Lecture 1 Updated +Created
Selected screenshots Updated +Created
Figure 1. .
The Star Wars one. Clearly branded websites like this are rare, which makes finding them all the much more fun. The Reuters article had two of them (Carson and rastadirect.net), so these were probably manually selected from the full hit dataset, and did not serve specifically as entry points. Most of the websites are quite boring and forgetful as you'd expect.
The subtitle "Beyond The Unknown" may be a reference to the Unknown Regions, an unexplored area of the galaxy in the Star Wars fictional universe.
Figure 2.
Stock photo of a Jedi boy from Getty Images used on starwarsweb.net
. Source.
The photo can still be licensed today as of 2025: www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/little-jedi-royalty-free-image/172984439. We found it by searching for "jedi boy" on gettyimages.co.uk. The photo is credited to a madisonwi, presumably an alias based on the location Madison, Wisconsin. Here's a random website about adoption that uses it: www.adoptionadvocates.net/star-wars-adoption-language/ and where it can be seen without the watermarks.
The droids can be seen e.g. at: www.amazon.co.uk/04-Kampf-Droiden-Superheftig-Jedi/dp/B004TINSW6, a promotional material for a 2008 The Clone Wars television series audio CD and available as transparent PNGs without background in several sources. The Yoda art also seems to come from that show: rpggamer.org/page.php?page=4229. The contractor's children were likely watching it when they had the idea.
Figure 3.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of webofcheer.com scrolled to show Johnny Carson
. Source. This website is a fansite for various comedians. It is the second known reference to Johnny Carson after alljohnny.com, which was one of the original screenshots given in the Reuters article. There must have been some massive Johnny Carson fan among the CIA contractors a that time!
Figure 4. .
The third Iranian football on top of the two other published by Reuters: iraniangoalkicks.com and iraniangoals.com! Admittedly, this one is the most generic and less well designed one. But still. They pushed the theme too far!
The goalkeeper can be seen at: www.pixtastock.com/illustration/7323632.
Figure 5. .
The German one.
The CIA has had a few Germany espionage scandals in the 2010s:
Figure 6. .
A French one. Because it mentions VTT (Mountain Biking in French), it must focus France.
The arrow graph is very popular can be seen at: www.financialexpress.com/money/top-4-global-market-risks-for-2024-that-may-impact-your-finances-3346284/ and many other sites. Source unknown.
Figure 7. . An Italian one about extreme sports.
Figure 9. . The Korean one. Love the kawaii style!
Figure 11. . The Philippine one one.
Figure 12. . The Mexican one.
Figure 14. . One of the many golf-themed sites. Golf appears to be quite popular over in Langley. It's exactly what you'd expect for a mid-level spook to do in their free time!
The best Caetano Veloso songs Updated +Created
Ryzen Updated +Created
This was the CPU architecure that saved AMD in the 2010's, see also: Video "How AMD went from nearly Bankrupt to Booming by Brandon Yen (2021)"
Epyc Updated +Created
AMD Instinct Updated +Created
ATI Technologies Updated +Created
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Updated +Created
B-tree Updated +Created
Like Binary search tree, but each node can have multiple objects and more than two children.
List of bitcoin blocks Updated +Created
Satoshi Nakamoto Updated +Created
bitcoin.org registration: 2008-08-18
2008-08-22: first private contact to Wei Dai email. Reproduced at www.gwern.net/docs/bitcoin/2008-nakamoto on gwern.net from address satoshi@anonymousspeech.com. Email provider shutting down entirely on 2021-09-30 as per archive.ph/wip/RRNKx, homepage now juts contains useless Bitcoin stuff.
First public Bitcoin whitepaper announcement: 2008-10-31 www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html linking to www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, email sent from from satoshi@vistomail.com. Claimed one year and a half development time. Provider apparently closed in 2014: www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h80mi/vistomailcom_closed_and_domain_changed_owner_in/, as of 2021 just reads:
Once upon a time a man paid me a visit in cyberspace, at this very domain. He planted a seed in our heads that would become the path we are walking today.
Replies in November: www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/thread.html#14863 under satoshi@anonymousspeech.com claims source code shared privately by request at that point.
First open source release: 9 January 2009. Announcement: www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/014994.html "Windows only for now. Open source C++ code is included" Arghhhhhh how can those libertarians use Microsoft Windows??? Had a GUI already.
2011-04-23 Satoshi sent his last email ever, it was to Martti Malmi. www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/business/decoding-the-enigma-of-satoshi-nakamoto-and-the-birth-of-bitcoin.html mentions:
May 2011 was also the last time Satoshi communicated privately with other Bitcoin contributors. In an email that month to Martti Malmi, one of the earliest participants, Satoshi wrote, "I've moved on to other things and probably won't be around in the future."
Hal Finney:
Fake P2PKH address Updated +Created
Two-stage P2SH inscription Updated +Created
To decode these, we throw away the last tx and the last constant of each input, e.g.:
btc getrawtransaction 033d185d1a04c4bd6de9bb23985f8c15aa46234206ad29101c31f4b33f1a0e49 true | jq -r '.vin[].scriptSig.asm' | head -n -1 | sed -r 's/ [^ ]+$//' | tr -d '\n'  | xxd -r -p > tmp.jpg
Bôbar (École Polytechnique) Updated +Created
The student organized bar of the École. There's a corresponding Binet that takes care of it.
Binet Gaussienne Updated +Created
This is likely a joke binet, but the idea is epic: its members would in principle take the hardest courses and purposefully get bad grades on them to improve the grades of others, as grades are always normalized to a normal distribution.

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