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Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Atomic and laser Physics subdepartment of the University of Oxford by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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CIA 2010 covert communication websites / Communication mechanism by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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There are four main types of communication mechanisms found:
  • There is also one known instance where a .zip extension was used! web.archive.org/web/20131101104829*/http://plugged-into-news.net/weatherbug.zip as:
    <applet codebase="/web/20101229222144oe_/http://plugged-into-news.net/" archive="/web/20101229222144oe_/http://plugged-into-news.net/weatherbug.zip"
    JAR is the most common comms, and one of the most distinctive, making it a great fingerprint.
    Several of the JAR files are named something like either:
    as if to pose as Internet speed testing tools? The wonderful subtleties of the late 2000s Internet are a bit over our heads.
    All JARs are directly under root, not in subdirectories, and the basename usually consist of one word, though sometimes two camel cased.
  • JavaScript file. There are two subtypes:
    • JavaScript with SHAs. Rare. Likely older. Way more fingerprintable.
    • JavaScript without SHAs. They have all been obfuscated slightly different and compressed. But the file sizes are all very similar from 8kB to 10kB, and they all look similar, so visually it is very easy to detect a match with good likelyhood.
  • Adobe Flash swf file. In all instances found so far, the name of the SWF matches the name of the second level domain exactly, e.g.:
    http://tee-shot.net/tee-shot.swf
    While this is somewhat of a fingerprint, it is worth noting that is was a relatively commonly used pattern. But it is also the rarest of the mechanisms. This is a at a dissonance with the rest of the web, which circa 2010 already had way more SWF than JAR apparently.
    Some of the SWF websites have archives for empty /servlet pages:
    ./bailsnboots.com/20110201234509/servlet/teammate/index.html
./currentcommunique.com/20110130162713/servlet/summer/index.html
./mynepalnews.com/20110204095758/servlet/SnoopServlet/index.html
./mynepalnews.com/20110204095403/servlet/release/index.html
./www.hassannews.net/20101230175421/servlet/jordan/index.html
./zerosandonesnews.com/20110209084339/servlet/technews/index.html
    which makes us think that it is a part of the SWF system.
  • CGI comms
These have short single word names with some meaning linked to their website.
Because the communication mechanisms are so crucial, they tend to be less varied, and serve as very good fingerprints. It is not ludicrous, e.g. identical files, but one look at a few and you will know the others.
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CIA 2010 covert communication websites / CGI comms variant by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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École Polytechnique student culture by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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CIA 2010 covert communication websites / Backlinks by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-08-08
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Announcements and updates by self:
Pings by self:
Reactions by others:
Notable reactions to the websites themselves:
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Institute of Physics by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Year On by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Video 1.
Learning Approach Uncollege by Dale Stephens (2011)
Source.
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Crank (person) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Svengali by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Information Age by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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The beauty of mathematics by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Ciro Santilli intends to move his beauty list here little by little: github.com/cirosantilli/mathematics/blob/master/beauty.md
The most beautiful things in mathematics are results that are:
Good lists of such problems Lists of mathematical problems.
Whenever Ciro Santilli learns a bit of mathematics, he always wonders to himself:
Am I achieving insight, or am I just memorizing definitions?
Unfortunately, due to how man books are written, it is not really possible to reach insight without first doing a bit of memorization. The better the book, the more insight is spread out, and less you have to learn before reaching each insight.
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Formalization of mathematics by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-12-13
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You start with a very small list of:
Using those rules, you choose a target string that you want to reach, and then try to reach it. Before the target string is reached, mathematicians call it a "conjecture".
Mathematicians call the list of transformation rules used to reach a string a "proof".
Since every step of the proof is very simple and can be verified by a computer automatically, the entire proof can also be automatically verified by a computer very easily.
Finding proofs however is undoubtedly an uncomputable problem.
Most mathematicians can't code or deal with the real world in general however, so they haven't created the obviously necessary: website front-end for a mathematical formal proof system.
The fact that Mathematics happens to be the best way to describe physics and that humans can use physical intuition heuristics to reach the NP-hard proofs of mathematics is one of the great miracles of the universe.
Once we have mathematics formally modelled, one of the coolest results is Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which states that for any reasonable proof system, there are necessarily theorems that cannot be proven neither true nor false starting from any given set of axioms: those theorems are independent from those axioms. Therefore, there are three possible outcomes for any hypothesis: true, false or independent!
Some famous theorems have even been proven to be independent of some famous axioms. One of the most notable is that the Continuum Hypothesis is independent from Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory! Such independence proofs rely on modelling the proof system inside another proof system, and forcing is one of the main techniques used for this.
Figure 1.
The landscape of modern Mathematics comic by Abstruse Goose
. Source. This comic shows that Mathematics is one of the most diversified areas of useless human knowledge.
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Intellectual property by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Fraudster by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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Formal system by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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NixOS by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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This thing is sexy.
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CC BY-SA by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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This one strikes the right balance between restriction and permissions. NC and ND are simply too restrictive.
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White paper by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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White papers are a form of advertisement. They are not peer reviewed papers and are generally not reproducible; their value lies entirely in trust of their publisher rather than being able to verify their claims.
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If a product of a big company has a catchy name it came from an acquisition by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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If a Big Company makes a product that Does Something, they just call it Big Company Does Something.
If a product is called "Big Company Catchy Name Does Something", then it came from an acquisition, and they wanted to keep the name due to its prestige and to not confuse users.
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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!
Video 1.
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source.
We have two killer features:
  1. 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-calculus
    Articles 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/derivative
    Video 2.
    OurBigBook Web topics demo
    . Source.
  2. 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.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    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.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
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
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