Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40
Joined 2022-11-02 Message
Incoming links: Five Eyes
Home Updated 2026-10-18
Check out: **OurBigBook.com**, the best way to publish your scientific knowledge. It's an open source note taking system that can publish from lightweight markup files in your computer both to a multi-user mind melding dynamic website, or as a static website. It's like Wikipedia + GitHub + Stack Overflow + Obsidian mashed up. Source code: **github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook**.
Sponsor me to work on this project. For 1M USD I will quit my job and work on OurBigBook full time for three more years to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. Status: ~44k / 400k USD. At 4M USD I retire/tenure and work on open STEM forever. How to donate: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
I first quit my job 1st June 2024 to work on the project for 1 year after I reached my initial 100k goal mostly via a 1000 Monero donation.
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous. More rationale: Section "OurBigBook.com"
Explaining things is my superpower, e.g. I was top user #17 on Stack Overflow in 2025[ref][ref] and I have a few 1k+ star educational GitHub repositories[ref][ref][ref][ref]. Now I want to bring that level of awesomeness to masters level Mathematics and Physics. But I can't do it alone! So I created OurBigBook.com to allow everyone to work together towards the perfect book of everything.
My life's goal is to bring hardcore university-level STEM open educational content to all ages. Sponsor me at github.com/sponsors/cirosantilli starting from 1$/month so I can work full time on it. Further information: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". Achieving what I call "free gifted education" is my Nirvana.
This website is written in OurBigBook Markup, and it is published on both cirosantilli.com (static website), outbigbook.om/cirosantilli (multi-user OurBigBook Web instance) and github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io-md (censorship resistant Markdown render directly on github.com). Its source code is located at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io and also at
cirosantilli.com/_dir and it is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted.To contact Ciro, see: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". He likes to talk with random people of the Internet.
GitHub | Stack Overflow | LinkedIn | YouTube | Twitter | Wikipedia | Zhihu 知乎 | Weibo 微博 | Other accounts
Besides that, I'm also a freedom of speech slacktivist and recreational cyclist. I like Chinese traditional music and classic Brazilian pop. Opinions are my own, but they could be yours too. Tax the rich.
Let's create an educational system with:
- no distinction between university and high school, students just go as fast as they can to what they really want without stupid university entry exams
- fully open source learning material
- on-demand examinations that anyone can easily take without prerequisites
- granular entry selection only for space in specific laboratories or participation in specific novel research projects
I offer:
- online private tutoring for:
- any STEM university course
- passionate younger STEM students (any age) who want to learn university level material and beyond. Can your kid be the next Fields Medalist or Nobel Prize winner? I'm here to help, especially if you are filthy rich! I focus moving students forward as fast as they want on and on producing useful novel tutorials and results
Let your child be my Emile, and me be their Adolfo Amidei, and let's see how far they can go! I will help take your child:and achieve their ambitious STEM goals!- into the best universities
- into the best PhD programs
- educational consulting for institutions looking to improve their STEM courses
- do you know that course or teacher that consistently gets bad reviews every year? I'll work with the teacher to turn the problem around!
- are you looking to create a consistent open educational resources offering to increase your institutions internationally visibility? I can help with that too.
My approach is to:For minors, parents are welcome to join video calls, and all interactions with the student will be recorded and made available to parents.
- propose interesting research projects. The starting point is always deciding the end goal: Section "Backward design"
- learn what is needed to do the project together with the student(s)
- publish any novel results or tutorials/tools produced freely licensed online, and encourage the student to do the same (Section "Let students learn by teaching", digital garden)
I have a proven track of explaining complex concepts in an interesting and useful way. I work for the learner. Teaching statement at: Section "How to teach". Pricing to be discussed. Contact details at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli".
I am particularly excited about pointing people to the potential next big things, my top picks these days are:I am also generally interested in:
- quantum computing
- AGI research, in particular AI code generation, automated theorem proving and robotics
- assorted molecular biology technologies
- 20th century physics, notably AMO and condensed matter
- the history of science, and in particular trying to look at seminal papers of a field
The problem with education by Ciro Santilli
. In this video Ciro Santilli exposes his fundamental philosophy regarding why Education is broken. This philosophy was the key motivation behind the failed OurBigBook Project. Source.Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
. Source. OurBigBook Web topics demo
. The OurBigBook topic feature allows users to "merge their minds" in a "sort by upvote"-stack overflow-like manner for each subject. This is the killer feature of OurBigBook Web. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-topics. Source.OurBigBook dynamic article tree demo
. The OurBigBook dynamic tree feature allows any of your headers to be the toplevel h1 header of a page, while still displaying its descendants. SEO loves this, and it also allows users to always get their content on the correct granularity. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-dynamic-article-tree. Source.OurBigBook local editing and publishing demo
. With OurBigBook you can store your content as plaintext files in a Lightweight markup, and then publish that to either OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features, or as a static website where you are in full control. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/publish-your-content. Source.Top Down 2D continuous game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)
More information: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games". This is Ciro's underwhelming stab at the fundamental question: Can AGI be trained in simulations?. This project could be taken much further. Source.
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| Force of Will 3 U U |
| --------------------------------- |
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| | ///_\ (--) \///\ | |
| | ) //// \_____///\\ | |
| | ) \ / / / / | |
| | ) / \ | | / _/ | |
| | ) \ ( ( / / / / \ | |
| | / ) ( ) / ( )/( ) \ | |
| | \(_)/(_)/ /UUUU \ \\\/ | | |
| .---------------------------------. |
| Interrupt |
| ,---------------------------------, |
| | You may pay 1 life and remove a | |
| | blue card in your hand from the | |
| | game instead of paying Force of | |
| | Will's casting cost. Effects | |
| | that prevent or redirect damage | |
| | cannot be used to counter this | |
| | loss of life. | |
| | Counter target spell. | |
| `---------------------------------` |
| l
| Illus. Terese Nelsen |
-------------------------------------Code 1. .
Artist unknown, uploaded December 2014. Part of Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" where Ciro Santilli maintains a curated list of such interesting inscriptions.
This was a small project done by Ciro for artistic purposes that received some attention due to the incredible hype surrounding cryptocurrencies at the time. Ciro Santilli's views on cryptocurrencies are summarized at: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?".
YellowRobot.jpgJPG image fully embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain depicting some kind of cut material art depicting a yellow robot, inscribed on January 29, 2017.
Ciro Santilli found this image and others during his research for Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" by searching for image fingerprints on every transaction payload of the blockchain with a script.
The image was uploaded by EMBII, co-creator of the AtomSea & EMBII upload mechanism, which was responsible for a large part of the image inscriptions in the Bitcoin blockchain.
The associated message reads:This is one of Ciro Santilli's favorite AtomSea & EMBII uploads, as it perfectly encapsules the "medium as an art form" approach to blockchain art, where even non-novel works can be recontextualized into something interesting, here depicting an opposition between the ephemeral and the immutable.
Chiharu [EMBII's Japanese wife] and I found this little yellow robot while exploring Chicago. It will be covered by tar or eventually removed but this tribute will remain. N 41.880778 E -87.629210
2010 Wayback Machine archive of starwarsweb.net
.This website was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites, a covert system the CIA used to communicate with its assets. More details at: Section "CIA 2010 covert communication websites".
Ciro Santilli had some naughty OSINT fun finding some of the websites of this defunct network in 2023 after he heard about the 2022 Reuters report on the matter, which for the first time gave away 7 concrete websites out of a claimed 885 total found. As of November 2023, Ciro had found about 350 of them.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of noticiasmusica.net
.This is another website that was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites. This website is written in Brazilian Portuguese, and therefore suggests that the CIA had assets in Brazil at the time, and thus was spying on a "fellow democracy".
Although Snowden's revelations made it extremely obvious to the world that the USA spies upon everyone outside of the Five Eyes, including fellow democracies, it is rare to have such a direct a concrete proof of it visible live right on the Wayback Machine. Other targeted democracies include France, Germany, Italy and Spain. More details at: USA spying on its own allies.
This investigative report by Ciro Santilli was featured on the Daily Mail after 404 Media reported on it in 2025.
Diagram of the fundamental theorem on homomorphisms by Ciro Santilli (2020)
Shows the relationship between group homomorphisms and normal subgroups.
Used in the Stack Exchange answer to What is the intuition behind normal subgroups? One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Spacetime diagram illustrating how faster-than-light travel implies time travel by Ciro Santilli (2021)
Used in the Stack Exchange answer to Does faster than light travel imply travelling back in time?. One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Average insertion time into heaps, binary search tree and hash maps of the C++ standard library by Ciro Santilli (2015)
Used in the Stack Overflow answer to Heap vs Binary Search Tree (BST). One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli". Source.
Top view of an open Oxford Nanopore MinION
. This is Ciro Santilli's hand on the Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Nanopore_Technologies. He put it there after working a bit on Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it" :-) And he would love to document more experiments like that one Section "Videos of all key physics experiments", but opportunities are extremely rare. Source.
A quick 2D continuous AI game prototype for reinforcement learning written in Matter.js, you can view it on a separate page at cirosantilli.com/-/raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport. This is a for-fun-only prototype for Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, C++ or maybe Python (for the deep learning ecosystem) seems inevitable for a serious version of such a project. But it is cute how much you can do with a few lines of Matter.js!
HTML snippet:
<iframe src="-/raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport" width="1000" height="850"></iframe>This project was originally done before Ciro Santilli knew how to use Codex and before Codex was so incredibly strong. Codex 6 Astra High can now just disassemble, deobfuscate and datamine the fuck out of such binaries, so we asked it to. Unfortunately it couldn't really find anything mind blowing, but here are the results anyways.
The analysis scripts is: jar.py and it should be pointed to a dump directory of the websites such as CIA 2010 websites dump. The analysis below was done as of commit b9eb31618c36421133e4875bc1cd7d7ac7763a32.
These scripts produce TODO directories.
The JARs are obfuscated, and Codex believes that they have a strong match to the Zelix KlassMaster commercial obfuscator, and points to this analysis from 2006: www.exploit-db.com/docs/english/13132-cracking-string-encryption-in-java-obfuscated-bytecode.pdf. Zelix appears to have the exact same string obfucation mechanism quat1024 had already previously manually discovered. It stores all string literals XOR'ed with 5 consecutive key bytes along:It then injects an encoder/decoder for this which transforms the strings as neede at runtime. The bytes are present in each class file itself.
switch (character_index % 5):
case 0: key = 47
case 1: key = 41
case 2: key = 84
case 3: key = 35
default: key = 14Zelix is made by an Australian company based in Narraweena and its website proudly sates:Shame they failed to list the CIA in their users list! I'm goign to ping them actually.
Leading Java Obfuscator since 1997
Here are the best small finds:
- some of the
resource/resources.binfiles contain the string:Codex could not find any clear public reference to what#Auto-generated Starbuck client config fileStarbuckis, which leads to the tentalizing possibility that could be an internal project codename. Though the possibility that it is just some internal of some public tool so obscure that even the web has lost track of it is also too strong to refute entirely.This string is part of a more complete key/value pair, e.g.dryterrainnews.comcontains:which would be present insie the- key:
Config.properties.old.1277148810409 - value:
#Auto-generated Starbuck client config file: Mon Jun 21 14:32:02 ACT 2010 #Mon Jun 21 14:32:02 ACT 2010 ServerURL=http\\://www.dryterrainnews.com/cgi-bin/nigeria.cgi EncSharedSecret=7A948986EF08B9DDF800E5AF229EC118D4F8AD9609C5080CBF2AB92397C2A9B8 KeyE=1F7D7 KeyN=67D8EA7BF935232E55863DCED7A279F701B7492316FE96F15D00C983CBFDB93B97D35898FA8928FA13D4F320E2B62D1B92F08FA8692F7D043EC197E2857D2A540E01A2529AEB232EB386917992B80D5CADE283D2C4E8DCBF682704F419E29D013FFCF33D9A1BC94E4AA469058BB508EEE1D654CF9FC4B89977A13FA33CDEDAED
resource/resources.binfile present inside the JAR.resource/resources.binfile is encrypted with International Data Encryption Algorithm, a public symmetric encryption standard. However the key is itself present inside the JAR as an XOR obfuscated string.The decrypted form ofresource/resources.binis a custom key value format which Codex could not identify the source of for the life in it. The JAR contains a decoder for it in its code.There are different alternative filenames for this file all with the same format, each one with a single key used across all JARs, and each JAR having at most one of them:Applet.properties: key:7A5DAEC4029C91ED, occurances: 76. Exmaple:aryannews.net/20101229122727/headlines.jarpathc/b/b/Applet.properties.Client.properties: key:60A514D96C19F93C, occurances: 33. Example:activegaminginfo.com/20110202130304/gaming.jarpatha/b/f/Client.propertiesresource/resources.bin: key:0C5C45F2EC3C2A63, occurances: 45. Example:all-sport-headlines.com/20110207144821/birdie.jarpathresource/resources.bin
The remaining JARs use other arrangements:applet.configs, XOR-obfuscated as a single string: 35. Example:aeronet-news.com/20110202122601/aeronet.jarpatha/a/b/applet.configs. Deobfuscated content might look like:#Applet Properties #Thu Aug 19 08:19:00 AMT 2010 RequestKey.UserData.1.IsQuery=set Applet.BundleSize=1 ResponseKey.UserData.0.Size=85bw.properties, ZIP-packed: 30. Example:casanewsnow.com/20110201184918/casanews.jarpathb/a/bw.properties- none of these configuration resources: 9. Example:
factorforcenews.com/20110202125321/factorspeed.jar
- key:
- there's a certain number of timestamps present in the Jars. Although these could have been faked, it feels unlikey that they were. The sources of those include:
- ZIP modification time of each file
- Certificate validity dates:
- present in 37 JARs. Example:
latinamericanewsbeat.com/20100513191045/today.jarfileMETA-INF/INLINE.DSA - timezone: yes
- format: Standard binary
PKCS#7/X.509encoding unencrypted, readable with OpenSSL - usage: these are part of a standard JAR public key signatures scheme, which if a key trusted would have given greater execution priviledges to the JAR. They are validly signed but self signed as you might expect...
- present in 37 JARs. Example:
applet.configs: comment timestamp as shown aboveStarbuckclient comment as shown above:#Auto-generated Starbuck client config file: Mon Jun 21 14:32:02 ACT 2010- config key backup Unix epoch milliseconds key, e.g. the
1277148810409inConfig.properties.old.1277148810409. So their editing tool kept backups as they were editing it, which is a small OPSEC defect.
We've dumped timestamp data to: github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/jar/dates.csv No dates of interest was found in the SWF.
Many of the timestamps present are much older than the earliest archive we have for each website, suggesting that they were around for much longer. E.g. 2005-06-02.
The operators worked exclusively on weekdays, and much less on Friday than other days of the week, lol they're only human:92% of timestamps fall in conventional work hours between 08:00 and 18:00, so it was not a James Bond work through the clock to save the world business.
Day Configuration timestamps Distinct configuration calendar dates ZIP timestamps¹
Monday 21 11 72
Tuesday 12 10 78
Wednesday 16 13 72
Thursday 12 11 72
Friday 5 5 60
Saturday 0 0 0
Sunday 0 0 0The timezones are:
Timezone label applet.configs Backups in resources.bin Total Possible locations / interpretations
EST 9 4 13 Eastern United States, eastern Canada, parts of the Caribbean
EDT 8 11 19 Eastern United States, eastern Canada, parts of the Caribbean
AMT 18 0 18 Western Brazil (Amazon Time), Armenia
ACT 0 16 16 Acre in Brazil (Acre Time), Northern Territory in Australia if interpreted as Java’s short timezone IDThere are a few plausible timestamp trigram documentations with slightly different possibilities among them:
- code.googlesource.com/edge/openjdk/+/refs/heads/master/jdk/src/share/classes/java/time/ZoneId.java
- docs.oracle.com/cd/E98457_01/opera_5_6_core_help/PDFs/Time_Zones.pdf
- //android.googlesource.com/platform/libcore/+/9f08ee8977750b228382eaf9a081f4847a1e0377/jdk/src/share/classes/sun/util/resources/TimeZoneNames.java
EST an EDT are obvious, Langley. ACT is understandable, Australia, a Five Eyes country and center of US espionage is East Asia. But AMT? That one is weird.
A few sites have timestamps from multiple locations e.g.:
Site Labels and counts
internationalnewsworthiness.com EDT ×2, ACT ×2
intlnewsdaily.com EDT ×2, ACT ×1
www.myhealthlibrary.net EDT ×1, ACT ×5
www.todaysnewsreports.net EDT ×1, ACT ×3Codex also spots the interesting case of myhealthlibrary on April 11, 2011 backup sequence, configuration comments go:which in UTC would jump backwards in time if ACT actually means Australia...but would work neatly if ACT is actualy Acre Standard time at UTC-4. Damn, Brazilian operators???Codex also comments:Too strong. Too strong.
09:18:19 ACT
13:59:13 EDT
13:34:14 ACT
13:43:20 ACT
14:17:18 ACT09:18:19 ACT April 10, 23:48:19
13:59:13 EDT April 11, 17:59:13
13:34:14 ACT April 11, 04:04:14
13:43:20 ACT April 11, 04:13:20
14:17:18 ACT April 11, 04:47:1814:18:19 UTC
17:59:13 UTC
18:34:14 UTC
18:43:20 UTC
19:17:18 UTC