Alexis C. Madrigal

New details about the Stuxnet virus suggest, quite clearly, that Iranian facilities were its target. A paper by the Symantec researchers who've been reverse-engineering the highly sophisticated attack software to find out what it could do to industrial systems indicates that centrifuges were the likely target, reports Kim Zetter at Wired's Threat Level.

So, let's walk through what Stuxnet was built to do once it used its various tools and skeleton keys to get inside its target system(s). The virus set itself up between the control systems and frequency converters that are used to control the speed of motors. From that position, it could secretly control motors without alerting anyone to its presence. That is, if the factory had the precise configuration it was looking for; Stuxnet would only go into attack mode if the facility had more than 33 frequency converter drives manufactured by Iran's Fararo Paya or Finland's Vacon.

By itself, that piece of information suggests that Iran was a target of the attack, but the evidence gets more detailed. Stuxnet targets only very high-frequency drives from the two companies. While the centrifuges used to enrich uranium are not the only possible uses for such drives, they sure do fit the bill for that activity. In fact, drives of that speed would be regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission if you tried to export them.

But Stuxnet wasn't designed to destroy the drives or the facility. Its preferred sabotage method was much more subtle. Over long periods of time -- weeks in some cases -- the worm would alter the speed of the motors, pushing it up and down. That precision disruption would, in turn, hurt the purity of any centrifuges' output without calling attention to itself.

"It wanted to lie there and wait and continuously change how a process worked over a long period of time to change the end results," Symantec researcher Liam O Murchu told Zetter.

Put it this way: if Stuxnet wasn't designed to sabotage an Iranian uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, it's hard to imagine what it might have targeted.

You've heard by now that Facebook will have a new messaging service that combines your email, text messages, and Facebook communications. The joke on Twitter is that Facebook just launched Google Wave, the ill-fated "better than email" experiment Google recently killed off.

As for me, I'll admit it: I don't get it. The stated purpose is to make sending messages to people easier, but their solution seems more, not less, complicated to me.

That said, I'm trying to hold off on forming opinion for two reasons. First, I want to test drive the system before dismissing it. Gmail Priority Inbox was a serious improvement to my email workflow and I don't think I could have anticipated that just from a description of how it worked. Second, I don't think that this service is designed with me in mind. I think it was built for the way college-age and younger kids use Facebook.

A few years ago, I remember a Facebook engineer explaining to me how crazily popular wall posting was for high schoolers. Based on how rarely my post-college friends used that part of the site, I could hardly believe it. But he was right, and something similar may be going on in messaging.

One stunning fact came out of Facebook's data crunching about the four billion messages that people send each day through the service. The top three subjects were, in order: none, Hi!, and Yo. I'm just guessing here but that says to me that many of Facebook's heaviest messagers are young to very young. Perhaps this messaging update is supposed to solve their problems, which are difficult to imagine.

Before the word pharmaceutical, before Merck and Viagra, before the Food and Drug Administration, there were always people selling The Cure for What Ails You.

Taylor's Oil of Life! Your English Female Bitters (for maid or matron)! Dr. Shoop's Tonic! And of course Dr. Pierce's Favorite Prescription!

All of these elixirs sit preserved in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History patent medicine collection, which chronicles the rise and fall of the over-the-counter's precursor from its early British roots through the rise of modern medicine in the early 20th century.

Patent medicine was the name given to the various concoctions mixed up by post-apothecary, pre-chemist mixologists who sometimes pretended to be doctors. Many included booze, lots of booze. One doctor made the statistical claim that "more alcohol is consumed in this country in patent medicines than is dispensed in a legal way by licensed liquor vendors," beers excepted. Others had morphine, opium, cocaine, heroin, cannabis, or even actanilide, a precursor of acetaminophen. All contained strange combinations of natural ingredients that managed to impart a distinctive smell and taste and brand to each potion. Dr. Pierce's Favorite Prescription, for example, contained lady's slipper root, black cohosh root, unicorn root, blue cohosh root, oregon grape root, and viburnum.

Recently, Diane Wendt, Associate Curator in the Division of Medicine and Science, gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of the collection. Three themes emerged during our conversations that make the collection so fascinating and important.

First, patent medicines are a testament to the long and friendly relationship between marketing and medicine in the United States. Early tonic makers were pioneers in outdoor advertising, traveling sales, and what we would call advertorial now. They were experts at working the newspapers to legitimize themselves, as revealed by Samuel Hopkins Adams in his massive expose for Collier's Magazine, "The great American fraud." They were some of the first brands to extend beyond we would know now as brand building.

Second, they speak to this deep American desire for the cure-all in a bottle. The substances have certainly changed -- some of the new ones even work! -- but the consumer desire to be made whole and healthy through simply buying something hasn't. These bottles represent the echinacea, creatine, acai, or fen-phen of their day. Some were harmless, others not so much, but all made it seem as if a better life was just a pill (or swig) away.

Third, they are just beautiful. Imagine if the cold and flu aisle of the CVS looked like these bottles. They seem to mark a high water mark in typography and offset printing. They've aged incredibly well, too.

Eventually, regular medicine got better and the the Food and Drug Administration's regulations got tougher and scathing exposes like Adams' depressed the popularity of patent medicines. By then, though, the American consumer had already been exposed and it was just a matter of time before a nearly endless supply of new health miracles appeared to worm their money out of their wallets.

Everyone has an opinion about Facebook's design, and how it should change to fit their needs better. But not everyone could actually remake the page from the ground up. The Washington Post asked Bruce Mau Design, a major and innovative firm, to take a crack at remaking your Facebook page.

I have three quick thoughts here.

One, it looks a lot like the new Windows Phone 7 operating system. Second, when we read what the firm had to say, you realize how difficult Facebook's task really is. So, it's easy for Bruce Mau Design to present a grid that only shows, "the people you most want to keep in touch with and care about," but it's very difficult to automatically figure that out. Instead, you've got to deploy some ranking algorithm that will undoubtedly put people in there that are not your (as they put it) "real friends." Third, they emphasize getting in touch through outside services. So, there is no "Facebook message" or "email" on their contact box on the right. Instead the options are Call, Video, SMS. I find that a fascinating choice, an implicit accusation that Facebook messaging and/or wall posting is somehow deficient. I heard that criticism over and over last week after I wrote a response to Zadie Smith. At least for some people, Facebook messaging -- though it's not technically different from email -- doesn't work as well for them. Perhaps that discontent is legitimately widespread, and part of the reason Facebook is expected to announce an email service today.

Here's a surprising datapoint from the Newsweek-Daily Beast tie-up: Newsweek.com had roughly double The Daily Beast's traffic. The Beast seems like the big digital part of the deal, but it's actually the other way around.

That's no knock on The Beast, which is a great publication. They were fighting an uphill battle for brand recognition in an environment where it's exceptionally difficult to build loyalty. And that's one reason that I'm not as down on the deal as everyone else seems to be.

I have a theory (more like a hypothesis) that the print brands created during the 20th century are special. They reached a level of national awareness and cohesion that I don't think will be equaled. A simpler way to put this: they knew what they did and so did everyone else. Even when they go online, they are trusted and known in ways that other sites -- even well-funded, high-profile ones -- can't match.

While Newsweek.com's people certainly earned their traffic, as one disgruntled (soon-to-be former) employee noted, they were also standing on the shoulders of decades of other reporters' hard work. Maybe publications have to be grandfathered in. So, take a website (The Beast) with a ton of editorial energy and marry it to a shaky, but salvageable print brand and maybe you're on to something.

I've started to wonder whether one can really build a new destination publication -- one that people bookmark and return to, or type into a browser bar -- that can reach millions. I know there are counterexamples -- HuffPo, Gawker, GigaOm, TechCrunch -- but not many. It's worth noting that these successful standalone online publications all launched in 2006 or before. That is to say, they got in before the social media tidal wave hit the beaches. Even The Awl, which is a singular media property if ever there was one, has taken years to get to half a million unique visitors a month. And who knows how many of those people go in the front door thinking, "I wonder what's on TheAwl.com?"

This is largely intuition here, but people just don't seem to use the Internet that way anymore. If they are the type of person who goes to a predetermined set of sites, they already have their list. And if they do frequent new sites and publications, they get there through social media. Relative to even a few years ago, it seems harder to capture dedicated readers beyond very small niches. Obviously, this has major implications for my own career trajectory, and those of all writers.

That's why I'm intrigued by the way Meebo is opening up the Web for Foursquare-style check-ins. From what I can tell, it's different from a social bookmarking site (like Delicious) because you check into domains (TheAtlantic.com) not individual stories. That's a very different kind of sharing than the linky kind that forms the core of information flow on the web. It's more about the brand than it is about an individual story. If such a thing took off, perhaps people would begin to think of online media sites as the kind of cohesive publications their print forebears were.

On the other hand, maybe cohesion is overrated (not to mention expensive). Maybe it doesn't really matter whether people come to your site exclusively via links their friends share or Redditors upvote. But if it doesn't, we media people are really going to have to rethink what we do even more deeply than we have. How would one create a coreless publication?

The United States Geological Survey uses satellite photos for all kinds of research into agriculture, weather, climate change, geology, and more. But those same photos are sometimes just stunningly beautiful. So, the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center put together a gallery of its most aesthetically appealing images. You're looking at one of them here. That's cloud formations over the Aleutians Islands off the coast of Alaska. The color variations derive from the shape and size of the water droplets that form the clouds.

Over the last two years, the online restaurant reservations site OpenTable has outperformed all other IPOs. I sure wouldn't have guessed that. Chalk that up to a soft market for IPOs and a business that's shown impressive revenue growth. OpenTable gets paid by restaurants when you book through their service.

In the early days after its debut in May 29, the company traded at about 28 dollars a share. It closed Thursday over $65. But now the short-sellers are circling the company, according to a report in Bloomberg. They're betting that the company can't continue to grow while keeping up its profit margins.

The good news for you: more and more restaurants are signing up to work with OpenTable, making it easier to book a date online. At last count, 15,246 restaurants used the company's system.

Close of Business is a new video series that we're trying out. The idea is simple: at 5 p.m. (or thereabouts), we post a quick video summarizing the top three news stories of the day. Some of them we'll have written about; others will just be what people were talking about on the Internet.

Links to stories mentioned in this video:

Samsung Tab reviews: Gizmodo ["a pocketable train wreck"]; Walt Mossberg ["iPad's first real rival"]; David Pogue ["beautiful and expensive"]

Twitter Plus iTunes Ping is a Non-Starter [ReadWriteWeb]

Hubble's Replacement is in Trouble. What Happened? [The Atlantic]

See more video from The Atlantic Technology Channel.

Yesterday, NASA announced that its premiere next-generation astrophysics mission, the James Webb Space Telescope, is overbudget and behind schedule.

The total cost of the launching the telescope may end up at $6.5 billion, the agency reported at a press briefing, a far cry from the $1 billion initially projected.

A special report found that the mission, on which a generation of scientists are counting, has had serious managerial problems. The project, the report bluntly stated, "was simply not executable within the budgeted resources."

In order to keep building the Webb and launch it in 2015, the rest of NASA may have to warp to fit its needs. That means other projects won't be funded or will be scaled back. That's not ideal, but it might be the best choice that NASA's got.

Let's be clear about why the mission is important: the Webb is the next Hubble. It will extend human understanding in many of the ways that everyone's favorite space telescope did. We'll be able to see farther back in time, learn new things about the universe, and possibly resolve liquid water on a nearby habitable exoplanets. The Webb, as Lee Billings put it in his definitive piece on the telescope, is "the key to almost every big question that astronomers hope to answer in the coming decades."

Not to mention that the Webb is the telescope that will generate the images that will adorn your desktop. If there are still Time magazine covers in 2015, the Webb's work will cover one.

So, what happened? How did such a phenomenally important project end up in such a predicament? Billings provides three key explanations, which I'll excerpt here.

First, the metrics on which it would be measured "mission-ready" changed. After a few notable failures of "faster, better, cheaper" missions around the turn of the millennium, NASA went back to its more rigorous construction and testing protocols. That pushed the Webb's cost up.

Second, because scientists all knew the Webb was the premiere astrophysics mission for an entire generation, they wanted the telescope to be able to address their own particular issues. As Peter Stockman of the Space Telescope Science Institute told Billings, "Everyone fears it will be the last opportunity in their scientific lifetime." Like bloated software, suddenly a telescope designed to do a few things well ends up with carrying a bunch of other instruments.

Third, the capabilities astronomers wanted from the Webb required deploying new and unproven technologies. You can't always tell how smoothly their development is going to go until it's too late. Not only that, but the JWST would have to work flawlessly from the get-go. It's positioning farther away from Earth than Hubble (four times farther than the moon, actually) means that repair missions would be out of the question.

Chances are that the Webb will get built and fly. There's just too much and too many riding on its success. But in an era of tight budgets, other programs seem likely to suffer. NASA has elevated the mission from a "project" to a "program," which means that it'll be managed from the agency's central offices. But that might not prevent the Webb from being, as a Nature headline called it, "The telescope that ate astronomy."

Images: 1. The Webb's primary mirror; 2. A full-scale model of the Webb.

No one in media can quite believe how much the Internet has changed our profession. Sometimes it seems as if none of the old rules apply. That's one reason it's great to work at a longstanding magazine; it forces you to take a longer view.

In honor of our 153rd birthday, which we celebrated this week, I'm posting this 12-step guide to editing a magazine, which is tacked up in the hallway here at The Watergate. Judging from the type and tone, I'd say it's from the middle of the 20th century, but I have no real information on its provenance.

Not that you need to know its context to appreciate it. Take its datelessness as a kind of timelessness. Every rule on this list still matters in one way or another.

I particularly like number eight, which states, "Follow the news. Remember that timeliness means being on time, not before the time." Number six is a good reminder, too: "Be careful about expenses. Calculate the cost of each number. Remember that our margin is always narrow."

In any case, enjoy. Print it out and pin it above your desk. Remember that the fundamentals of making a good publication endure.

Here's a transcription of the whole list, for search engines' sakes:

1. When in doubt, let a manuscript go back.
2. Always remember that the fastidious element in the Atlantic audience is its permanent and valuable core.
3. Don't over-edit. You will often estrange an author by too elaborate a revision, and furthermore, take away from the magazine the variety of style that keeps it fresh.
4. Avoid mistakes of fact. If a paper is statistical, question the author closely.
5. The Atlantic has always been recognized as belonging to the Liberal wing. Be liberal, but be radical only as a challenge to be answered.
6. Be careful about expenses. Calculate the cost of each number. Remember that our margin is always narrow.
7. A sound editor never has a three-months' full supply in his cupboard. When you over-buy, you narrow your future choice.
8. Follow the news. Remember that timeliness means being on time, not before the time.
9. Interesting papers on conscience, personal religion, theory of living, are always precious. The Atlantic has three dimensions -- breadth of interest, height of interest, depth of interest. Individual personal philosophy always adds to the depth.
10. Keep all suggestions in the Black Book, so that they can be followed up.
11. Humor is precious and correspondingly hard to find. Most humor that reaches us is merely jocularity, and it is well to be jocular only when really funny.
12. Quick decisions -- except in poetry. Collect groups of verse and make a selection after several readings.

Many web startups begin without a business model. They have a cool service or a sticky blog -- or merely an *idea* that people might like.

Airbnb is not one of those startups. The site allows people to rent out their rooms or houses as vacation rentals, turning every place into a prospective microhotel. Their business model is simple: they handle the transaction, taking a 6-12 percent cut on each booking. In other words, they might not be a brick-and-mortar company, but they built in people paying them money from the beginning.

And that might be one reason that the company just grabbed $7 million in a Series A venture capital round led by Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners, as Jenna Wortham notes in the New York Times.

Airbnb has come a long way since it was founded in August of 2008 by Joe Gebbia and some friends out of their shared apartment in San Francisco's SoMA district. Joe and I ran in similar circles in San Francisco, and I remember when he first dropped the idea on me. At the time, it didn't seem like the most serious business venture. There was already Couchsurfing.com, which seemed to provide the ability for people to travel around the world on the cheap staying with strangers. Why would anyone need Airbnb? Would thousands of people really want strangers staying with them?

But Joe knew he was on to something. They depersonalized the process a little, created a slick interface, earned a ton of media mentions, and got a very hip core group to start renting out their places.

As the site has grown -- it now has rooms in 8,000 cities -- I realize that I should have done the math. Airbnb told the Times that they've had more than 560,000 nights booked through their service in the last six months. Even at an average price of just $50, and at the bottom of their booking fee scale, that's almost $1.7 million in revenue. Let's say you start a content site that tries to monetize your audience with ads. Unless you're a premiere brand, you're only going to get a few dollars per thousand ad impressions. So, to generate $1.7 million in revenue, you'd need well over 300,000,000 pageviews.

The math is easy for consumers, too. Say you're going to New York -- just try to find a hotel for less than $150. But if you head to Airbnb, you can find dozens of places under $100, including a bunch for less than $50. Most of the accommodation options are just rooms in people's apartments, but so what? It's cheap! For room renters it makes sense because you're monetizing a previously worthless aset.

Of course, Airbnb still faces a lot of challenges. There's always the danger that something bad will happen to someone who rents a room, touching off a Craiglist-killer-like panic. Or that hotels lobby states or cities to ban the kind of short-term rentals that Airbnb depends on. But for now, they've got cash to grow and a mission to profitably disintermediate the hotel business.

Image: brixton/Flickr.

Close of Business is a new video series that we're trying out. The idea is simple: at 5 p.m. (or thereabouts), we post a quick video summarizing the top three news stories of the day. Some of them we'll have written about; others will just be what people were talking about on the Internet.

Links to stories mentioned in this video:

Nintendo Attempting to Trademark "It's On Like Donkey Kong" [CrunchGear]

Google Gives All Employees Surprise $1,000 Cash and 10% Raise [Silicon Alley Insider]

Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 35% in Third Quarter; Smartphone Sales Increased 96% [Gartner]

See more video from The Atlantic Technology Channel.