William Ockham, who knows a whole lot more about coding than many of us, shares some interesting thoughts with us about the Stuxnet virus in this post.

Obviously the shutdown of the Internet or the threat to have the military fire on its own people didn’t save Egypt’s now-former president Hosni Mubarak. But they provide the building blocks for how other nations might handle this crisis, out of the watchful eye of the world. This could already be happening in Iran, or Libya, or Bahrain. Mubarak may not have saved his own autocracy, but he may end up saving others.

The Egyptian uprising has not yet ended, and with the military banning labor strikes and workers energized by the spark of revolution not heeding this call and demonstrating for better pay and conditions, we clearly have a long way to go before that country’s affairs are settled. The role of labor in the uprising is unique and fascinating, and deserves more scrutiny. For now, however, let’s spin around the globe.

In The People Reloaded, Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel have put together a collection of essays that help explain what happened. Though both are unabashed supporters of the Green Movement, and their anthology makes the case from that angle, it does so based on the perspectives of some of the leading scholars, analysts, and journalists who have been following Iran, many of them for decades.

He’s a serious person, a seriously deluded person.

Last week, Russian Ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, told the organization that the computer worm Israel and the US devised to ruin Iran’s nuclear program could have led to a catastrophe with the Bushehr nuclear reactor like Chernobyl. Russia said on Wednesday that NATO should investigate last year’s computer virus attack on a Russian-built nuclear [...]

Talks aimed at a resolution between Iran and the West over their nuclear program collapsedtoday, with no progress and no timetable for future talks. Overall the negotiations sounded like a huge waste of time.

Iran has one of the highest per capita consumptions of fuel in the world, and constitutes the tenth largest polluter among all countries. This results in excessive waste and pollution, and renders the country’s industrial production inefficient, expensive and uncompetitive. Moreover, Iran’s ecology suffers from this pollution, and the health of its citizens is at serious risk from the emissions.

In a very interesting bit of coincidental timing, two stories have emerged on the role of Iran in Afghanistan. The Times of London (behind a subscription paywall) reported on Friday that “intelligence officials have revealed that the Iranian government is releasing significant al-Qaeda terrorists from jail so that they can help to reorganise its battered structures in border areas of Pakistan.” The Times also reported that Iran is directly aiding the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. Conveniently providing confirmation for this story, NATO informed the press that an Iranian Revolutionary Guard al-Quds officer was captured Saturday by NATO forces in southern Afghanistan.

Update: ISAF has withdrawn their claim that the captured arms smuggler was al-Quds. See the follow-up post.

Funny how those dangerous states aren’t really dangerous enough to be deprived of Slim-Fast?