Proxima Centauri Updated 2025-07-16
It is so close that we can notice its proper motion, and its distance to us will vary significantly across a few tens of thousands of years!
Run Zephyr on QEMU Updated 2025-07-26
Real hardware is for newbs. Real hardware is for newbs.
Tested on Ubuntu 23.10 we approximately follow instructions from: docs.zephyrproject.org/3.4.0/develop/getting_started/index.html stopping before the "Flash the sample" section, as we don't flash QEMU. We just run it.
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends git cmake ninja-build gperf \
  ccache dfu-util device-tree-compiler wget \
  python3-dev python3-pip python3-setuptools python3-tk python3-wheel xz-utils file \
  make gcc gcc-multilib g++-multilib libsdl2-dev libmagic1 python3-pyelftools
python3 -m venv ~/zephyrproject/.venv
source ~/zephyrproject/.venv/bin/activate
pip install west
west init ~/zephyrproject
cd ~/zephyrproject
west update
west zephyr-export
cd ~
wget https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/sdk-ng/releases/download/v0.16.1/zephyr-sdk-0.16.1_linux-x86_64.tar.xz
tar xvf zephyr-sdk-0.16.1_linux-x86_64.tar.xz
cd zephyr-sdk-0.16.1
./setup.sh
The installation procedure install all compiler toolchains for us, so we can then basically compile for any target. It also fetches the latest Git source code of Zephyr under:
~/zephyrproject/zephyr
The "most default" blinky hello world example which blinks an LED is a bit useless for us because QEMU doesn't have LEDs, so instead we are going to use one of the UART examples which will print characters we can see on QEMU stdout.
Let's start with the hello world example on an x86 target:
cd ~/zephyrproject/zephyr
west build -b qemu_x86 samples/hello_world -t run
and it outputs:
Hello World! qemu_x86
The qemu_x64 on the output comes from the CONFIG_BOARD macro github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/blob/c15ff103001899ba0321b2c38013d1008584edc0/samples/hello_world/src/main.c#L11
#include <zephyr/kernel.h>

int main(void)
{
	printk("Hello World! %s\n", CONFIG_BOARD);
	return 0;
}
You can also first cd into the directory that you want to build in to avoid typing samples/hello_world all the time:
cd ~/zephyrproject/zephyr/samples/hello_world
zephyr west build -b qemu_x86 -t run
You can also build and run separately with:
west build -b qemu_x86
west build -t run
Another important option is:
west build -t menuconfig
But note that it does not modify your prj.conf automatically for you.
Let's try on another target:
rm -rf build
zephyr west build -b qemu_cortex_a53 -t run
and same output, but on a completely different board! The qemu_cortex_a53 board is documented at: docs.zephyrproject.org/3.4.0/boards/arm64/qemu_cortex_a53/doc/index.html
The list of all examples can be seen under:
ls ~/zephyrproject/zephyr/samples
which for example contains:
zephyrproject/zephyr/samples/hello_world
So run another sample simply select it, e.g. to run zephyrproject/zephyr/samples/synchronization:
west build -b qemu_cortex_a53 samples/synchronization -t run
Your profile picture, name and status are public by default as of 2022!!! OMG!!!
This means that all secret services in the world have alrady scraped this information for everyone that uses WhatsApp!!!
They just have to go incrementally through the list of all phone numbers... 001 0000 0000, 001 0000 0001, 001 0000 0002, etc. and then you can deduce who has which phone number.
OMG... it is analogous to the Facebook profile face dump.
Some dumps from us looking for patterns, but could not find any.
Sources of whois history include:
The vast majority of domains seem to be registered either via domainsbyproxy.com which likely intgrates with Godaddy and is widely used, and seems to give zero infromation at all about the registrar.
A much smaller number however uses other methods, some of which sometimes leak a little bit of data:
Big question: webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/13237/how-do-you-view-domain-whois-history DomainTools also has it.
How on Earth did did Citizen Labs find what seems to be a DNS fingerprint??? Are there simply some very rare badly registered domains? What did they see!
One promising way to find more of those would be with IP searches, since it was stated in the Reuters article that the CIA made the terrible mistake of using several contiguous IP blocks for those website. What a phenomenal OPSEC failure!!!
The easiest way would be if Wayback Machine itself had an IP search function, but we couldn't find one: Search Wayback Machine by IP.
viewdns.info was the first easily accessible website that Ciro Santilli could find that contained such information.
Our current results indicate that the typical IP range is about 30 IPs wide.
E.g. searching: viewdns.info/iphistory and considering only hits from 2011 or earlier we obtain:
Neither of these seem to be in the same ranges, the only common nearby hit amongst these ranges is the exact 68.178.232.100, and doing reverse IP search at viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=68.178.232.100&t=1 states that it has 2.5 million hostnames associated to it, so it must be some kind of Shared web hosting service, see also: superuser.com/questions/577070/is-it-possible-for-many-domain-names-to-share-one-ip-address, which makes search hard.
Ciro then tried some of the other IPs, and soon hit gold.
Initially, Ciro started by doing manual queries to viewdns.info/reversip until his IP was blocked. Then he created an account and used his 250 free queries with the following helper script: ../cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/viewdns-info.sh. The output of that script can be seen at: github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/viewdns-info.sh.
Ciro then found 2013 DNS Census which contained data highly disjoint form the viewdns-info one!
Summaries of the IP range exploration done so far follows, combined data from all databases above.
Summary: this is just a red herring. Wakatime owner likely registered the domains just after this article was published as a publicity stunt. Fair play though.
As raised at: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280666, many, but not all, of the domains currently redirect to wakatime.com/ as of 2023, and apparently they were taken up in 2013 (TODO how to confirm that). TODO what is the explanation for that? Some examples that do:But some failed resolution examples:Even more suspiciously, according to his LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/alanhamlett/, the owner of Wakatime, Alan Hamlett, worked at WhiteHat Security, Inc from Aug 2011 - Sep 2013. The company was then acquired by Synopsys in 2022. Holy crap!!! As shown at: web.archive.org/web/20131013193406/https://www.whitehatsec.com/ that company made website security tools. Did that dude use the tools to find the vulnerabilty and then just gobble up all the domains??? What a fucking legend if he did!!!
Running e.g.
curl -vvv dedrickonline.com
gives:
*   Trying 162.255.119.197:80...
* Connected to dedrickonline.com (162.255.119.197) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: dedrickonline.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.88.1
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
< Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 20:30:19 GMT
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
< Content-Length: 55
< Connection: keep-alive
< Location: https://wakatime.com
< X-Served-By: Namecheap URL Forward
< Server: namecheap-nginx
<
<a href='https://wakatime.com'>Moved Permanently</a>.

* Connection #0 to host dedrickonline.com left intact
so we see that he must have setup redirection with Namecheap as mentioned at: www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/385/2237/how-to-redirect-a-url-for-a-domain/
Let's also try DNS history
  • whoisrequest.com/history/:
    • dedrickonline.com: registered: 1 Nov, 2010, dropped: 24 Nov, 2013
    • activegaminginfo.com : registered: 1 Feb, 2010, dropped: 1 Apr, 2012
  • tools.whoisxmlapi.com/whois-history-search
    • dedrickonline.com:
      • CIA (registrar: Godaddy, registrant name: domainsbyproxy.com)
        • Created Date: October 27, 2010 00:00:00 UTC
        • Updated Date: October 28, 2013 00:00:00 UTC
        • Expires Date: October 27, 2014 00:00:00 UTC
      • Alan (namecheap):
        • Created Date: June 11, 2023 09:59:25 UTC
        • Expires Date: June 11, 2024 09:59:25 UTC
    • activegaminginfo.com:
      • CIA (Network Solutions, registrant name: LLC. Corral, Elizabeth|ATTN ACTIVEGAMINGINFO.COM|care of Network Solutions)
        • Created Date: January 26, 2010 00:00:00 UTC
        • Updated Date: November 27, 2010 00:00:00 UTC
        • Expires Date: January 26, 2012 00:00:00 UTC
      • Alan:
        • Created Date: June 11, 2023 09:59:40 UTC
        • Expires Date: June 11, 2024 09:59:40 UTC
    • iraniangoalkicks.com:
      • CIA (registrar: Godaddy, registrant name: domainsbyproxy.com)
        • Created Date: April 9, 2007 00:00:00 UTC
        • Updated Date: March 2, 2011 00:00:00 UTC
        • Expires Date: April 9, 2011 00:00:00 UTC
      • Alan:
        • Created Date: June 11, 2023 09:59:20 UTC
        • Expires Date: June 11, 2024 09:59:20 UTC
    • iraniangoals.com:
      • CIA (registrar: Godaddy, registrant name: domainsbyproxy.com):
        • Created Date: March 6, 2008 00:00:00 UTC
        • Updated Date: March 7, 2011 00:00:00 UTC
        • Expires Date: March 6, 2014 00:00:00 UTC
      • Reuters:
        • Created Date: September 29, 2022 11:16:09 UTC
        • Updated Date: September 29, 2022 11:16:09 UTC
        • Expires Date: September 29, 2023 11:16:09 UTC
So these suggest Alan might have just come along in 2023 way after the 2022 Reuters article and did the same basic IP range search that Ciro is doing now, so possibly no new tech. Let's ask... twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1668369786865164289
The domain name history presented is however of interest, and could lead to patterns being found.
Searching tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search with term "Corral, Elizabeth" gave no results unfortunately.
Basic search under tools.whoisxmlapi.com/reverse-whois-search for "Corral" also empty. They can't see their own data? Ah, need advanced. Marked "Historic" and selected "Corral, Elizabeth", ony one hit, activegaminginfo.com.
Digital quantum computer Updated 2025-07-16
As of 2022, this tends to be the more "default" when you talk about a quantum computer.
But there are some serious analog quantum computer contestants in the field as well.
webpack/no-js-inject Updated 2025-07-16
This example shows how you could manually include the dist/index.js that is output from webpack into your index.html.
This is generally not what you want to do, because what you actually want to do is to use a Js output name with a hash in it, so that browsers only need to refetch when the name changes.
And to do that, we have to let webpack dynamically inject that unpredictable hash as done in webpack/template with:
new HtmlWebpackPlugin({
  filename: 'index.html',
  // Inject the include to our hashed filename,
  // since it is not deterministic due to the hash.
  inject: true,
  template: path.resolve(__dirname, 'index.html'),
}),
Calcite Updated 2025-07-16
This section contains some of the most interesting and a few representative screenshots of the websites found.
We intentionally omit the screenshots already reported by the Reuters article.
Figure 1.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of starwarsweb.net
.
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.
Marked as Uploaded 10 October, 2008.
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.
It later ocurred to Ciro Santilli that perhaps Reuters chose not to showcase this website because it features the photograph of a minor. But Ciro is sure that that minor is now a handsome young man in his 20's and would find the entire story very amusing if he ever finds out about it!
The images of 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.
One can almost picture the contractor who made that site seeing his children watching that show or playing the video game one evening, when a lightbulb popped over their head: tomorrow I'm going to have some fun at work.
In retrospect however, this website was likely a bad idea, since the massive pop culture appeal of Star Wars meant that when The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site by Joseph Cox was published in 2025 the combination of "CIA" and "Star Wars" on a single sentence produced an irresistible clickbait that amplified knowledge of the fiasco to general public in a way that poor Johnny Carson and Bob Marley could never do. That's why you just can't have fun while working for the secret services anymore.
Figure 3.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of alljohnny.com
. Source. Although alljohnny.com is one of the original Reuters examples, we are highlighting this screenshot here because the Reuters provided screenshot is from the extremely early 2004 version of the site, and it is interesting to see how this unique example was later updated in this 2011 version, the only known such case so far. The lack of OPSEC awareness is mind blowing, them reusing a domain like that after so many years in a completely new threat environment and possibly for a new asset.
Figure 4.
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 5.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of iranfootballsource.com
.
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 6.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of dedrickonline.com
.
The German one.
The CIA has had a few Germany espionage scandals in the 2010s:
Figure 7.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of lesummumdelafinance.com
.
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 8.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of attivitaestremi.com
. An Italian one about extreme sports.
Figure 10.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of economicnewsbuzz.com
. The Korean one. Love the kawaii style!
Figure 11.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of snapnewsfront.net
.
The Japanese one.
Figure 12.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of philippinenewsonline.net
. The Philippine one one.
Figure 13.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of feedsdemexicoyelmundo.com
. The Mexican one.
Figure 14.
2012 Wayback Machine archive of easytraveleurope.com
.
Figure 15.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of tee-shot.net
. 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!
Figure 16.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of nouvellesetdesrapports.com
.
Figure 17.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of pangawana.com
.
Figure 18.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of recuerdosdeviajeonline.com
.
Figure 19.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of theworld-news.net
.
Figure 20.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of kessingerssportsnews.com
.
Figure 21.
2011 Wayback Machine archive of negativeaperture.com
.
F-Droid Updated 2025-07-16
webpack/sass Updated 2025-07-16
This example shows how to use Sass.
To make things simple, it generates a completely separate dist/index.js and dist/main.css which are manually included from index.html, and does not do any type of injection (neither Js into HTML nor CSS in Js).

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