Stuxnet: A 'cybernetic weapon of mass destruction'

Check out Ralph Langner's rather harrowing TED Talk about the Stuxnet computer worm:

When first discovered in 2010, the Stuxnet computer worm posed a baffling puzzle. Beyond its unusually high level of sophistication loomed a more troubling mystery: its purpose. Ralph Langner and team helped crack the code that revealed this digital warhead's final target -- and its covert origins. In a fascinating look inside cyber-forensics, he explains how.

Ralph Langner is a German control system security consultant. He has received worldwide recognition for his analysis of the Stuxnet malware.

Watch and listen

Some recent podcasts and videos worth checking out:

• James Hughes interviews neuroscientist David Eagleman
• The latest RadioLab episode is pure win: Lost & found
• Cynthia Breazel gives a TED talk on the Rise of personal robots
• Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett discuss the meaning of life and death

TED Talks: Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer

This is another remarkable TED talk -- fascinating, incredibly informative and not without controversy. I'm overjoyed to hear an expert from IBM put forth a theory of mind that tries to address the problem of how the brain projects a representation of the universe to a subjective observer. I'm fairly convinced that his framing of the issue will yield some positive results.

Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved in fairly short order. He argues that mental illness, memory and perception are all made of neurons and electric signals -- and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain's 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.

Singularity Summit 2008 videos now available online

The first batch of Singularity Summit 2008 videos are now available online, and the SIAI says there's more to come.