Annotated 33-9
This scene was inspired by my visits with Flo, which also took place in Philadelphia, and where she then resided had a similar buzzer-lock system. Flo obviously never played this kind of game with me, but the power dynamics of the device intrigued me, and I figured this would be a good way to show a little of Xan’s personality before we formally met the guy.
(Of course, those who’d followed Flo’s and my work before this had met Xan already, but more on that in a page or two.)
We get a little fire from Shanna, too: it’s been a while since she’s had a chance to flex her see-through-other-people’s-bullshit vision.
Without being too smug about this… I’ve always wondered how folks talk themselves into believing they’re truly “off-grid” when they live in an above-ground dwelling and reside in any region that is at all urbanized.
I mean, even unincorporated cities are still hubs of social activity, it’s easy to pay people off to spy on others because of the cost of living, anonymity pretty much relies on the exclusive use of proxies and remote meeting places you’ll never return to… and this dude invites people to his *apartment*?
You’re better off becoming a nomad and stealing other people’s credit cards to use at an internet cafe. Not that I endorse this…
I can only guess this is Xan screwing with Shanna as he does following this page. The only other explanation is the creators are following tropes and ignoring the idea that a actually hacker would have done background checks from a proxy server and most likely never meet in person. Trusting a app a stranger told you to download is comical in itself.
Xan told Shanna to download the app, and it’s most likely he designed and coded it himself for the specific purpose of conversing securely with people he didn’t know personally.
Designing and coding your own secure app is enormously dangerous. Much more likely he made her use some open-source end-to-end encrypting tool which can be used anonymously. Given that they talked on the phone, that could have even been Signal (because Signal uses phone numbers as identifiers, so you need to tell people your phone number to allow them to contact you). Otherwise, something like Briar or Jami allows completely anonymous use and sends messages directly P2P. Those are all open source, are continuously being tested by lots of people and therefore immensely less likely to have any security-breaking bugs than anything even the best security-conscious programmer could come up with on their own.
I’m amused by the people who put tape over a laptop’s camera but do nothing about the microphone.
Well, putting tape over your microphone doesn’t really do much, does it?
Joke aside, if you there’s one easy thing you can do and one hard one (i.e.: opening your laptop, finding the microphone and disconnecting it, or even better: solder a hardware switch onto it for the times when you do want to activate it), why be surprised that most people only do the easy thing? Definitely better than nothing, I’d say.
My interpretation was simply that Xan had some last-minute doubt about meeting with Shanna.
I don’t remember reading anything about whether Xan was on the run from the law, or maybe simply believes he’s a thorn in the side of some government agency or another, or knows there’s *some* illicit activity he does not want to have traced back to him, whose existence Shanna has deduced based on his “hacker” label (because of course hackers are criminals, right?). So, unless I forgot about those things, we don’t really know whether Xan is being more cautious than he needs to be or whether agreeing to meet with Shanna is taking a major risk (in addition to the fact that there’s a killer on her trail, of course, which he doesn’t yet know about).
The most important aspect of staying hidden is not to be noticed in the first place. Xan’s not always, 100% off the grid, he’s just been pretty good at partitioning his life so that any activity that’d draw attention to him remains unseen. He’ll have to change that shortly when he shifts into fugitive mode, but he’s ready for that.
That said, I’m going to ask your forgiveness in advance for any obvious blunders here. Neither Flo nor I ever guarded our internet privacy all that carefully, and while Xan is more of an eccentric than a true expert, it’s still possible we had him make mistakes that’d be as obviously out of character to a knowledgeable source as medical shows are to real-life surgeons.
A sadly relevant scene, nowdays
Boston perspective:
“You can tell this is a fantasy world because the speaker-buzzer exists and works.”