I’m excited to be part of an excellent panel at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Organized by feminist-scientist dynamo Patricia B. Campbell, the panel is called Blogs, Boards and Bonding: Using Electronic Communities to Support Women in Science. I’ll be joining several other distinguished panelists, and talking about my experiences trying to squash gender stereotypes in the world of science writing, as well as how blogging has helped female scientists find community and get their work noticed in unconventional ways.

Despite my furious posting on io9, I am continuing to write my weekly column Techsploitation. It’s nice to have a place where I can still be an angry leftist when it comes to science and tech, and these days there’s more than ever to be pissed about. Here’s what the radical, destroy-the-current-hegemony part of my brain has been doing for the past several weeks.

I thought a lot about consumer biotech. I worry that companies such as 23andme.com, which offers to sequence your genome for $1000 and tell you things about yourself based on your genes, will become the basis for new social networks based on genome-compatibility. Think of it as user-generated eugenics. Then I scoffed at people’s concerns over eating cloned meat, and talked about how cloning livestock for meat isn’t the real problem. Factory farming is.

I told you about how Comcast has a subtle but nefarious plan to stop file-sharing by occasionally stopping data packets that it believes are from file-sharing programs. And I screamed and yelled and stomped my feet about the government’s nonsubtle, utterly evil plan to grant telcos immunity for having handed over their customers’ personal data to the NSA without warrants.

Now that I am editing and writing a mainstream blog, I worry a lot about what will happen to this once-upstart medium as it merges with more traditional media. I wrote about my concerns that blogs will lose their edge and make the same mistakes that mainstream magazines and newspapers did when they started self-censoring and narrowing the range of what it’s permissible to talk about in a public forum.

And just last week, I wrote about the mysterious severing of 5 undersea fiber optic cables, which cut off network service to many countries in Asia and the Middle East.

I’m finally catching my breath after doing nothing but blog at io9 for about 5 weeks straight. In between posting, I also managed to organize a conference for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility called Technology in Wartime. It was held at Stanford (thanks to the Center for Internet and Society!) on January 26, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. We had a full audience, despite the early start hour on a Saturday, and the speakers — including luminaries Bruce Schneier, Cindy Cohn, Ronald Arkin, Herb Lin, Kevin Poulsen, Barbara Simons, Patrick Ball, Noah Shachtman, and Nick Mathewson — were terrific.

Thanks to videographer Mark Burdett, the proceedings are now archived in video form on Archive.org. You can see a complete list of panels/speakers, with links to video, here. Thanks to everybody who came out, and to the board of CPSR for helping make this such a great conference on a timely topic.

So today my new science fiction and futurism blog, io9, went live. It covers everything from hard science to bizarre tales of alien invasion, and is published by Gawker Media. Much to my happy surprise, we had a blockbuster first day — in fact, with over 450 thousand page views as of this writing, io9 has had the most successful launch in Gawker history.

I have been working on this blog incredibly hard for months, and almost nonstop for the past month, with terrific help from associate editors Charlie Jane Anders and Kevin Kelly. So it’s good to see all those months of blogging in the dark paying off! I’m looking forward to lots more blogging about weird science experiments, mind-blowing scifi novels, and the gore-tastic B-movies that make my life complete. If you have any story ideas for io9, or there’s more of something you’d like to see, don’t hesitate to write!

Update: We wound up having 750 thousand views that day. Phew!

You can find me at io9, blogging about science fiction and science and the future until my brains explode!

The mayoral election earlier this month in San Francisco was abysmal. Our conservative-leaning incumbent Gavin Newsom ran virtually unopposed. Still, I sought out the one candidate I think could turn this city around. That’s why I voted for Josh Wolf, a young blogger who was imprisoned for not handing information over to the police related to story he’d posted online. Find out more about what Josh Wolf represents for the future of politics.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve also been playing with a new map mashup tool that shows which countries are censoring social networking sites such as YouTube or MySpace. The tool is called the Access Denied Map, and you’ll be surprised to see who is doing the blocking and why.

Back in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church would sell you an “indulgence” for your sins. Pay the church a set amount per sin, and they’d hand over a piece of fancy paper saying your sin had been wiped clean. It was a quick way for the rich and middle classes to buy their ways into heaven.

These days, green chic has brought us the carbon offset as a modern-day form of the indulgence. Fly on a plane, and for a few extra dollars the airline will throw some money at a random “clean development” project. You pollute the earth with your jet ride, but you feel so much better inside. This is also the worst possible way to support green development. Read more of my rant about the dark side of carbon indulgences.

This Thursday I’m moderating a panel about digital privacy (and the lack thereof) at San Francisco’s excellent Commonwealth Club. The panel is called “2007 — Is This 1984?” and the panelists are attorneys who work on privacy issues in the high tech industry. On the public interest side, we have Kevin Bankston from EFF and Chris Hoofnagle from UC Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology; on industry’s side we have Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly and Google’s Senior Privacy Counsel Jane Horvath. Doors at 6:00, panel starts at 6:30. Tickets are $20 for non-members. Followed by wine and cheese!

Registration is now open for Technology in Wartime, a conference I’m co-organizing for CPSR that’s happening at Stanford on Jan. 26 of next year.

The event will attract an international audience of computer scientists, policy makers, military professionals, human rights workers, and academics. The goal of this non-partisan conference will be to consider the ethical implications of wartime technologies and how these technologies are likely to affect civilization in years to come. Topics will range from high tech weapons systems and internet surveillance, to privacy-enhancing technologies that aid human rights workers documenting conditions in war-torn countries and help soldiers communicate their experiences in blogs and e-mail. We are also interested in the history of computer-aided weapons systems. Ultimately we want to engage a pressing question of our time: What should socially-responsible computer professionals do in a time of high tech warfare?

The proceedings will be broadcast live on the Web, and the presentations collected in book form online, released under an open license, and made available to the public and policy makers looking for expert opinions on wartime technology issues during the election year.

I’ve been working my butt off to get a bunch of cool people to come speak at this event, and the work has paid off. We have an amazing lineup, including Bruce Schneier (Counterpane Security), Barbara Simons (ACM), Herb Lin (NAS), Cindy Cohn (EFF), Patrick Ball (Benetech), and Noah Shachtman (Wired magazine’s war correspondent). Plus more!

We’ve gotten sponsorships from Google, Stanford Law School, iSec Partners, and Joi Ito. We hope to get a few more sponsorships before January, so if you or your company is interested, have them contact me! Or just register for this conference, which I guarantee will be one of the most thought-provoking tech and policy conferences of the year.

Yeah, it’s last minute. But if you’re in the mood to make fun of a cheesy, mid-1990s movie with Angelina Jolie playing a 1337 haXOr, come out to San Francisco’s Dark Room (2263 Mission) at 8 PM for “Bad Movie Night,” hosted by the incomparable Sherilyn Connelly. Basically everybody will eat popcorn and watch Hackers, while Sherilyn, Charlie Anders, and I hold microphones and make fun of it MST3K style. Actually, everybody will make fun of the movie, but only the three of us will have microphones. I just watched Hackers again last week, and let me just say that you haven’t lived until you’ve seen this silly time capsule full of references to “elite hackers,” phreaking, UNIX, PVC corsets for guys, pirate TV, and raves where the only music playing is by The Prodigy and Underworld.