Linked List: January 16, 2011

Sunday, 16 January 2011

Stuxnet Worm Used Against Iran Was Tested in Israel ★: How was the Stuxnet worm so effective against the Iranian nuclear program? It was tested against the same centrifuges in Israel’s wink-wink-nudge-nudge never-officially-acknowledged nuclear facilities, reports The New York Times. How clever is Stuxnet? This clever:

The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.
Shortchanging Your Business With User-Hostile Platforms ★: Alex Payne on services that do things like use Adobe Air instead of building proper native apps:

Imagine a new restaurant that wants to make the most of their burgeoning lunch traffic. They start serving low-quality meat: after all, it’s cheap, plentiful, and requires nothing more than placing a different order with their distributor. For a few weeks, profits are up. But pretty soon, so are customer complaints, and the stars on their Yelp page are rapidly dwindling. The owner doesn’t understand. The meat isn’t great, sure, but it’s perfectly edible, and for a while it seemed like the restaurant was making more money and attracting new customers. What went wrong?
World’s Smallest Instagram Gallery ★: Great idea: put your Instragram photos on your iPod Nano. The small size and square crop make for a perfect match.