This is an update to the article: Section "CIA 2010 covert communication websites"
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.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of webofcheer.com
. Source. 
2011 Wayback Machine archive of webofcheer.com scrolled to show Johnny Carson
. Source. 
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.
Stock photo of a Jedi boy from Getty Images used on starwarsweb.net
. Source. 
2010 Wayback Machine archive of starwarsweb.net
. There were two small advances that led to the discovery of new domains:
- while looking for a way to procrastinate I decided to scrape justdropped.com/drops/ for fun. That website lists expired domain names and see if it would yield any new results.I had already scrapped other expired domain websites before and used that data, and I hoped that this one would provide some new domain hits, even though it had very large overlap with the other websites I had scraped domains from previously.Such domain name lists tend to contain all SCAM domains in existence, since those inevitably expire once the scammers are caught.
- even more importantly, I noticed by chance that I was being too strict on a small part of my fingerprinting which was excluding a few good domains, by removing any hits that had multiple archives of the Communication mechanism
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.
2009 Wayback Machine archive of fastnews-online.com
. 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.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of todaysengineering.com
. 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.
The full list of newly found websites is:
- cellar-notes.com
- dailywellnessnews.com
- differentviewtoday.com
- dryterrainnews.com
- euronewsonline.net
- fastnews-online.com
- financecentraltoday.com
- globalcitizennews.net
- globalinvestmentnews.net
- inkfreenews.com
- internationalnewsworthiness.com
- intoworldnews.com
- lasthournews.com
- latinamericanewsbeat.com
- localtoglobalnews.com
- magneticfieldnews.com
- middle-east-newstoday.com
- mideasttoday.net
- mydailynewsreport.com
- mynepalnews.com
- nbanewsroundup.com
- nejadnews.com
- networkconnectionsite.com
- news-and-sports.com
- newsdelivered.net
- pondernews.net
- profile-news.com
- purlicue-news.com
- sandstormnews.com
- segomonews.com
- shadesofnews.com
- technologypresstoday.com/
- the-news-scene.com
- thefootball-life.com
- thefreshnews.com
- thenewsofpakistan.com
- totallynewsnow.com
- travelxtreme.net
- webofcheer.com
- wiredworldnews.com
- world-news-online.net
- worldaroundyunnan.com
- worldofonlinenews.com
Announced at:
- mastodon.social/@cirosantilli/114156495883418926
- x.com/cirosantilli/status/1900249928653271334
- www.facebook.com/cirosantilli/posts/pfbid02LbrfezGmFik582d6H7ZEoCf9bwpU73vyivdGLVbbzWjejWLS5Rv9EjGNXBPQppUBl
- www.linkedin.com/posts/cirosantilli_httpslnkdineyu8qwc-i-found-44-new-covert-activity-7306015949374058496-X5zl/
Homepage: www.llama.com/
Not-for profit that took up OpenAI Gym maintenance after OpenAI dropped it.
It would be cool if they maintained their own list!
github.com/DLR-RM/rl-baselines3-zoo seems to contain some implementations.
Suggested at: github.com/Farama-Foundation/Gymnasium/discussions/1331
OpenAI Gym development by OpenAI ceased in 2021, and the Farama Foundation not for profit took up maintenance of it.
gymnasium==1.1.1 just worked on Ubuntu 24.10 testing with the hello world gym/random_control.py:just works and opens a game window on my desktop.
sudo apt install swig
cd gym
virtualenv -p python3
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements-python-3-12.txt
./random_control.py
Lunar Lander environment of Farama Gymnasium with random controls
. This example just passes random commands to the ship so don't expect wonders. The cool thing about it though is that you can open any environment with it e.g.
./random_control.py CarRacing-v3To manually control it we can use gym/moon_play.py:
cd gym
./moon_play.pyManual control is extremely useful to get an intuition about the problem. You will notice immediately that controlling the ship is extremely difficult.
Lunar Lander environment of Farama Gymnasium with manual control
. We slow it down to 10 FPS to give us some fighting chance.
We don't know if it is realistic, but what is certain is that this is definitely not designed to be a fun video game!A good strategy is to land anywhere very slowly and then inch yourself towards the landing pad.
- the legs of the lander are short and soft, and you're not supposed to hit the body on ground, so you have to go very slow
- the thrusters are quite weak and inertia management is super important
- the ground is very slippery
The documentation for it is available at: gymnasium.farama.org/environments/box2d/lunar_lander/ The agent input is described as:so it is a fundamentally flawed robot training example as global x and y coordinates are precisely known.
The state is an 8-dimensional vector: the coordinates of the lander in x & y, its linear velocities in x & y, its angle, its angular velocity, and two booleans that represent whether each leg is in contact with the ground or not.
Variation in the scenario comes from:
- initial speed of vehicle
- shape of lunar surface, but TODO can the ship observe the lunar surface shape in any way? If not, once again, this is a deeply flawed example.
The actions are documented at:so we can make it spin like mad counter clockwise with:
- 0: do nothing
- 1: fire left orientation engine
- 2: fire main engine
- 3: fire right orientation engine
action = 1To actually play the games manually with keyboard, you need to define your own keybindings with gymnasium.utils.play.play. Feature request for default keybindings: github.com/Farama-Foundation/Gymnasium/discussions/1330
There is no C API, you have to go through Python: github.com/Farama-Foundation/Gymnasium/discussions/1181. Shame.
They have video recording support, minimal ex stackoverflow.com/questions/77042526/how-to-record-and-save-video-of-gym-environment/79514542#79514542
TODO can they do historical reverse IP or not? I.e. determine which domains were hosted on a given IP at a given date in the past?
Very curiously, their reverse IP search appears to be somewhat broken, or not to be historic, e.g.We've contacted viewdns.info support and they replied:This is likely not accurate, more precisely it likely only works if it was the last IP address, not necessarily a current one.
- viewdns.info/iphistory/?domain=vuvuzelanews.com hits 74.116.72.246 in 2011, later moved to others
- viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=74.116.72.246&t=1 however does not contain
vuvuzelanews.com
The reverse IP tool will only show a domain if that is it's current IP address.
This section is about Nvidia GPUs that are focused on compute rather than rendering.
Until 2020 these were branded as Nvidia Tesla, but then Nvidia dropped that brand due to confusion with the Tesla Inc. the car maker.[ref].
This is the most accessible DNS database online, as it does not require login or payment.
They have reasonable data. It's not fully complete as Ciro Santilli saw on CIA 2010 covert communication websites, but it is very valuable.
Tested as of 2025, they seem to have removed the pre-IP checks on web interface, and just instead use Cloudfare to check that you are human from time to time, which allows for a lot manual searching to be done! Awesome!
Previously, tou could only get about 250 queries on the web interface, then 250 queries per free account via API. They check your IP when you signup, and you can't sign in twice from the same IP. They also state that Tor addresses are blacklisted. They also normalize dots in gmail addresses, so you need more diverse email accounts. But they haven't covered the
.gmail vs .googlemail trick.Their data is also quite disjoint from the data of the 2013 DNS Census. There is some overlap, but clearly their methodology is very different. Some times they slot into one another almost perfectly.
TODO is their database amazing?
TODO do they offer historical reverse IP?
- www.reddit.com/r/simracing/comments/10cxz7i/why_isnt_there_any_open_sourced_sim_racing_game/
- www.reddit.com/r/simracing/comments/1xnoqf/anyone_played_with_open_source_sims/ has some good comments:and
TORCS was apparently coded at the beginning of time for research into AI, car setups, etc. and is actually still actively developed today as people are still publishing papers and doing work with it. I think Speed Dreams was an attempt to improve the "game" aspect of it, but it looks like it has fallen off in terms of active development.
Downloaded TORCS and the physics feel pretty bizzaro. I can tell there are parts they are getting right, but they are overshadowed by some pretty ridiculous feeling behavior
Rigs of Rods 2022.12 had some promise as a fun simulator, and seems to have multiplayer and a way to find user created content online. But it is just too cluncky to get started with.
God can't we just have something that runs and is mildly fun to play with already?
github.com/pmndrs/racing-game finally seems to have the focus of being immediately fun. And it runs on browser. But the physics are completely broken, you go through the floor basically everywhere, and going over any bump sends you flying no matter your speed.
He died of a an accidental drug overdose on the campus of UC Berkeley on February 13, 2024. He was on his second semester of the mathematics course. That's fucked up! His mother then died a of cancer a few months later on August 9, 2024:
- heavy.com/news/marco-troper/
- eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/05/31/marco-troper-susan-wojcicki-son-cause-of-death/73920826007/
- www.jta.org/2024/03/13/obituaries/jewish-life-stories-the-19-year-old-son-of-a-tech-legend-and-the-french-jew-who-helped-abolish-the-guillotine His father is also Jewish.
Marco Troper
. There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.