Vaterite Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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Gathering key points from the articles Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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citizenlab.ca/2022/09/statement-on-the-fatal-flaws-found-in-a-defunct-cia-covert-communications-system/ did an investigation and found 885 such websites, but decided not to disclose the list or methods:
Using only a single website, as well as publicly available material such as historical internet scanning results and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, we identified a network of 885 websites and have high confidence that the United States (US) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used these sites for covert communication.
The websites included similar Java, JavaScript, Adobe Flash, and CGI artifacts that implemented or apparently loaded covert communications apps. In addition, blocks of sequential IP addresses registered to apparently fictitious US companies were used to host some of the websites. All of these flaws would have facilitated discovery by hostile parties.
The websites, which purported to be news, weather, sports, healthcare, and other legitimate websites, appeared to be localized to at least 29 languages and geared towards at least 36 countries.
The question is which website. E.g. at citizenlab.ca/2021/07/hooking-candiru-another-mercenary-spyware-vendor-comes-into-focus/ they used data from Censys.
Another critical excerpt is:
The bulk of the websites that we discovered were active at various periods between 2004 and 2013. We do not believe that the CIA has recently used this communications infrastructure. Nevertheless, a subset of the websites are linked to individuals who may be former and possibly still active intelligence community employees or assets:
  • Several are currently abroad
  • Another left mainland China in the time frame of the Chinese crackdown
  • Another was subsequently employed by the US State Department
  • Another now works at a foreign intelligence contractor
Given that we cannot rule out ongoing risks to CIA employees or assets, we are not publishing full technical details regarding our process of mapping out the network at this time. As a first step, we intend to conduct a limited disclosure to US Government oversight bodies.
This basically implies that they must have found some communication layer level identifier, e.g. IP registration, domain name registration, or certificate because it is impossible to believe that real agent names would have been present on the website content itself!
The websites were used from at least as early as August 2008, as per Gholamreza Hosseini's account, and the system was only shutdown in 2013 apparently. citizenlab.ca/2022/09/statement-on-the-fatal-flaws-found-in-a-defunct-cia-covert-communications-system/ however claims that they were used since as early as 2004.
Notably, so as to be less suspicious the websites are often in the language of the country for which they were intended, so we can often guess which country they were intended for!
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The Reuters websites Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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The Reuters article directly reported only two domains in writing:
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.
Also none of those extra ones have any Google hits except for huge domain dumps such has Expired domain trackers, so maybe this counts as little bit of novel public research.
The full list of domains from screenshots is:
This brings up to 8 known domain names with Wayback Machine archives, plus the yet unidentified Johnny Carlson one, see also: Section "Searching for Carson", which is also almost certainly is on Wayback Machine somewhere given that they have a screenshot of it.
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Reverse engineering Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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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.
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Boson Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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Undergraduate course of the University of Oxford Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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Graduate course of the University of Oxford Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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CPT symmetry Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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AppImage Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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Crow intelligence experiment Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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Video 1.
Causal understanding of water displacement by a crow by PLOS Media (2014)
Source.
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Stanford University Physics Department Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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Department of the University of Oxford Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences division of the University of Oxford Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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GoDaddy Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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Run variants Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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It would be boring if we could only simulate the same condition all the time, so let's have a look at the different boundary conditions that we can apply to the cell!
We are able to alter things like the composition of the external medium, and the genome of the bacteria, which will make the bacteria behave differently.
The variant selection is a bit cumbersome as we have to use indexes instead of names, but one you know what you are doing, it is fine.
Of course, genetic modification is limited only to experimentally known protein interactions due to the intractability of computational protein folding and computational chemistry in general, solving those would bsai.
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Other run variants Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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Besides time series run variants, conditions can also be selected directly without a time series as in:
python runscripts/manual/runSim.py --variant condition 1 1
which select row indices from reconstruction/ecoli/flat/condition/condition_defs.tsv. The above 1 1 would mean the second line of that file which starts with:
"condition" "nutrients" "genotype perturbations" "doubling time (units.min)" "active TFs"
"basal" "minimal" {} 44.0 []
"no_oxygen" "minimal_minus_oxygen" {} 100.0 []
"with_aa" "minimal_plus_amino_acids" {} 25.0 ["CPLX-125", "MONOMER0-162", "CPLX0-7671", "CPLX0-228", "MONOMER0-155"]
so 1 means no_oxygen.
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First mentions of bitcoin on YouTube Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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Incoming links Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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By Ciro Santilli:
By others:
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Strong CP problem Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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Install and first run Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
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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:
sudo docker run --name=wcm -it -v "$(pwd):/wcEcoli" docker.pkg.github.com/covertlab/wholecellecolirelease/wcm-full
This mounts the host source under /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.py
The meaning of each of the analysis commands is described at Section "Output overview".
As 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 bash
runscripts/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
and then it ended on the Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) at:
 2569.18    783.09        1.943        1.910        2.005        1.950        1.963

Simulation finished:
 - Length: 0:42:49
 - Runtime: 0:09:13
when the cell had almost doubled, and presumably divided in 42 minutes of simulated time, which could make sense compared to the 20 under optimal conditions.
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