A more precise term for those in the know: open source software that also has a liberal license, for some definition of liberal.
Ciro Santilli defines liberal as: "can be commercialized without paying anything back" (but possibly subject to other restrictions).
He therefore does not consider Creative Commons licenses with NC to be FOSS.
For the newbs, the term open source software is good enough, since most open source software is also FOSS.
dnshistory.org contains historical domain -> mappings.
We have not managed to extract much from this source, they don't have as much data on the range of interest.
But they do have some unique data at least, perhaps we should try them a bit more often, e.g. they were the only source we've seen so far that made the association: headlines2day.com -> 212.209.74.126 which places it in the more plausible globalbaseballnews.com IP range.
TODO can it do IP to domain? Or just domain to IP? Asked on their Discord: discord.com/channels/698151879166918727/968586102493552731/1124254204257632377. Their banner suggests that yes:
With our new look website you can now find other domains hosted on the same IP address, your website neighbours and more even quicker than before.
Owner replied, you can't:
At the moment you can only do this for current not historical records
In principle, we could obtain this data from search engines, but Google doesn't track that entire website well, e.g. no hits for
site:dnshistory.org "62.22.60.48" presumably due to heavy IP throttling.Homepage dnshistory.org/ gives date starting in 2009:and it is true that they do have some hits from that useful era.
Here at DNS History we have been crawling DNS records since 2009, our database currently contains over 1 billion domains and over 12 billion DNS records.
Any data that we have the patience of extracting from this we will dump under github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hits.json.
P for quantum computing!
Heck, we know nothing about this class yet related to non quantum classes!
- conjectured not to intersect with NP-complete, because if it were, all NP-complete problems could be solved efficiently on quantum computers, and none has been found so far as of 2020.
- conjectured to be larger than P, but we don't have a single algorithm provenly there:
- it is believed that the NP complete ones can't be solved
- if they were neither NP-complete nor P, it would imply P != NP
- we just don't know if it is even contained inside NP!
Not everything is perfect.
One big problem of many big open source projects is that they are contributed to by separate selfish organizations, that have private information. Then what happens is that:
- people implement the same thing twice, or one change makes the other completely unmergeable
- you get bugs but can't share your closed source test cases, and then you can't automate tests for them, or clearly demonstrate the problem
- other contributors don't see your full semi secret important motivation, and may either nitpick too much or take too long to review your stuff
Another common difficulty is that open source maintainers may simply not care enough about their own project (maybe they did in the past but lost interest) to review external patches by people they don't know.
Therefore, if you ever submit patches and they get ignore, don't be too sad. It just comes down to a question of maintenance cost, and means that you will waste some extra time on the next rebase. You just have to decide your goals and be cold about it:
- are you doing the right thing and going for a specific goal backward design? Then just fork, run as fast as possible towards a minimum viable product, and if you start to feel that rebase is costing you a lot, or feel you could get some open source fame for cheap, open reviews and see what upstream says. If they ignore you, politely tell yourself in your mind silently "fuck them", and carry on with the MVP
- otherwise, e.g. you just want to randomly help out, you have to ask them before doing anything big "how can I be of help". If I propose a patch for this issue, do you promise to review it?
Writing documentation in an open source project in which you don't have immediate push rights is another major pain due to code reviews. Code code reviews tend to be much less subjective, because if you do something wrong, stuff crashes, runs slower, or you need more lines of code to reach the same goal. There are tradeoffs, but in a limited number. Documentation code reviews on the other hand, are an open invitation to infinite bike-shedding, since you can't "run" documentation through a standardized brain model. Much better is for one good documenter person to just make one cohesive Stack Overflow post, and ping others with more knowledge to review details or add any missing pieces :-)
CIA 2010 covert communication websites Find missing hits in IP ranges by 
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16It is because there was nothing there, or just because we don't have a good enough reverse IP database?
It is possible that DomainTools could help with a more complete database, but its access is extremely expensive and out of reach at the moment.
Putting 140 USD into WhoisXMLAPI to get all whois histories of interest for possible reverse searches would also be of interest.
Probable observation of the Josephson superconducting tunneling effect by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16Paper by Philip W. Anderson and John M. Rowell that first (?) experimentally observed the Josephson effect.
Paywalled by the American Physical Society as of 2023 at: journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.10.230
They used tin-oxide-lead tunnel at 1.5 K. TODO oxide of what? Why two different metals? They say that both films are 200 nm thick, so maybe it is:
-----+------+------+-----
... Sn | SnO2 | PbO2 | Pb ...
-----+------+------------
100nm 100nmA reconstruction of their circuit in Ciro's ASCII art circuit diagram notation TODO:
DC---R_10---X---GThere are not details of the physical construction of course. Reproducibility lol.
Open source development model in which developers develop in private, and only release code to the public during releases.
Notable example project: Android Open Source Project.
CIA 2010 covert communication websites How did Alexa find the domains? by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16It can't be HTML crawl because presumably there wouldn't have been links to those websites? Presumably this is why Common Crawl doesn't seem to have any hits.
The same question also applies to the 2013 DNS Census. It has less hits, but still has many.
Whatever they did, we are so so glad that they did!
Closed source on offline products used by millions of people is evil, when you could just have those for free with open source software! Thus Ciro's hatred for Microsoft Windows and MacOS (at least userland, maybe).
.com and .net are very dominant. Here we list other choices made:
.info: has a few hits:Did a full Wayback Machine CDX scanning on .info after:That makes about 10k domains, so it's about the right size.grep -e news -e noticias -e nouvelles -e world -e global.org: has a least one hit, see: Are there .org hits?.biz:- unarchived comms:
- atthemovies.biz
- unarchived comms:
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact