I love dragons. But more than dragons, I love dragons fighting helicopters! Ever since Reign of Fire, where the dragons never quite fought the helicopters, I have dreamed of a movie that would give me giant, angry dragons fighting huge, flame-throwing helicopters. At last, the Korean film industry has granted my wish in the movie D-War, soon to be released in the U.S. under the name Dragon Wars. I am fucking ecstatic. Hooray for the rejuvenation of the giant monster movie, and hooray for dragons vs. helicopters! Check out the trailer — note that the dude from Roswell appears to be some kind of mystical dragon-killer or something. I will be at the theater on Sept. 14, opening night, cheering for the dragons to KICK HELICOPTER ASS!

Like many geeks, I’ve spend the last couple of weeks happily playing with mad scientist Virgil Griffith’s new creation, WikiScanner. It’s a web application that reveals who has been making anonymous edits on Wikipedia. Surprise: it’s not a bunch of angry, unprofessional bloggers in pajamas. It’s the CIA, members of Congress, large corporations like Pepsi and Haliburton, and staffers at the New York Times and Fox News. Each of these groups is guilty of deleting unflattering information about their own organizations, or of posting propaganda about issues they’re directly involved with.

As somebody who has long advocated the use of anonymous speech for people who are vulnerable to political and social persecution, the revelations of WikiScanner are intriguing to me. Often anonymous dissidents and whistleblowers are tarred with the brush of “bad” anonymity — and by “bad” anonymity, I mean the kind of unbridled speech that’s full of slander, lies, and attacks. I’m gratified to see that the people engaging in “bad” anonymity turn out to be some of the same ones who have tried to deprive whistleblowers and dissidents of their right to speak out anonymously. There is still a place for “good” anonymity on the Web and in the media, the kind that results in truth-telling against all odds, in places where speaking out openly could cost lives.

In my column this week, you can read more about who is editing what on Wikipedia, and what it means for the politics of anonymity.

I’ve proposed a panel for the 2008 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference called “Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting!” It will be a user’s guide to organizing revolts on social networks, such as the AACS key protest on Digg.com, or the Harry Potter fanfic revolt on LiveJournal. We’ll be talking about how to stage a successful and non-destructive revolt, and how social network organizers should respond to revolting users. I’ll be joined on the panel by distinguished social network gurus/bloggers Gina Trapani and Jessamyn West, as well as a couple of other cool people TBA.

SXSW won’t accept the panel unless you vote for it — all panels at this geeky conference are picked by the community. So if you want to send me, Gina and Jessamyn to SXSW and find out what we have to say about user revolts, please sign up and vote for our panel!

The video of our She’s Such a Geek reading at Google is now online, part of the Authors @ Google series. Co-editor Charlie Anders and I were joined by contributors (and Googlers) Ellen Spertus and Jenn Shreve. We had a great time, and even got a free lunch and tour of the weird programmable toilets at Google — no, you can’t see the toilets in our video. Watch the video.

One of the things I have to do in my new role volunteering as president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility is clean out the 25-year-old organization’s archives. Our little office in San Francisco’s awesome Nonprofit Tech Center can’t hold all our history, and so I’m in the process of negotiating with a very cool university library that wants to acquire our papers and keep them in good condition so that generations of researchers can learn about what CPSR did to protest SDI (Star Wars) weapons systems.

In the process of going through 30 boxes and 9 filing cabinets of our papers — with help from the excellent library nerds Steven Black, Sacha Arnold, Rick Prelinger, Megan Shaw Prelinger, and Gina DeVries — I’ve gained a new appreciation for paper archives. While I want to digitize as much of CPSR’s history as possible, I also want a paper audit trail as it were. Too often, tech geeks like myself place too much faith in the longevity of digital storage. But in fact, history is still going to be remembered via paper most of the time. Read more about my adventures in the CPSR archives, and why I think every digital archive needs a paper backup copy.

With The Simpsons movie in theaters, and every fucking 7-11 converted into a massive walk-in advertisement for the show, I have finally decided to speak out about why I have hated this overrated, overquoted TV show for 17 years.

When The Simpsons debuted on Fox back in 1990, I was primed to love it. I’d been reading Groening’s stuff in alt.weeklies for years, and was into the idea of an indie cartoonist making it big on what passed for an indie network at that time. But as the action unfolded that season, I grew depressed, then angry.

I was watching yet another network TV show that gave us yuks by lampooning a working class family full of stupid men and smart-but-indulgent women. This was the era when the show Roseanne was going full-blast, and I loved it because we finally had a working-class comedy where the characters dealt with real-life problems (not being able to pay bills), weren’t the butt of the show’s jokes (instead, they made the jokes), and didn’t fit known stereotypes (one daughter, Darlene, was a comic book geek).

On The Simpsons, however, the characters are nothing but stereotype. They’re practically Pyncheonesque in their emptiness — not people, but objects who get driven through various pastiches in order to become the butt of the audience’s arch, ironic jokes. I didn’t give a shit about any of them. The only way I could enjoy these characters was to say, “Haha look at the funny dumb poor people who are so incredibly stupid that they actually work at nuclear power plants.”

Problem is, I actually don’t find that funny.

Yes, it’s true that there’s one rich guy on the show, Mr. Burns, who is also the butt of jokes, but let’s face it: the whole point of The Simpsons is to let us have our postmodern Archie Bunker in the character of Homer, and quote all the moronic things he says to our media-savvy, smarty-smart friends.

The Simpsons feels like an early 1970s show wrapped up in a form of Gen X knee-jerk irony that was hip 17 years ago and hasn’t been funny since The Daily Show rewrote the rules for U.S. TV satire. So now there’s nothing left about The Simpsons that’s interesting anymore: not only do we have the same old recycled “blue collar idiot” jokes that mainstream comedy has provided for at least 100 years, but they’re told in a satirical style that’s about as fresh as a Sonic Youth album.

Sure, I think a lot about movies — probably more than I should, given that movies are rapidly dying as a media form. Hell, even TV is pretty old hat. I should really be spending all my time watching YouTube vids, but the problem is that when I go to YouTube (which is practically every day) all I do is watch clips from movies and TV. Usually old movies and old TV.

Anyway, I was glad to discover that an economics researcher over at UC Berkeley is just as obsessed with movies as I am. In fact, he and a colleague did a very interesting and detailed study about why people get enjoyment out of scary movies. Since they’re economics geeks, of course they phrased it differently: they wanted to know why people spend money on scary shit, a process they describe as “consuming negative feelings.” What was interesting about their research is that they discovered something that literary critics have known for centuries: it’s fun to hear, watch or read a story that arouses conflicting feelings of terror and pleasure. Ambivalence is the stuff of narrative zoom! Read more about their cool study, and how they tortured a bunch of undergraduates with bad movies and questionnaires.

While I was in Minneapolis, some local riff raff exposed me to a great movie about pornography from 1964 — Perversion for Profit. This was an anti-porn movie funded by financier Charles Keating, probably best known for architecting the 1980s savings and loan scandal. What struck me about the movie most was that it used scare tactics straight from today’s anti-internet free expression brigade. The announcer in the movie claims that “new technologies” and “new distribution methods” are putting pornography into the hands of 90% of kids! Sounds like something a nutty Congresscritter would say before proposing a bill about censoring the internet. But of course this flick is about the dangers of printed books, and the “distribution methods” are fast transit systems. So I wrote about how the rhetoric around new technologies doesn’t change.

Unfortunately, I wrote about this in a satirical way, which has resulted in a lot of hate mail. So check it out, and feel the hate!

Are you interested in what happens to computer technology during wartime? How can we weaponize beta versions of software and hardware safely so that soldiers and civilians are protected? What are the ethical implications of using technology to spy on citizens — or to help those citizens speak out against wartime atrocities? This January 26, at Stanford University, a conference called Technology in Wartime aims to raise — and begin to answer — those questions. Sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), the conference is currently seeking participants. So visit the conference website now, and find out more about how you can participate.

What’s my role in all this? Well, in my wonky life, I’m proud to be the president of CPSR, one of the oldest geek activist organizations that I know. Its roots go back to the early 1980s, when a bunch of computer scientists — many at Stanford — banded together to speak out about the problems with SDI and computerized launch-on-demand missile systems. They argued that the military didn’t realize how many things could go wrong with computerized weapons systems, and their message got through loud and clear. They become some of the most visible advocates for caution in deploying what became known as the Star Wars weapons system.

In the 1990s, they helped fight battles to protect privacy and free speech online, and in the 2000s CPSR has worked on reforms in e-voting practices, as well as international internet regulation. Now, we’re returning to our roots with the Technology in Wartime conference, confronting a host of issues that our current wartime mentality has brought to the fore in the United States and throughout the world. Find out more!