Greetings, members!

Welcome and welcome back, and happy new year! We have many exciting events planned for this term; here are some of the upcoming ones, so mark up your fresh calendars (unless you prefer to preserve their beautiful, clean, glossy, white pages...).

~Gabriella Coleman, "Weapons of the Geek": Monday, Jan. 28, 4:30pm, DC 1302 An anthropologist from McGill, Gabriella Coleman researches, writes, and teaches on hackers and digital activism. Her talk is part of the CrySP Speaker Series on privacy. Here is the abstract: "Drawing on fieldwork among Free and Open Source software hackers and the Anonymous protest movement, I will discuss some attributes of hacker and geek activism that set their actions apart from other modalities of dissent and contextualize their actions in light of broader historical trends concerning censorship, intellectual property, privacy, and surveillance."

~Code Party 0: Friday, Feb. 1, 7:00pm, Comfy Lounge (MC 3001) Our first code party of the term is next Friday. There will be soda, chips, cookies, and (probably not many) other delectable delicacies to pleasure your palates. There will also be music and free Internet ((both) in limited supply). Stop by, relax, and work on that coding project you've been putting off since Christmas. Attendance is not limited to members!

~Scheduled downtime: Sunday, Feb. 3, 12:00pm until Monday, Feb. 4, 12:00pm CSC systems will be taken offline to allow us to switch homedirectory hosting to our new Netapp storage device. All CSC systems, homedirectories and hosted websites will be unavailable for the duration of our maintenance window. Make sure to save your work, and plan ahead to use a personal computer or a different machine during that time.

Happy coding, Matt O. CSC Secretary, Winter 2013