Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

What happens when the underdogs get together and try to factor out their efforts to beat some evil dominant power, sometimes victoriously.

Or when startups use the cheapest stuff available and randomly become the next big thing, and decide to keep maintaining the open stuff to get features for free from other companies, or because they are forced by the Holy GPL.

Open source frees employees. When you change jobs, a large part of the specific knowledge you acquired about closed source a project with your blood and tears goes to the trash. When companies get bought, projects get shut down, and closed source code goes to the trash. What sane non desperate person would sell their life energy into such closed source projects that could die at any moment? Working on open source is the single most important non money perk a company can have to attract the best employees.

Open source is worth more than the mere pragmatic financial value of not having to pay for software or the ability to freely add new features.

Its greatest value is perhaps the fact that it allows people study it, to appreciate the beauty of the code, and feel empowered by being able to add the features that they want.

That is why Ciro Santilli thought:

But quoting Ciro's colleague S.:

And "can reverse engineer the undocumented GPU hardware APIs", Ciro would add.

While software is the most developed open source technology available in the 2010's, due to the "zero cost" of copying it over the Internet, Ciro also believes that the world would benefit enormously from open source knowledge in all areas on science and engineering, for the same reasons as open source.

Experiment and theory are like the yin and yang: opposites, but one cannot exist without the other.

Good reading list: Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics.

An upload system for various media types includeing text, images, HTML pages and audio.

bitfossil.org is an indexer website created by EMBII for it.

Each AtomSea payload has a toplevel transaction which links to other transactions. All the linked transactions together make up the payload. The most common payload type is a text plus image, as is the case of Nelson-Mandela.jpg, which can be seen at bitfossil.com/78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e/ where 78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e is the toplevel transaction ID: www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/78f0e6de0ce007f4dd4a09085e649d7e354f70bc7da06d697b167f353f115b8e

See Section "Nelson-Mandela.jpg" for a detailed reverse engineering of the format, and Section "AtomSea & EMBII data format" for a summary of it.

Holy crap, they actually support:

apertus.io/ is the system to upload/index locally, and therefore likely part of the backend of bitfossil: github.com/HugPuddle/Apertus

The system shows the messages and the images on a single page: bitfossil.org/4cbb32cd27b5b5edc12d3559bdffc1355ac2a210463d5cfaadc7ce9b06675b2b/index.htm It is basically a blockchain-based Twitter.

Hidden surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain by Ken Shirriff (2014) suggests that AtomSea & EMBII are the creator's aliases. The following online profiles of the creators feel authentic:Tried saying hi to them at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1382080760774033415 and they replied: twitter.com/AllenVandever/status/1563964396656812034

Somewhat related projects:

At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1762501350997233976 (2024) EMBII mentions that he was inspired by the Satoshi uploader.

How do you think Ciro got his rep? Just kidding.

Stack Overflow later forbade Ciro from advertising this project as described at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019". Those newbs know nothing about security through obscurity.

dnshistory.org contains historical domain -> mappings.

We have not managed to extract much from this source, they don't have as much data on the range of interest.

But they do have some unique data at least, perhaps we should try them a bit more often, e.g. they were the only source we've seen so far that made the association: headlines2day.com -> 212.209.74.126 which places it in the more plausible globalbaseballnews.com IP range.

TODO can it do IP to domain? Or just domain to IP? Asked on their Discord: discord.com/channels/698151879166918727/968586102493552731/1124254204257632377. Their banner suggests that yes:

Owner replied, you can't:

This is a shame, reverse IP here could be quite valuable.

In principle, we could obtain this data from search engines, but Google doesn't track that entire website well, e.g. no hits for site:dnshistory.org "62.22.60.48" presumably due to heavy IP throttling.

Homepage dnshistory.org/ gives date starting in 2009:and it is true that they do have some hits from that useful era.

Any data that we have the patience of extracting from this we will dump under github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/hits.json.

This section is more precisely about classical mechanics.

One may dream.

If they belive that their reputation is a representative meaningful metric, then it should be fine!

And if not, then they should fix it.

Notably, more people would try to "game" the system by quickly answering lots of small impact answers which could tilt things off a bit. Not to mention straight out fraud.

So basically less money into developers doing useless new features for the website, and more money back into meaningful contributors.

How about 2k USD / month for the number one contributor of the year, going linearly down to 0 for the 200th? This would be 100k USD / month, so about 12 developers.

TODO what does this Chinese forum track? New registrations? Their focus seems to be domain name speculation

Some of the threads contain domain dumps. We haven't yet seen a scrapable URL pattern, but their data goes way back and did have various hits. The forum seems to have started in 2006: club.domain.cn/forum.php?mod=forumdisplay&fid=41&page=10127

club.domain.cn/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=241704 "【国际域名拟删除列表】2007年06月16日" is the earliest list we could find. It is an expired domain list.

Some hits:

Forms a normal subgroup of the general linear group.

Once upon a time, when Ciro Santilli had a job, he had a programming problem.

A senior developer came over, and rather than trying to run and modify the code like an idiot, which is what Ciro Santilli usually does (see also experimentalism remarks at Section "Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory"), he just stared at the code for about 10 minutes.

We knew that the problem was likely in a particular function, but it was really hard to see why things were going wrong.

After the 10 minutes of examining every line in minute detail, he said:and truly, that was the cause.

And so, Ciro was enlightened.

Basically the same as clade.

The perfect Middle Way between command-line interfaces and GUIs. A thing of great beauty.