Edit: Carson was found Oleg Shakirov's findingsby Oleg Shakirov: alljohnny.com, communicated at: twitter.com/shakirov2036/status/1746729471778988499, earliest archive from 2004 (!): web.archive.org/web/20040113025122/http://alljohnny.com/, The domain was hidden in plain sight, it was present in a not very visible watermark visible in the Reuters article screenshot! The watermark was added to the CIA to the background image, it is actually present on the website. In retrospect, it was actually present at on the expired domain trackers dataset, but the mega discrete all second word made Ciro Santilli miss it: github.com/cirosantilli/expired-domain-names-by-day-2015/blob/9d504f3b85364a64f7db93311e70011344cff788/07/05/02#L1572

What follows is the previous

The fact that the Reuters article has a screenshot of it, and therefore a Wayback Machine link, plus the specificity of the website topic, will likely keep Ciro awake at night for a while until someone finds that domain.

Some text visible on the Reuters screenshot:It is unclear however if this text is plaintext or part of a an image.

Some failed attempts, either dry guesses or from DNS grepping dataset searches:

Searching the Wayback Machine proved fruitless. There is no full text search: Wayback Machine full text search, and a heuristic web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/Johnny%20Carson search has relevant hits but not the one we want.

Another attempt was to search for "carson" on webmasterhome.cn which lists expired domains in bulk by expiration day, and it search engine friendly. It contains most of the domains we've found so far. Google either doesn't support partial word search or requires you to be a God to find itso we settle for DuckDuckGo which supports it: duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Awebmasterhome.cn+%22carson%22&t=h_&ia=web Adding years also helps: duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Awebmasterhome.cn+%22carson%22+2011&ia=web with this we might be getting all possible results. Ciro went through all in 2011, 2012 and 2013 but no luck. Also fuck en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_City,_Nevada and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson,_California :-)

Let's search tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search for "carson" contained in any historic domain name. 10,001 lines. Grepping those, no good Wayback machine hits for those that also contain "johnny" or "show". Data at: raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/tools.whoisxmlapi.com_reverse-whois-search_carson.csv in case anyone want to try and dig...

Let's also search the fortuitously timed 2013 DNS Census.

Summary: this is just a red herring. Wakatime owner likely registered the domains just after this article was published as a publicity stunt. Fair play though.

As raised at: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280666, many, but not all, of the domains currently redirect to wakatime.com/ as of 2023, and apparently they were taken up in 2013 (TODO how to confirm that). TODO what is the explanation for that? Some examples that do:But some failed resolution examples:Even more suspiciously, according to his LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/alanhamlett/, the owner of Wakatime, Alan Hamlett, worked at WhiteHat Security, Inc from Aug 2011 - Sep 2013. The company was then acquired by Synopsys in 2022. Holy crap!!! As shown at: web.archive.org/web/20131013193406/https://www.whitehatsec.com/ that company made website security tools. Did that dude use the tools to find the vulnerabilty and then just gobble up all the domains??? What a fucking legend if he did!!!

Let's try:

Running e.g.gives:so we see that he must have setup redirection with Namecheap as mentioned at: www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/385/2237/how-to-redirect-a-url-for-a-domain/

Let's also try DNS history

So these suggest Alan might have just come along in 2023 way after the 2022 Reuters article and did the same basic IP range search that Ciro is doing now, so possibly no new tech. Let's ask... twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1668369786865164289

The domain name history presented is however of interest, and could lead to patterns being found.

Searching tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search with term "Corral, Elizabeth" gave no results unfortunately.

Basic search under tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search for "Corral" also empty. They can't see their own data? Ah, need advanced. Marked "Historic" and selected "Corral, Elizabeth", ony one hit, activegaminginfo.com.

And if you really can't make money from a subject, there is only one other thing people crave: beauty.

You have to give the beauty motivations upfront, before boring people to death with endless prerequisites, otherwise no one will ever want to learn it.

Then, if people find errors, or have questions, they will write a comment near the content itself.

Then, next person that comes along and has the same problem, will also find that comment, and your answer will solve their problems too.

The perfect way to do this is to use GitHub issues

whoisxmlapi WHOIS history April 11, 2011:Folowed by reuters registration in 2022.

whoisrequest.com/history/ mentions:

whoisxmlapi WHOIS history March 23, 2011:

whoisrequest.com/history/ mentions:
1 May, 2007: Domain created*, nameservers added. Nameservers:

whoisxmlapi WHOIS history March 22, 2011:

Vertebrates minus tetrapods.

This paraphyletic subgroup is easy to form the "acquatic only" (fishes) vs "things that come out of water" (tetrapods). Though mudfishes make that distinction harder.

Which kind of makes sense, why would you want for limbs unless you are going to stay out of water!

whoisxmlapi WHOIS record on April 28, 2011

whoisxmlapi WHOIS record on September 13, 2011

2012:

whoisxmlapi WHOIS record on April 17, 2011

Whenever you make a change to your material, people should still be able to access the previous version.

Maybe there was something in the previous version that they needed, and you just removed.

Git + GitHub is the perfect way to do versioning.