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.

Consumer electronics are so 2007. It’s all about the consumer biotech, people. Want to find out what the three big upcoming home biotech gizmos will be? Read my column about the “DNA Crystal Ball,” “Clonies!” and “Gene Expression Jam Session.”

James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, has finally been publicly spanked and booted from his job for a lifetime of sexism and racism. I will never forget when he gave a lecture at Berkeley in 2001 and claimed that black women were “sexier” than other women because there is a genetic correlation between skin color and horniness. The guy is a fucker. Find out why I think that sexist, racist scientists like Watson should make us question the scientific enterprise itself.

When I was at the excellent conference Arse Elektronika last month, I was lucky enough to meet the artist/musician/geek Matt Ganucheau. He’s known for his electronic music and sound-related art projects, but for Arse Elektronika he created an interactive erotic device known as Moaning Lisa. A hollowed-out mannequin covered in piezo sensors that register pressure, Moaning Lisa could be induced to have an “orgasm” (signaled by the sound of a million women moaning) if you touched her sensors in the right order for the right length of time. Each time you played with her, her software would change which sensors and timings were required to create the orgasm. Despite her sex-doll appearance, I liked Moaning Lisa because she taught a simple (feminist) lesson: every woman’s body is different, and creating sexual pleasure for her is not magical but instead just involves learning how to deal with a series of sensors. When I wrote about Moaning Lisa, I managed to outrage a number of feminists who couldn’t get past the idea that she’s a sex doll.