I’ll be spending Silvester — German New Year — in Berlin, enjoying the company of my friends as well as European hackers, copyfighters, and people who want to dance until dawn. Not sure if I’ll make it all the way to dawn, but I’m going to try. In the meantime, I’ve written up a few of my geeky resolutions for the new year, which include hanging out with more mechanical and civil engineers, as well as sharing more media and re-learning French. Read about my plans for a truly nerdy 2007 here. Happy New Year!

I’ll be giving a talk called “Revenge of the Female Nerds” at the 23rd annual Chaos Communication Congress on Wed., 12/27, at 11 PM in the main lecture hall. It will be a much-updated and more thoroughly-researched version of the talk I gave last year at Harvard with the same title. Basically it’s about the social barriers women have to surmount to become scientists and engineers — and how we can blow those barriers to bits. I’ll be discussing my recent book, She’s Such a Geek, as well as a study I’m completing for the National Academy of Sciences on how the media covers scientific studies about gender issues.

CCC is sponsored by another CCC, the Chaos Computer Club, which is one of the oldest political hacker groups in the world. It’s my first time attending one of their events, which includes Chaos Computer Camp every third summer. I can’t wait to hang out with the European hackers and dig into some serious nerd politics and art, as well as cool tech. If you’ll be there, come say hi! I won’t have my cell phone, but you can reach me on AIM as t3chspl01t or jabber as annalee@gmail.com.

A group called Wikichix recently spun out of Wikipedia because its members felt their experiences at the collectively-authored online encyclopedia had been tained by sexism. While they don’t intend to stop contributing to Wikipedia, the Wikichix want a female-only space to talk about women in the wiki world. Among other issues they hope to address are several conflicts over Wikipedia entries that dealt with feminism (such as the 5-year battle over the category “feminist science fiction”) and lesbian public figures. Plus, the Wikichix say, men often try to silence women in debates over Wikipedia entries — either in a subtle way, or with overt, obnoxiously sexist comments.

In my most recent column, I talk about what the Wikichix want. It’s not their own “women’s encyclopedia.” They just want Wikipedia to be a place where women are as influential and respected as men. Read more about the revolutionary Wikichix.

When I worked at EFF, I was the semi-official go-to person on spam issues, largely because nobody else wanted to do it. Having never dealt much with the spam wars, I found the topic intriguing. At that time there were a lot of discussions about “sender authentication” and that raised concerns about anonymous speech, which is in many ways the cornerstone of free speech online. So I viewed the “spam problem” as one of overzealous spam filtering rather than stopping spam.

That’s probably why, in my two years of policy wonking about spam, I never had a chance to sit down with anybody and talk about techniques spammers use to get their spurts of weirdness into my inbox. I knew that every strange chunk of text and oddball gif I received was designed to circumvent spam filter programs, but I didn’t know why. That’s why I called up IronPort antispam architect Daniel Quinlan and chatted with him about the true meaning of spam. His answers might surprise you. Find out more about why you receive random quotes from Beowulf and pictures of pink, bouncy text in your spam in my column.

New X-ray techniques have allowed science historians to see the internal workings of what many call a 2,000 year old computer. It’s the Antikythera Mechanism, a complex Greek device made of interlocking gears that could accurately predict the motions of the sun, moon and stars — as well as eclipses. Why didn’t this device change history and lead to the invention of computers 2,000 years ago? That’s what I wondered about in a recent column.

Apparently I was on the front page of news recommender site Digg.com the other day — an interbloggy sort of honor — for a post I wrote at Table of Malcontents about why Battlestar Galactica may be doomed as a show. Fans came out in droves to tell me how wrong I am, despite the fact that my list of 10 reasons the show is starting to blow are pretty undeniable. At least now I’ve had the pleasure of being told by hundreds of people that I shouldn’t criticize BSG because: 1. the show is the only good thing in their lives and/or on television; and 2. I am not a TV producer and thus don’t know what I’m talking about. Read my controversial post.

Last week I published an article in Wired about how the new Nike+ iPod Sport Kit is the perfect surveillance device. Nike+ iPod is a gizmo that allows you to track how far you’ve run and how fast by sticking a little RFID chip into your shoe, which broadcasts your running data to an iPod Nano. A group of security researchers at University of Washington, however, discovered that the devices also make perfect trackers — with just a hundred bucks, you can set up a listening station that notifies you every time somebody with one of these Nike+ sneakers goes by. You can even plot that person’s location on Google maps. Surveillance — just do it! When I called the nice PR person at Apple and told her about it, she actually screamed in pain. I’ve never done that to a PR person before, and it was sort of exhiliarating. Read more about the Nike+ iPod surveillance device.

I also wrote a pissy column about high tech crap of the future, in order to avoid writing about the new high tech crap that’s out this holiday season. So instead of talking about the Wii and the Zune, I describe what DNA DRM will be like, as well as how one day you’ll use BitTorrent to store your consciousness in a distributed P2P environment. Read more about that.