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Updates / Post OurBigBook job search round 2025 by Ciro Santilli 40 Created 2025-05-07 Updated 2025-07-16 2025-07-16
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I shouldn't be doing this on funded OurBigBook time which is until the end of May, but I was getting too nervous and decided to start a casual job search to test the waters.
In particular I want to see if I can get past the HR lady step without toning down my online profiles. If nothing works out for the next round I'll be hiding anything too spicy like:
Another interesting point is to see if French companies are more likely to reply given that Ciro Santilli studied at École Polytechnique which the French worship.
Figure 1.
Gay Putin, currently used in Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow profile
. Ciro's profiles may be a bit too much for the HR ladies who reject his job applications on the spot. To be fair, perhaps not enough years of experience for certain applications and job hopping may have something to do with it too. But since they don't ever tell you anything not to get sued, we'll never know.
I'm looking in particular either for:
I spent the last two weeks doing that:
I'll make sure to add two weeks of OurBigBook work after May to make up for this.
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Updates / 60 new CIA website screenshots discovered on CQ Counter by Ciro Santilli 40 Created 2025-04-15 Updated 2025-07-16 2025-07-16
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While procrastinating I suddenly remembered that cqcounter.com/siteinfo/ has screenshots of many many old websites, and I decided to look at possible hits in known IP ranges for which the Wayback Machine archive was broken.
Luckily I had already maintained a clear list of known domains in IP ranges which had no or broken wayback machine archive, so I just went over those.
This led to finding 60 novel screenshots of previously examined domains that are in common CIA-style, thus confirming them as hits beyond reasonable doubt in my mind. This also publicly revealed for the first time how a few new websites looked like, and what was their content, and in particular the target language, which could sometimes not be easily determined from the domain name alone.
This novel CQ Counter screenshot interpretation, plus a few new random discoveries and a slight relaxation of fingerprint requisites described described below moves us to 473 hits up from the previous 397!
The newly found websites were all just soulless bulk or mildly cute like the vast majority of them, but I did find found a few new screenshots of CIA websites that targeted other democracies:
I've also decided to now classify garanziadellasicurezza.com (Italy) as a hit due to various forms of supporting evidence being present. The archive is very broken however unfortunately.
Figure 1.
2011 cqcounter archive of affairesdumonde.com targeting France
. Source.
Figure 2.
2011 cqcounter archive of romulusactualites.com targeting France
. Source.
Figure 3.
2011 cqcounter archive of ordenpolicial.com targeting Spain
. Source.
Figure 4.
2011 cqcounter archive of vejaaeuropa.com targeting Brazil
. Source.
Figure 5.
2011 cqcounter archive of european-footballer.com targeting Croatia
. Source.
The fingerprint of "having a visually similar CQ Counter screenshot" is definitely weaker than a Wayback Machine archive as we only have a screenshot and can't inspect the HTML to find the communication mechanism. But when the screenshot is perfectly in CIA style and in a known IP range, the evidence is too strong and we'll consider it as a hit moving forward.
I'm also going to reclassify a few previously known domains in confirmed IP ranges as hits as hits either when:
This is a slight moving of goalposts, but those cases just feel overwhelmingly probably.
I love how this project has led me to use whatever random sources come in hand! CQ Counter is the ONLY website that I know of besides the Wayback Machine that has historical screenshots of a huge number of domains. Their database is VERY complete. But they are so obscure!
They even have the old IP of the domain. But because they don't have reverse IP to domain reverse search, and are heavily CAPTCHAed preventing search engines from properly indexing them, we can't use them to fill in existing IP ranges... So the search for the most complete DNS database that doesn't cost 15k USD like DomainTools continues www.reddit.com/r/OSINT/comments/1j8uasm/does_domaintools_offer_historical_reverse_ip_ie/
Interestingly a large number of the websites with broken Wayback Machine are from regions outside of the USA, presumably being slower to load from Wayback Machine US-based servers makes he archives more likely to break.
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Updates / 44 new CIA websites by Ciro Santilli 40 Created 2025-03-13 Updated 2025-07-16 2025-07-16
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I found 44 new covert websites made by the CIA around 2010 bringing the total to 397!
Most websites were boring as usual, but one was slightly cooler: webofcheer.com is a comedy fansite featuring Johnny Carson, Charles Chaplin, Rowan Atkins (of Mr. Bean fame), The Three Stooges and some other Americans no one knows about anymore. There must have been a massive Johnny Carson amongst the contractors at that time, given that we previously also knew about alljohnny.com, a site dedicated fully to him! Both of these sites also serve as some of the earliest examples we've got so far, dating back to 2004 and 2005.
Figure 1.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of webofcheer.com
. Source.
Figure 2.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of webofcheer.com scrolled to show Johnny Carson
. Source.
Figure 3.
2004 Wayback Machine archive of alljohnny.com
. Source. This one was a previously known website featuring Johnny Carson.
Another cool discovery is that I found the Getty Images source of the Jedi boy on their Star Wars themed site starwarsweb.net: web.archive.org/web/20101230033220/http://starwarsweb.net/ The photo can still be licensed today as of 2025: www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/little-jedi-royalty-free-image/172984439. I found it by searching for "jedi boy" on gettyimages.co.uk. The photo is credited to username madisonwi, presumably an alias of a photographer from Madison, Wisconsin. Inspired by this I reverse image searched and found the source of many other stock images from other websites, and I pinged their authors whenever I could locate them e.g. x.com/cirosantilli/status/1899750172260806711.
Figure 4.
Stock photo of a Jedi boy from Getty Images used on starwarsweb.net
. Source.
Figure 5.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of starwarsweb.net
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There were two small advances that led to the discovery of new domains:
With those two new developments, I then kicked off my pre-existing search pipelines searching for domain names with the word news on them, an amazingly efficient heuristic because many of the websites were disguised as news aggregators, and after a few hours theses new hits emerged. A few of those also led to the discovery of new IPs which then led to new domains.
One entirely new IP range was found around fastnews-online.com from 208.93.112.105 to 208.93.112.125. There were many domain names with very promising names in the range, but unfortunately for some reason most didn't have Wayback Machine Archives so I didn't count them as hits as per my guidelines.
Figure 6.
2009 Wayback Machine archive of fastnews-online.com
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Also the newly found todaysengineering.com at 208.254.38.39 appears to form an IP range with the previously known nejadnews.com at 208.254.38.56, but I couldn't find any other domains in the region with our current data sources.
Figure 7.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of todaysengineering.com
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All other domains either slot into previously known IP ranges, or more commonly don't currently have a known IP, though they would likely just slot in existing ranges if we had better data.
Thanks to Jack Rhysider from the Darknet Diaries podcast for pointing me to the existing of the 2022 Reuters article that kickstarted my research on the subject!
One outcome of this update is that I've increased my jq level to better automate the maintenance of the hits.json file were I store all the known websites in JSON format. I love that tool so much, I managed to merge two JSONs with it removing duplicates and then sort the JSON as desired. Beauty.
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Test data 2 by cirosantilli2 0 Created 2025-03-09 Updated 2025-04-18 2025-04-18
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Caroline Ulbricht by Ciro Santilli 40 Created 2025-02-11 Updated 2025-09-11 2025-09-11
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Caroline Ulbricht is the wife of Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road website which allowed users to buy and sell illegal drugs online.
Caroline's maiden name is Caroline Debrion. She is French, and they met soon after Ross was put into jail. The couple married in 2024, one year before Ross' pardon in 2025. Ordinary this girl is not.
The spectacular comeback tour of Ross Ulbricht explains:
Shortly after Mr. Ulbricht was sentenced, he received a letter from a French tech worker in Los Angeles, Caroline Debrion. She told him that she had followed the trial and thought he could use support. They exchanged letters almost every day.
Other interesting quotes from the article related to Caroline:
“I dated so many jerks in L.A., and Ross was just very real and just super kind,” she said in 2021, according to a recording of a conversation with an associate obtained by The Times. “Ross is very, very romantic.”
Their relationship caused friction in the family. Ms. Ulbricht and Ms. Debrion sometimes butted heads, two people familiar with the women said. Against the wishes of Ms. Ulbricht, who had shielded her son from the media, Ms. Debrion helped persuade Mr. Ulbricht to participate in a Silk Road documentary, a last-ditch effort to sway public opinion.
Ciro Santilli had deduced caroline's maiden name "Caroline Debrion" before the New York Times article by stalking of her online accounts below. Also, her middle name might start with an L giving "Caroline L. Debrion", but this is less certain.
Likely accounts, all of which were live after Ross left prison, but were since taken down tested as of July 2025, including any Wayback Machine archives which are now marked "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine":
Googling "Caroline Debrion" previously found a: cryptonews.com/fr/exclusives/saga-ross-ulbricht-et-silk-road-scandales-derriere-la-peine-3271/ (archive from January 2025) specificlly describing her in French as "voluntary and projct manager for the website FreeRoss", so that is almost certainly be her maiden name. As of July 2025, her family name "Debrion" had been removed from the article, which is marked "Last updated: June 18, 2025", so they presumably found that article after either reading this article or Googling her and requested the change. She is also quoted in French in that article, but before The spectacular comeback tour of Ross Ulbricht it was unclear if she actually spoke in French or if this was just translated from English. Translation of one of her quotes:
Caroline, a volunteer and project manager for the FreeRoss website, clarified the case: "Ross has never been prosecuted for injury or death, or for endangering another person."
As of 2025 most Google hits currently give "Rebecca Caroline Ulbricht Ferreira" however, an unrelated Brazilian molecular biology researcher from UNICAMP. So a good Google search is "caroline ulbricht" -Rebecca to remove the overlap. This leads to www.linkedin.com/in/carolineld/ hits.
x.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1882489065167356024 has a photo of them hugging at the jail parking lot just after he was released in 2025.
Figure 1.
Ross Ulbricht with his wife soon after he was released from jail in 2025 in front of a mural
. Source. He still seems to be in jail clothes?
Figure 2.
Ross Ulbricht with his wife soon after he was released from jail in 2025 on the road
. Source.
Figure 3.
Ross Ulbricht's wife LinkedIn profile picture according to facecheck.id
.
Figure 4.
Ross Ulbricht's wife's wife credly.com profile picture according to facecheck.id
.
Figure 5.
Ross Ulbricht's wife's wife meetup.com profile picture according to facecheck.id
.
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Test data by cirosantilli2 0 Created 2022-11-29 Updated 2025-04-18 2025-04-18
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qwer
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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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