CIA 2010 covert communication websites Fingerprints Updated 2025-07-16
From The Reuters websites and others we've found, we can establish see some clear stylistic trends across the websites which would allow us to find other likely candidates upon inspection:The most notable dissonance from the rest of the web is that there are no commercial looking website of companies, presumably because it was felt that it would be possible to verify the existence of such companies.
- natural sounding, sometimes long-ish, domain names generally with 2 or 3 full words. Most in English language, but a few in Spanish, and very few in other languages like French.
- shallow websites with a few tabs, many external links, sometimes many images, and few internal pages
- common themes include:
- .com and .net top-level domains, plus a few other very rare non .com .net TLDs, notably .info and .org
- each one has one "communication mechanism file": communication mechanisms
- narrow page width like in the days of old, lots of images
- split header images
- some common pattern they follow in their news lists:
ul.rss-items > li.rss-item, e.g.: web.archive.org/web/20110202092126/http://beamingnews.com/- links with class
a.newslinkanda.newslinkalte.g. web.archive.org/web/20110128181622/http://profile-news.com/
Most domains are the only domain for its IP, i.e. the websites are mostly private hosted. However we have later found many exceptions to this general indicator, so it should not be used as a strong exclusion rule.
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Similar to a college, but led by religious denomination leaders rather than fellows.
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CIA 2010 covert communication websites Reverse engineering Updated 2025-07-16
In this section we document the outcomes of more detailed inspection of both the communication mechanisms (JavaScript, JAR, swf) and HTML that might help to better fingerprint the websites.
CIA 2010 covert communication websites The Reuters websites Updated 2025-07-16
But by looking at the URLs of the screenshots they provided from other websites we can easily uncover all others that had screenshots, except for the Johnny Carson one, which is just generically named. E.g. the image for the Chinese one is www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/usa-spies-iran/screencap-activegaminginfo.com.jpg?v=192516290922 which leads us to domain activegaminginfo.com.
Oleg Shakirov later discovered that the Carson one had its domain written right on the screenshot, as part of a watermark present on the original website itself. Therefore the URLs of all the websites were in one way or another essentially given on the article.
The full list of domains from screenshots is:
- 2011 archive: web.archive.org/web/20110208113503/http://activegaminginfo.com/. Contains mentions of 2010.
- As of 2023, it seemed to be an actual legit photography website by German (amateur?) photographer Klaus Wägele. Archive: web.archive.org/web/20230323102504/https://www.capture-nature.com/Ciro Santilli actually sent him a message to let him know about the CIA thing in case he didn't, and he replied that he wasn't aware of it.
- 2011 archive: web.archive.org/web/20110201164741/https://www.headlines2day.com/. Dated "Copyright 2009".
fitness-dawg.com: English fitness website.2021 archive: web.archive.org/web/20110207104044/http://fitness-dawg.com/.rastadirect.net: English Rastafari culture website.- 2011 archive: web.archive.org/web/20110203021315/http://fightwithoutrules.com/. Contains mentions of 2009 news.
- 2004 archive: web.archive.org/web/20040113025122/http://alljohnny.com/.
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webpack/template Updated 2025-07-16
../webpack/template contains a reasonable starter template.
This will produce, under
dist/ the following minimized files:dist/index.html: from ../webpack/template/index.html. You can open it to see:show on the browser. This was added from JavaScript.Hello webpackdist/index.js: from ../webpack/template/index.js and anything in its import tree, e.g.:- ../webpack/template/main.scss: sass source. It gets embedded the the JavaScript output as a string, and the JavaScript then applies it to the page, making the font blue
lodashthird party library
You can also run this test with the development server on localhost:9000:which uses unminimized outptus, and automatically push reloads the page whenever you change any of the input files!
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E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab Install and first run Updated 2025-07-16
At 7e4cc9e57de76752df0f4e32eca95fb653ea64e4 you basically need to use the Docker image on Ubuntu 21.04 due to pip breaking changes... (not their fault). Perhaps pyenv would solve things, but who has the patience for that?!?!
The Docker setup from README does just work. The image download is a bit tedius, as it requires you to create a GitHub API key as described in the README, but there must be reasons for that.
Once the image is downloaded, you really want to run is from the root of the source tree:This mounts the host source under The meaning of each of the analysis commands is described at Section "Output overview".
sudo docker run --name=wcm -it -v "$(pwd):/wcEcoli" docker.pkg.github.com/covertlab/wholecellecolirelease/wcm-full/wcEcoli, so you can easily edit and view output images from your host. Once inside Docker we can compile, run the simulation, and analyze results with:make clean compile &&
python runscripts/manual/runFitter.py &&
python runscripts/manual/runSim.py &&
python runscripts/manual/analysisVariant.py &&
python runscripts/manual/analysisCohort.py &&
python runscripts/manual/analysisMultigen.py &&
python runscripts/manual/analysisSingle.pyAs a Docker refresher, after you stop the container, e.g. by restarting your computer or running
sudo docker stop wcm, you can get back into it with:sudo docker start wcm
sudo docker run -it wcm bashrunscripts/manual/runFitter.py takes about 15 minutes, and it generates files such as reconstruction/ecoli/dataclasses/process/two_component_system.py (related) which is required to run the simulation, it is basically a part of the build.runSim.py does the main simulation, progress output contains lines of type:Time (s) Dry mass Dry mass Protein RNA Small mol Expected
(fg) fold change fold change fold change fold change fold change
======== ======== =========== =========== =========== =========== ===========
0.00 403.09 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000
0.20 403.18 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 2569.18 783.09 1.943 1.910 2.005 1.950 1.963
Simulation finished:
- Length: 0:42:49
- Runtime: 0:09:13 Unlisted articles are being shown, click here to show only listed articles.