Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

Ciro Santilli visited Qatar in 2025, here are some notes.

The lady at the border crossing that checked the passports was terrible. She and all her colleagues had their hijabed colleagues had cell phones on social media right on the job, and a terrible attitude. But one of them had an Apple Watch, they are not poor. They must be the disliked third wives of the cousin of the king of something. During exit the ladies were much better. Perhaps is also because they had the late shift. The facial recognition system was terrible and took several tries to work for some people. Quite funnily, all the border crossing male officers look like Saddam Hussein. Interestingly, Chinese nationals need to take more fingerprint than Europeans. Also there's a company that has a service to collect your bags for you, they have an infinitely long line of Indian valets waiting to pick up other people's bags.

Signal is blocked at my hotel 1 but not hotel 2, and also works on Vodaphone SIM. pornhub.com is blocked everywhere: www.reddit.com/r/qatar/comments/uyhwdz/comment/m6d5980/. WhatsApp voice calling was blocked on hotel 1 and 4G, but not on hotel 2. The National Museum of Qatar blocks YouTube comments with: "Restricted mode has hidden comments for this video".

The place looks a lot like Singapore. Both have an infinite money glitch, and they import cheap NPC foreign labor like there is no tomorrow. At the end of the day you can see a bunch of Indian dudes sitting on the grass in the park as is their custom, exactly like Singapore. But is is way more extreme, with 85%-90% of the population being immigrants.

Paintings of the dictator and his father are visible everywhere. The father is important to suggest that he willingly chose this son to power and give smooth transition. Sometimes the mother is also together, presumably in part to identify which of the wives is the mother!

Drivers are a bit wild, definitely a step up from UK level.

A few hits at: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=500&offset=0&ns0=1&search=%22open+university%22

We've found three unspent puzzle scripts that require finding SHA-256 hashes:

All three are also mentioned at: bitcoincashresearch.org/t/p2sh32-a-long-term-solution-for-80-bit-p2sh-collision-attacks/750/23 in addition to some OP_HASH256 ones. The thread manages to identify one of the OP_HASH256 ones as a fake Genesis block hash.

They can be viewed disassembled at:

They were mined on 01 Apr 2014, 02 Apr 2014 and 03 Apr 2014, suggesting a possible April fool's reference?

Each is worth 0.0002 BTC, which is only 20$ as of 2024, so it's not worth much effort beyond the fun aspect of it. But it is fun!

They never claimed it back at the end of the contract so I'm keeping it.

I finally took a day to edit the Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain section from Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects into a proper YouTube video. The amount of effort that goes into every minute of video editing never ceases to amaze me.

Announcements:

In 2024 I was user #25 with the most reputation gained on Stack Overflow.

This is up from #38 in 2023 is even though I have answered less questions than before.

This is likely because LLMs have killed users that just answered lots of easy new questions, and favored those like me who only answer more important questions found through Google.

I was #13 on the last quarter, so this is likely to go even higher in 2025. More details at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions"

Announcements:

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