Completely remarkable; a quest to decipher what's going on with a particular piece of malware ends up revealing a campaign to commit large-scale industrial sabotage of Iranian nuclear processing plants. Gripping, dense; it's a real thriller of an article.

"Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled." (Lots of other good stuff here, but I wanted to note this one down).

Me, talking to the chaps from Slub about livecoding and the like, for Wired. Turned out alright, I think. Shame there wasn't space for it in the print edition in the end, but online now.

Joel Johnson rounds on Wired for the gulf between their online and printed formats; the comments thread turns into a much more rational, and reasonable, discussion from many Wired staff, past and present.

"Maybe participating in a Game Jam ought be a required rite of passage for anyone who wants to make videogames. It's a deep, oxygen-less dive into the depths of the industry, compressed into 48 hours. Survive it, and you can survive anything." Development as fractal.

Clive Thompson on how Mirror's Edge "hacks" your proprioception: "it explains, I think, why Mirror's Edge is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it's neurologically realistic."

"Paine does have a descendent, a place where his values prosper and are validated millions of times a day: the Internet. There, his ideas about communications, media ethics, the universal connections between people, the free flow of honest opinion are all relevant again, visible every time one modem shakes hands with another." Fantastic article

"After all, what is science? It's a technique for uncovering the hidden rules that govern the world. And videogames are simulated worlds that kids are constantly trying to master. Lineage and World of Warcraft aren't "real" world, of course, but they are consistent -- the behavior of the environment and the creatures in it are governed by hidden and generally unchanging rules, encoded by the game designers. In the process of learning a game, gamers try to deduce those rules. This leads them, without them even realizing it, to the scientific method."

"An almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature."

"I'm passionate about this because I'm building the camera I've always wanted to shoot with," he says. "When my grandkids and great-grandkids look back, they're going to say I was a camera builder. I did handgrips and then goggles and then sunglasses to prepare myself. But cameras are magic." Fantastic article about Jim Jannard and his Red digital movie-camera business.

"David Rowan’s editorship of the UK edition of Wired raises many questions. The first being “Who is going to be his number two?”" The answer is Hammersley. That could be good.

'"The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet."'

Lego 'hired' Mindstorms geeks to help them develop a next generation of Mindstorms system. This Wired article explains what happens. Fun.