A reference beam is a term commonly used in optics and interferometry. It refers to a beam of light that is used as a standard or benchmark to compare against another beam of light, often referred to as the object beam. This comparison is critical for measuring various properties of the object beam, such as its amplitude, phase, or wavefront shape. In interferometry, the reference beam is typically directed towards a beam splitter, which divides the light into the reference beam and the object beam.

Of course, if you believe in modern science, agnosticism is just an euphemism for atheism.

Psalm 46:10 from the bible:

On github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship:

One promising way to find more of those would be with IP searches, since it was stated in the Reuters article that the CIA made the terrible mistake of using several contiguous IP blocks for those website. What a phenomenal OPSEC failure!!!

The easiest way would be if Wayback Machine itself had an IP search function, but we couldn't find one: Search Wayback Machine by IP.

viewdns.info was the first easily accessible website that Ciro Santilli could find that contained such information.

Our current results indicate that the typical IP range is about 30 IPs wide.

E.g. searching: viewdns.info/iphistory and considering only hits from 2011 or earlier we obtain:

Neither of these seem to be in the same ranges, the only common nearby hit amongst these ranges is the exact 68.178.232.100, and doing reverse IP search at viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=68.178.232.100&t=1 states that it has 2.5 million hostnames associated to it, so it must be some kind of Shared web hosting service, see also: superuser.com/questions/577070/is-it-possible-for-many-domain-names-to-share-one-ip-address, which makes search hard.

Ciro then tried some of the other IPs, and soon hit gold.

Initially, Ciro started by doing manual queries to viewdns.info/reversip until his IP was blocked. Then he created an account and used his 250 free queries with the following helper script: ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/viewdns-info.sh. The output of that script can be seen at: github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/viewdns-info.sh.

Ciro then found 2013 DNS Census which contained data highly disjoint form the viewdns-info one!

Summaries of the IP range exploration done so far follows, combined data from all databases above.

NCBI taxonomy entry: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?id=511145 This links to:

KEGG entry: www.genome.jp/pathway/eco01100+M00022

BioCyc promoter database query URL: biocyc.org/group?id=:ALL-PROMOTERS&orgid=ECOLI

.com and .net are very dominant. Here we list other choices made:

Many hits appear to happen on the same days, and per-day data does exist: archive.org/details/widecrawl but apparently cannot be publicly downloaded unfortunately. But maybe there's another way? TODO select candidates.

The CGI comms websites contain the only occurrence of HTTPS, so it might open up the door for a certificate fingerprint as proposed by user joelcollinsdc at: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280801!

crt.sh appears to be a good way to look into this:They all appear to use either of:

crt.sh/?q=globalnewsbulletin.com has a hit to: crt.sh/?id=774803. With login we can see: search.censys.io/certificates/5078bce356a8f8590205ae45350b27f58f4ac04478ed47a389a55b539065cee8. Issued by www.thawte.com/repository/index.html. No hits for certificates with same public key: search.censys.io/search?resource=certificates&q=parsed.subject_key_info.fingerprint_sha256%3A+714b4a3e8b2f555d230a92c943ced4f34b709b39ed590a6a230e520c273705af or any other "same" queries though.

Let's try another one for secure.altworldnews.com: search.censys.io/certificates/e88f8db87414401fd00728db39a7698d874dbe1ae9d88b01c675105fabf69b94. Nope, no direct mega hits here either.

TODO what does this Chinese forum track? New registrations? Their focus seems to be domain name speculation

Some of the threads contain domain dumps. We haven't yet seen a scrapable URL pattern, but their data goes way back and did have various hits. The forum seems to have started in 2006: club.domain.cn/forum.php?mod=forumdisplay&fid=41&page=10127

club.domain.cn/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=241704 "【国际域名拟删除列表】2007年06月16日" is the earliest list we could find. It is an expired domain list.

Some hits:

Related:

Maybe we need these people, maybe we do.

The problem as with many well known science communicators is that he falls too much on the basic side of the the missing link between basic and advanced.