Latest news with #Stuxnet
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Yahoo
These are our favorite cyber books on hacking, espionage, crypto, surveillance, and more
In the last 30 years or so, cybersecurity has gone from being a niche specialty within the larger field of computer science, to an industry estimated to be worth more than $170 billion made of a globe-spanning community of hackers. In turn, the industry's growth, and high-profile hacks such as the 2015 Sony breach, the 2016 U.S. election hack and leak operations, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, and a seemingly endless list of Chinese government hacks, have made cybersecurity and hacking go mainstream. Pop culture has embraced hackers with hit TV shows like Mr. Robot, and movies like Leave The World Behind. But perhaps the most prolific medium for cybersecurity stories — both fiction and based on reality — are books. We have curated our own list of best cybersecurity books, based on the books we have read ourselves, and those that the community suggested on Mastodon and Bluesky. This list of books (in no particular order) will be periodically updated. , Kim Zetter The cyberattack coordinated by Israeli and U.S. government hackers known as Stuxnet, which damaged the centrifuges at the Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz, is almost certainly the most well-known hack in history. Because of its impact, its sophistication, and its sheer boldness, the attack captured the imagination not only of the cybersecurity community, but the larger public as well. Veteran journalist Kim Zetter tells the story of Stuxnet by treating the malware like a character to be profiled. To achieve that, Zetter interviews virtually all the main investigators who found the malicious code, analyzed how it worked, and figured out what it did. It's a must read for anyone who works in the cyber field, but it also serves as a great introduction to the world of cybersecurity and cyberespionage for regular folks. , Joseph Cox There haven't been any sting operations more daring and expansive than the FBI's Operation Trojan Shield, in which the feds ran a startup called Anom that sold encrypted phones to some of the worst criminals in the world, from high-profile drug smugglers to elusive mobsters. Those criminals thought they were using communication devices specifically designed to avoid surveillance. In reality, all their supposedly secure messages, pictures, and audio notes were being funneled to the FBI and its international law enforcement partners. 404 Media journalist Joseph Cox masterfully tells the story of Anom, with interviews with the sting operation's masterminds in the FBI, the developers and workers who ran the startup, and the criminals using the devices. , Cliff Stoll In 1986, astronomer Cliff Stoll was tasked with figuring out a discrepancy of $0.75 in his lab's computer network usage. At this point, the internet was mostly a network for government and academic institutions, and these organizations paid depending on how much time online they spent. Over the next year, Stoll meticulously pulled the threads of what seemed like a minor incident and ended up discovering one of the first-ever recorded cases of government cyberespionage, in this case carried out by Russia's KGB. Stoll not only solved the mystery, but he also chronicled it and turned it into a gripping spy thriller. It's hard to understate how important this book was. When it came out in 1989, hackers were barely a blip in the public's imagination. The Cuckoo's Egg showed young cybersecurity enthusiasts how to investigate a cyber incident, and it showed the wider public that stories about computer spies could be as exciting as those of real-life James Bond-like figures. , Kashmir Hill Face recognition has quickly gone from a technology that seemed all-powerful in movies and TV shows — but was actually janky and imprecise in real-life — to an important and relatively accurate tool for law enforcement in its daily operations. Longtime tech reporter Kashmir Hill tells the history of the technology through the rise of one of the controversial startups that made it mainstream: Clearview AI. Unlike other books that profile a startup, at least one of Clearview AI's founders partially engaged with Hill in an attempt to tell his own side of the story, but the journalist did a lot of work to fact-check — and in some cases debunk — some of what she heard from her company sources. Hill is the best positioned writer to tell the story of Clearview AI after first revealing its existence in 2020, which gives the book an engaging first-person narrative in some sections. , Joseph Menn Investigative cyber reporter Joseph Menn tells the incredible true back story of the influential Cult of the Dead Cow, one of the oldest hacking supergroups from the '80s and '90s, and how they helped to transform the early internet into what it has become today. The group's members include mainstream names, from tech CEOs and activists, some of whom went on to advise presidents and testify to lawmakers, to the security heroes who helped to secure much of the world's modern technologies and communications. Menn's book celebrates both what the hackers achieved, built, and broke along the way in the name of bettering cybersecurity, freedom of speech and expression, and privacy rights, and codifies the history of the early internet hacking scene as told by some of the very people who lived it. , Emily Crose 'Hack to the Future' is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the incredible and rich history of the hacking world and its many cultures. The book's author, Emily Crose, a hacker and security researcher by trade, covers some of the earliest hacks that were rooted in mischief, through to the modern day, with no detail spared on the decades in between. This book is deeply researched, well represented, and both part-history and part-celebration of the hacker community that morphed from the curious-minded misfits whistling into a telephone to score free long-distance calls, to becoming a powerful community wielding geopolitical power and featured prominently in mainstream culture. , Andy Greenberg The concept of cryptocurrency was born in 2008 a white paper published by a mysterious (and still unknown) figure called Satoshi Nakamoto. That laid the foundation for Bitcoin, and now, almost 20 years later, crypto has become its own industry and embedded itself in the global financial system. Crypto is also very popular among hackers, from low-level scammers, to sophisticated North Korean government spies and thieves. In this book, Wired's Andy Greenberg details a series of high-profile investigations that relied on following the digital money through the blockchain. Featuring interview with the investigators who worked on these cases, Greenberg tells the behind the scenes of the takedown of the pioneering dark web marketplace Silk Road, as well as the operations against dark web hacking marketplaces (Alpha Bay), and the 'world's largest' child sexual abuse website called 'Welcome to Video.' , Barton Gellman Over a decade ago, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew wide open the vast scale of the U.S. government's global surveillance operations by leaking thousands of top secret files to a handful of journalists. One of those journalists was Barton Gellman, a then-Washington Post reporter who later chronicled in his book Dark Mirror the inside story of Snowden's initial outreach and the process of verifying and reporting the cache of classified government files provided by the whistleblower. From secretly tapping the private fiber optic cables connecting the datacenters of some of the world's biggest companies, to the covert snooping on lawmakers and world leaders, the files detailed how the National Security Agency and its global allies were capable of spying on almost anyone in the world. Dark Mirror isn't just a look back at a time in history, but a first-person account of how Gellman investigated, reported, and broke new ground on some of the most influential and important journalism of the 21st century, and should be required reading for all cyber journalists. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
TechCrunch
5 days ago
- TechCrunch
These are our favorite cyber books on hacking, espionage, crypto, surveillance, and more
In the last 30 years or so, cybersecurity has gone from being a niche specialty within the larger field of computer science, to an industry estimated to be worth more than $170 billion made of a globe-spanning community of hackers. In turn, the industry's growth, and high-profile hacks such as the 2015 Sony breach, the 2016 U.S. election hack and leak operations, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, and a seemingly endless list of Chinese government hacks, have made cybersecurity and hacking go mainstream. Pop culture has embraced hackers with hit TV shows like Mr. Robot, and movies like Leave The World Behind. But perhaps the most prolific medium for cybersecurity stories — both fiction and based on reality — are books. We have curated our own list of best cybersecurity books, based on the books we have read ourselves, and those that the community suggested on Mastodon and Bluesky. This list of books (in no particular order) will be periodically updated. Countdown to Zero Day, Kim Zetter The cyberattack coordinated by Israeli and U.S. government hackers known as Stuxnet, which damaged the centrifuges at the Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz, is almost certainly the most well-known hack in history. Because of its impact, its sophistication, and its sheer boldness, the attack captured the imagination not only of the cybersecurity community, but the larger public as well. Veteran journalist Kim Zetter tells the story of Stuxnet by treating the malware like a character to be profiled. To achieve that, Zetter interviews virtually all the main investigators who found the malicious code, analyzed how it worked, and figured out what it did. It's a must read for anyone who works in the cyber field, but it also serves as a great introduction to the world of cybersecurity and cyberespionage for regular folks. Dark Wire, Joseph Cox There haven't been any sting operations more daring and expansive than the FBI's Operation Trojan Shield, in which the feds ran a startup called Anom that sold encrypted phones to some of the worst criminals in the world, from high-profile drug smugglers to elusive mobsters. Those criminals thought they were using communication devices specifically designed to avoid surveillance. In reality, all their supposedly secure messages, pictures, and audio notes were being funneled to the FBI and its international law enforcement partners. 404 Media journalist Joseph Cox masterfully tells the story of Anom, with interviews with the sting operation's masterminds in the FBI, the developers and workers who ran the startup, and the criminals using the devices. The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll In 1986, astronomer Cliff Stoll was tasked with figuring out a discrepancy of $0.75 in his lab's computer network usage. At this point, the internet was mostly a network for government and academic institutions, and these organizations paid depending on how much time online they spent. Over the next year, Stoll meticulously pulled the threads of what seemed like a minor incident and ended up discovering one of the first-ever recorded cases of government cyberespionage, in this case carried out by Russia's KGB. Stoll not only solved the mystery, but he also chronicled it and turned it into a gripping spy thriller. It's hard to understate how important this book was. When it came out in 1989, hackers were barely a blip in the public's imagination. The Cuckoo's Egg showed young cybersecurity enthusiasts how to investigate a cyber incident, and it showed the wider public that stories about computer spies could be as exciting as those of real-life James Bond-like figures. Your Face Belongs to Us, Kashmir Hill Face recognition has quickly gone from a technology that seemed all-powerful in movies and TV shows — but was actually janky and imprecise in real-life — to an important and relatively accurate tool for law enforcement in its daily operations. Longtime tech reporter Kashmir Hill tells the history of the technology through the rise of one of the controversial startups that made it mainstream: Clearview AI. Unlike other books that profile a startup, at least one of Clearview AI's founders partially engaged with Hill in an attempt to tell his own side of the story, but the journalist did a lot of work to fact-check — and in some cases debunk — some of what she heard from her company sources. Hill is the best positioned writer to tell the story of Clearview AI after first revealing its existence in 2020, which gives the book an engaging first-person narrative in some sections. Cult of the Dead Cow, Joseph Menn Investigative cyber reporter Joseph Menn tells the incredible true back story of the influential Cult of the Dead Cow, one of the oldest hacking supergroups from the '80s and '90s, and how they helped to transform the early internet into what it has become today. The group's members include mainstream names, from tech CEOs and activists, some of whom went on to advise presidents and testify to lawmakers, to the security heroes who helped to secure much of the world's modern technologies and communications. Menn's book celebrates both what the hackers achieved, built, and broke along the way in the name of bettering cybersecurity, freedom of speech and expression, and privacy rights, and codifies the history of the early internet hacking scene as told by some of the very people who lived it. Hack to the Future, Emily Crose 'Hack to the Future' is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the incredible and rich history of the hacking world and its many cultures. The book's author, Emily Crose, a hacker and security researcher by trade, covers some of the earliest hacks that were rooted in mischief, through to the modern day, with no detail spared on the decades in between. This book is deeply researched, well represented, and both part-history and part-celebration of the hacker community that morphed from the curious-minded misfits whistling into a telephone to score free long-distance calls, to becoming a powerful community wielding geopolitical power and featured prominently in mainstream culture. Tracers in the Dark, Andy Greenberg The concept of cryptocurrency was born in 2008 a white paper published by a mysterious (and still unknown) figure called Satoshi Nakamoto. That laid the foundation for Bitcoin, and now, almost 20 years later, crypto has become its own industry and embedded itself in the global financial system. Crypto is also very popular among hackers, from low-level scammers, to sophisticated North Korean government spies and thieves. In this book, Wired's Andy Greenberg details a series of high-profile investigations that relied on following the digital money through the blockchain. Featuring interview with the investigators who worked on these cases, Greenberg tells the behind the scenes of the takedown of the pioneering dark web marketplace Silk Road, as well as the operations against dark web hacking marketplaces (Alpha Bay), and the 'world's largest' child sexual abuse website called 'Welcome to Video.' Dark Mirror, Barton Gellman Over a decade ago, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew wide open the vast scale of the U.S. government's global surveillance operations by leaking thousands of top secret files to a handful of journalists. One of those journalists was Barton Gellman, a then-Washington Post reporter who later chronicled in his book Dark Mirror the inside story of Snowden's initial outreach and the process of verifying and reporting the cache of classified government files provided by the whistleblower. From secretly tapping the private fiber optic cables connecting the datacenters of some of the world's biggest companies, to the covert snooping on lawmakers and world leaders, the files detailed how the National Security Agency and its global allies were capable of spying on almost anyone in the world. Dark Mirror isn't just a look back at a time in history, but a first-person account of how Gellman investigated, reported, and broke new ground on some of the most influential and important journalism of the 21st century, and should be required reading for all cyber journalists.
Yahoo
16-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Someone once hacked Iran's nuclear program using AC/DC songs on full blast
Iran's nuclear scientists and enrichment facilities have been subject to a lot of harassment, threats, and Israeli car bombs. While some of the attacks against the nuclear programs were deadly, others were designed to destroy enrichment equipment. Then, there are the computer viruses. In 2012, a handful of scientists at more than one of the Iranian regime's nuclear facilities were (probably) surprised to find a virus had taken over their computers, a virus that caused their computers to turn on at full volume, blasting the arena rock of iconic metal legends AC/DC. The scientists either aren't AC/DC fans, or the music was just a big surprise to anyone asleep inside the Fordo mountain nuclear enrichment site. Since Western music is illegal in the Islamic Republic, the scientists might have been trying to avoid either prosecution or a really good time. According to al-Arabiya's English-language site, a letter from Iran's atomic scientists was sent to F-Secure Security Labs, a Finnish internet security company, begging for help with the latest computer virus. 'I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom. There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC.' The scientist who wrote the email emphasized that he was not a computer technician and didn't know the full extent of what the virus did, but he was apparently familiar with Australian metal bands. This isn't the first time Iranian nuclear sites have been hit with computer viruses in an effort to disrupt the nation's attempts to build nuclear weapons nuclear programs. In 2010, a jointly made U.S.-Israeli virus called 'Stuxnet' devastated Iran's uranium enrichment centers and computer software infrastructure without ever playing 'Highway to Hell.' Read: The Stuxnet virus represented a significant leap in virus technology, marking the first time a virus caused physical damage to systems. It sabotaged centrifuges, sent false data to operators, altered the code that regulated automated industrial processes, and infected USB drives to spread to other air-gapped nuclear sites or systems. It was a dirty deed, done dirt cheap; one that shook Iran all night long. Playing 'Thunderstruck' at full volume in the middle of the night, while annoying, certainly isn't as destructive as the Stuxnet virus. That such malicious logic (as it's known to military IT professionals) could penetrate Iran's nuclear program so soon after the Stuxnet debacle goes to show how vulnerable the program really was. Or used to be, if multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrators did their job. It's probably for the best that Iran ultimately reached a deal, even if it was only for a short time. We Are The Mighty is a celebration of military service, with a mission to entertain, inform, and inspire those who serve and those who support them. We are made by and for current service members, veterans, spouses, family members, and civilians who want to be part of this community. Keep up with the best in military culture and entertainment: subscribe to the We Are The Mighty newsletter. 'Day of the Jackal' author Frederick Forsyth dies at age 86 That time a Marine general led a fictional Iran against the US military – and won Sig Sauer's P320 banned by Chicago Police Department and other law enforcement agencies
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
A Reporter's Trail From a Bush-Era Cyberattack to Trump's Strike on Iran
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. Sixteen years before President Trump sent B-2 bombers armed with 30,000-pound bunker-busting weapons to blast into Fordo and Natanz, Iran's two major uranium enrichment centers, there was another American and Israeli assault with the same goal: Destroy Tehran's ability to produce nuclear fuel. But that attack, which started at the end of the Bush administration and spilled into the Obama era, wasn't the subject of wall-to-wall news coverage, or of public fears about triggering another war in the Middle East. It was a covert program, launched from the White House Situation Room where the two presidents reviewed diagrams of the enrichment site at Natanz and weighed the risks of releasing a sophisticated cyberweapon to speed up and slow down the centrifuges spinning deep underground, sending them out of control. The cyberweapon was given a name, Stuxnet, and the operation had a code name inside America's intelligence agencies: Olympic Games. It was designed as an alternative to blowing up the enrichment operations the old-fashioned way and risking a war. For years, it looked like a success — until the code was inadvertently made public and the Iranians, angry about the sabotage, began enriching uranium on a scale that was bigger than ever before. Uncovering the details, from President Bush's first orders to the days the code broke loose, plunged The New York Times into 15 years of even deeper reporting on Iran's nuclear infrastructure. Ultimately, it helped position The Times to cover the military gamble that President Trump took last month and its aftermath. The United States has never formally acknowledged Olympic Games; even today, most of the participants are barred from talking about it. But through our reporting from 2010 to 2012, readers learned details of the operation. And those revelations triggered new waves of coverage, as well as arguments over how long, and how effectively, Stuxnet had set the Iranians back. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
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First Post
25-06-2025
- Politics
- First Post
American bombings don't end the Iranian nuclear question; they simply reset the timeline
Iran is unlikely to abandon its ambitions altogether. If anything, the strikes have confirmed to Tehran that the West's assurances and the IAEA's frameworks offer no lasting protection from aggression read more On the night of June 21, 2025, the United States dropped more than just bombs; it dropped a signal to the world: 'Deterrence is out; denial is back'. In a stunning return to muscular pre-emption, 'Operation Midnight Hammer' unleashed a multi-theatre assault on Iran's nuclear facilities. The Pentagon confirmed that B-2 bombers, GBU-57 bunker busters, and Tomahawk missiles hammered Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth called the strikes 'devastating.' The Trump White House called it 'a necessary reset.' What it really was: a test case for the nuclear age's most unsettling question: can pre-emption ever replace deterrence? STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD These bombings represent the most significant military action against Iran's nuclear infrastructure since the Stuxnet sabotage of 2010 and the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020. In the wake of these events, a question arises that transcends tactical military calculations: What does this mean for nuclear stability, and can classical strategic theory still explain such actions? Enter Kenneth Waltz American political scientist Kenneth Waltz's influential 1981 Adelphi papers (Number 171, IISS), The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, offers a critical lens through which to assess these developments. At its core, Waltz's argument is counterintuitive when he suggests that nuclear weapons, by their very destructiveness, are stabilising forces. States that possess them, he underscores, become more cautious and more focused on survival, not aggression. In this light, the pre-emptive strikes on Iran's nuclear programme reflect not the irrationality of Iran's intentions but the persistent anxiety of its adversaries, who remain unconvinced by Waltz's atomic optimism. Now contrast that with the world's reaction to Iran's slow but deliberate march to nuclear latency. Iran has not conducted a test nor declared a bomb. Yet it has paid the price of a state that has cyber sabotage, assassinations, economic warfare, and now, a kinetic campaign of pre-emptive strikes. Waltz foresaw these military actions in his work: 'A country with nuclear weapons may be tempted to destroy the nascent force of a hostile country. This would be preventive war, a war launched against a weak country before it can become disturbingly strong'. This aptly describes the June 2025 strikes, which were not in response to an imminent Iranian nuclear breakout but rather to the potential of Iran nearing weaponization thresholds, allegedly within 'weeks,' according to leaked intelligence assessments. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The Enduring Logic of Nuclear Self-Help Iran's nuclear ambitions are not new, but their persistence, despite IAEA inspections, international sanctions, cyber operations, and now overt strikes, signals something deeper: 'the logic of self-help in an anarchic international order and the most important way in which states must help themselves is by providing for their security.' Waltz further argued that nations seek nuclear weapons not to conquer but to deter. For Tehran, though not a 'clean (Shia Islamic) regime', surrounded by hostile Sunni Arab states, a nuclear-armed Israel, and an unpredictable US, nuclear weapons represent the ultimate insurance policy. This logic is only reinforced by repeated external interventions. Every act of sabotage or bombing deepens Iran's belief that sovereignty and survival require a credible second-strike capability. Waltz anticipated such scenarios, noting that feelings of insecurity may lead to arms races that subordinate civil needs to military necessities. In other words, strikes may delay Iran's programme, but they cannot erase its rationale. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Deterrence Vs Denial: The Israeli and US Dilemma Waltz's optimism rested on the assumption that nuclear deterrence works, even between rivals. He pointed to the Cold War standoff, India-Pakistan stability post-1971, and the cautious behaviour of nuclear-armed China. Yet the Israeli and American leaderships reject this logic vis-à-vis Iran, arguing that Tehran is a uniquely ideological actor that cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons. This assumption that deterrence fails in the face of religious or revolutionary zeal has long animated Israeli security doctrine. The Begin Doctrine, which justified the bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor ( Operation Opera, 1981), has since evolved into a broader strategic policy of 'nuclear denial,' later seen in Syria ( Operation Orchard, 2007) and now Iran (2025). The Trump administration has reinforced this approach, dismantling JCPOA-era diplomatic channels and embracing direct action as a preferred mode of containment. Yet Waltz warned that denying nuclear capabilities through force may backfire. States struck in their developmental phase are likely to go underground, accelerate covert R&D, and insulate their programmes from external disruption. Iran's nuclear infrastructure is already highly decentralised, hardened, and increasingly indigenized. The strikes may delay timelines, but they may also erode remaining restraint within the Iranian system. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Can Waltz Stil****l Be Right? Amid the ongoing escalations, the US declared an abrupt ceasefire on June 24, but the truce unravelled almost immediately. That prompted Trump sharply criticizing both Tehran and Tel Aviv for engaging in pounding each other. This reflexive escalation somehow reflects Kenneth Waltz's caution that, in unstable environments, 'uncertainty and miscalculation cause wars', particularly when deterrence is absent or deliberately denied. As Waltz observed, 'Miscalculation causes wars. One side expects victory at an affordable price, while the other side hopes to avoid defeat.' In this case, the absence of a mutual deterrent framework, given Iran's nuclear vulnerability and Israel's overwhelming military superiority in the Middle East, has led to a situation where ceasefires are fragile and 'political logic may lead a country to attack even in the absence of an expectation of military victory.' Waltz's analysis helps us understand why temporary truces, without structural stability or reciprocal deterrence, often collapse under the weight of mutual suspicion and unbalanced coercive power. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD In another critical respect, Waltz's argument retains its relevance: nuclear weapons discipline states more often than not. Nuclear-armed states do not launch wars against each other easily. Despite occasional rhetorical escalation, North Korea, India-Pakistan, and even China-U.S. relations have remained within conventional bounds. The fear of mutual destruction alters strategic behaviour. Iran, even at the threshold stage, has shown such restraint. It has not retaliated with full-scale war even after provocations like General Soleimani's assassination (2020) or the latest June 2025 air strikes. Tehran's response so far has been limited to cyber operations and asymmetric proxy mobilization, reflecting the very caution Waltz predicted nuclearization would produce. Conclusion The June 21 bombings do not end the Iranian nuclear question; they simply reset the timeline. Iran is unlikely to abandon its ambitions altogether. If anything, the strikes have confirmed to Tehran that the West's assurances and the IAEA's frameworks offer no lasting protection from aggression. In Waltzian terms, the more vulnerable a state feels, the more rational a nuclear deterrent becomes. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD ** As the region braces for Iranian retaliation, direct or through proxies, the world must confront the enduring dilemma Waltz posed: Is stability better served by containment and deterrence or by denial and pre-emption? In 2025, the answer remains a matter of contention. But the costs of the latter regional escalation, erosion of norms, and nuclear latency are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Animesh Roul is Executive Director of the Society for the Study of Peace and Conflict (SSPC), New Delhi. He specialises in counter-terrorism and strategic affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost's views. **
