my letter. Plus, many of the participants wrote more eloquent and interesting letters than I could ever write.

So when I finally sat down in the calm environment Alice created to write my postcard as the festival was drawing to a close, my brain jumped around all the things that felt off that weekend. How I felt so different from how I had imagined I would have felt. How I didn't quite feel okay.

Then, it hit me, and I smiled.

Dear Future Me,

You're okay when everything is not okay.

♡,
Liz circa 2018