Jon Mitchell writes:

Yesterday, when I wrote about the social media campaign that Israel was waging alongside its attack on Hamas, I thought it was interesting. I thought it was a straightforward and effective way of presenting the cause behind the attack. Whether you thought the offensive was right or wrong, you had to admit the propaganda's effectiveness.

Well, day two has changed matters. The IDF Blog now has atrocious gamification badges with points and rewards for sharing the content to social media. For example, if you visit the site 10 times, you get the "Consistent" badge. If you search the blog multiple times, you're promoted to "Research Officer." Yes, Israel has gamified war. This is absolutely horrendous.

RT report.

According to Debka, the trusted member of President Ahmadinejad's crew took with him to the States two suitcases full of "the most complete and updated footage" that US intelligence has ever been offered of Iran's top secret military facilities and other related structures, something the site claims to include "exclusive interior shots of the Natanz nuclear complex, the Fordo underground enrichment plant, the Parchin military complex and the small Amir-Abad research reactor in Tehran."

Haaretz report.

A monitoring device disguised as a rock exploded last month when Iranian troops near Fordow nuclear plant disturbed it, the Sunday Times reported, citing Western intelligence sources.

According to the report, Iran's Revolutionary Guards were on patrol last month to check terminals connecting data and telephone links at the underground nuclear enrichment plant, when they saw the rock and tried to move it.

"Iranian experts who examined the scene of the explosion found the remains of a device capable of intercepting data from computers at the plant, where uranium is being enriched in centrifuges," said the report, "It is feared a significant source of intelligence may have been lost for the West."

Robert Wright in the Atlantic.

President Obama had been doing an admirable job in recent weeks of keeping the chances of war with Iran from rising, notably in rebuffing Bibi Netanyahu's efforts to get America to lower the threshold for a military attack. But on Friday the chances of war rose, and that's Obama's fault.

A government official said the U.S. will remove the "terrorist" label from the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, a group that got onto the list of terrorist organizations decades ago by, among other things, killing Americans.

Guardian report.

Two leading computer security laboratories -- Kaspersky Lab and Symantec -- have been studying a series of powerful cyberweapons used against targets including the Iranian nuclear programme and Lebanese banks accused of laundering money for Iran and its ally Hezbollah. They are now convinced that all were probably created by a national government or governments working together.