Use only with permission. Choose your own adventure: Hacker or Executive ? Hacker Æva Black is a non-binary hacker, veteran of the first dot-com bubble, and the former Section Chief for Open Source Security at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. They founded Null Point Studio in the Netherlands in 2025 to continue supporting the sustainability and security of free and open…
Q : Aeva, are you available to speak at ______ ? A : Probably. Please review my speaker's rider . My contact info is available on that page. Q : Aeva, do you have a bio or headshot we can use? A : Yes, which you can find on this page . Q : Aeva, do you have recordings of past talks for us to review? A : Lots of them. See the table below :) Upcoming Appearances Date Event / Publication…
NAME: æva black ALIASES: XXXXXXXX AGE: over 40 GENDER: irrelevant HUMAN LANGUAGES: english, german, mandarin, sanskrit COMPUTER LANGUAGES: many LAST KNOWN LOCATION: northern europe FIRST PUBLIC CODE: 1999 (p2p network apps) BIOGRAPHY: goto bios SPEAKING AVAILABILITY: goto speaker's rider CONSULTING AVAILABILITY: goto nullpoint.studio
Well hello there, internet friends... It's been a while since I posted here, so I want to share a quick note ...
Policy makers in both the US and the EU are currently debating several efforts to improve the security of digital infrastructure, including broad new regulations such as SOSSA and the CRA . In light of high profile recent events, we are all aware that open source software is a critical part of software infrastructure as a whole. Security issues related to popular open source projects are in the…
Luis Villa posted a series of questions on opensource.com for this year's OSI Board Nominees to answer. In this post, I share my thoughts.
This is my official announcement post for my candidacy for the OSI Board of Directors in 2021. Read on for the description of my platform and goals. This post is shared on my personal site and on the 2021 OSI Board Elections page .
I try to journal around New Years every year. I'm running late this year, but with good reason - I had top surgery in December and wasn't able to sit at my desk and comfortably write for a few weeks. By the time I could, I was swamped at work and focusing on that. Check back for a follow-up to this post when I get around to actually writing it 😅
I thought that migrationg to a static site generator would be a good motivation to spend more time learning Rust ... but once I compiled Rust, and compiled Zola, everything else was just a matter of getting the templating to render well and fiddling with my build-publish workflow. Oh well. I still have a new site that I'm much happier with :)
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been at Microsoft for almost a year now — and that I came down with COVID-19 six and a half months ago. When I look back at the tumultuous political landscape that is 2020, these two events will doubtless color my memories of this year in ways that I can not yet really understand.
The doctors told me that it takes six to eight weeks – on average – for healthy folks with my symptoms to recover. It took more than six months.
It's been two years since I came out. So much has changed. So much has improved. If 2018 was about accepting that truth, 2019 was about taking action on it .. For starters, I changed all my online profiles this year. I changed my name this year. I realized that my career choices over the past several years had led me uncomfortably far from my ethics. (More on that later…) The result? I spent…
You gave up everything I’ve spent my life fighting for. I can’t imagine how much you must have been hurting inside to choose to do that. Sarah Novotny
It’s been a month now since I signed an employment contract with Microsoft. You read that correctly — the giant tech company which I swore, back in the 90’s, I would never work for. Even though most of my colleagues have been very encouraging, even reminding me that Microsoft isn’t as monopolistic or walled-off as it once was, there are still some things which bear clarification (especially for…
(content warning: gender issues and gender-based violence, no specifics but still may be difficult for some) Yesterday, the Washington State Department of Licensing held a public hearing for comments on the proposed legislation to add an ‘X’ gender marker option on state-issued ID’s. I chose to go and stand up for all the non-binary, intersex, and transgender members of my communities.
A MAN IN A frock held up his right hand and said a few words, and I got to fill out some paperwork. It is strange that this process makes me feel better about myself. I abhor paperwork.
The project is still quite healthy and is following the usual hype curve: OpenStack is finally mature enough that it’s less interesting to talk about, so it’s understandable that people think something happened. The folks asking me this question are generally curios and good intentioned, and I think my answer says a lot about my professional background, so even during an interview I indulge in a…
There’s something I need to get off my chest. I’ve used a lot of different labels to describe myself over the years – geek, goth, autodidact, polyglot, kinkster, polyamorous, third-culture kid, dharma bum, database admin, software developer, cloud architect, VP. None feel as risky to claim as #trans, and yet, none of those other labels are as authentic, none require as much vulnerability to share.