Incoming links: Ciro Santilli's naughty projects
Check out: OurBigBook.com, the best way to publish your scientific knowledge. It's an open source note taking system that can publish from lightweight markup files in your computer both to a multi-user mind melding dynamic website, or as a static website. It's like Wikipedia + GitHub + Stack Overflow + Obsidian mashed up. Source code: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook.
Sponsor me to work on this project. For 200k USD I will quit my job or not get a new job and work on OurBigBook full time for a second year to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. Status: ~44k / 200k USD. At 2M USD I retire/tenure and work on open STEM forever. How to donate: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
I first quit my job 1st June 2024 to work on the project for 1 year after I reached my initial 100k goal mostly via a 1000 Monero donation. For a second follow up year, I increased my requirement to 200k USD to give me more peace of mind. So the total donation so far is 144k, and if I reach a total of 300k USD, then I'll work on the project for a second year. A second year greatly improve chances of success: year one I improved my tech, year two I come guns blazing to solve courses and expand further.
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous. More rationale: Section "OurBigBook.com"
Explaining things is my superpower, e.g. I was top user #39 on Stack Overflow in 2023[ref][ref] and I have a few 1k+ star educational GitHub repositories[ref][ref][ref][ref]. Now I want to bring that level of awesomeness to masters level Mathematics and Physics. But I can't do it alone! So I created OurBigBook.com to allow everyone to work together towards the perfect book of everything.
My life's goal is to bring hardcore university-level STEM open educational content to all ages. Sponsor me at github.com/sponsors/cirosantilli starting from 1$/month so I can work full time on it. Further information: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". Achieving what I call "free gifted education" is my Nirvana.
This website is written in OurBigBook Markup, and it is published on both cirosantilli.com (static website) and outbigbook.om/cirosantilli (multi-user OurBigBook Web instance). Its source code is located at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io and also at
cirosantilli.com/_dir and it is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted.To contact Ciro, see: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". He likes to talk with random people of the Internet.
GitHub | Stack Overflow | LinkedIn | YouTube | Twitter | Wikipedia | Zhihu 知乎 | Weibo 微博 | Other accounts
Besides that, I'm also a freedom of speech slacktivist and recreational cyclist. I like Chinese traditional music and classic Brazilian pop. Opinions are my own, but they could be yours too. Tax the rich.
Let's create an educational system with:
- no distinction between university and high school, students just go as fast as they can to what they really want without stupid university entry exams
- fully open source learning material
- on-demand examinations that anyone can easily take without prerequisites
- granular entry selection only for space in specific laboratories or participation in specific novel research projects
I offer:
- online private tutoring for:
- any STEM university course
- passionate younger STEM students (any age) who want to learn university level material and beyond. Can your kid be the next Fields Medalist or Nobel Prize winner? I'm here to help, especially if you are filthy rich! I focus moving students forward as fast as they want on and on producing useful novel tutorials and results
Let your child be my Emile, and me be their Adolfo Amidei, and let's see how far they can go! I will help take your child:and achieve their ambitious STEM goals!- into the best universities
- into the best PhD programs
- educational consulting for institutions looking to improve their STEM courses
- do you know that course or teacher that consistently gets bad reviews every year? I'll work with the teacher to turn the problem around!
- are you looking to create a consistent open educational resources offering to increase your institutions internationally visibility? I can help with that too.
My approach is to:For minors, parents are welcome to join video calls, and all interactions with the student will be recorded and made available to parents.
- propose interesting research projects. The starting point is always deciding the end goal: Section "Backward design"
- learn what is needed to do the project together with the student(s)
- publish any novel results or tutorials/tools produced freely licensed online, and encourage the student to do the same (Section "Let students learn by teaching", digital garden)
I have a proven track of explaining complex concepts in an interesting and useful way. I work for the learner. Teaching statement at: Section "How to teach". Pricing to be discussed. Contact details at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli".
I am particularly excited about pointing people to the potential next big things, my top picks these days are:I am also generally interested in:
- quantum computing
- AGI research, in particular AI code generation, automated theorem proving and robotics
- assorted molecular biology technologies
- 20th century physics, notably AMO and condensed matter
- the history of science, and in particular trying to look at seminal papers of a field
Ciro Santilli's amazing Stack Overflow profile
. Ciro contributes almost exclusively by answering question he Googles into out of his own need, and never by refreshing the newest question of big tags for low hanging fruit! More information at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions".
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats
. Further methodology details at: Figure "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow stats".OurBigBook Web topics demo
. Source. The OurBigBook topic feature allows users to "merge their minds" in a "sort by upvote"-stack overflow-like manner for each subject. This is the killer feature of OurBigBook Web. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-topics.OurBigBook dynamic article tree demo
. Source. The OurBigBook dynamic tree feature allows any of your headers to be the toplevel h1 header of a page, while still displaying its descendants. SEO loves this, and it also allows users to always get their content on the correct granularity. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-dynamic-article-tree.OurBigBook local editing and publishing demo
. Source. With OurBigBook you can store your content as plaintext files in a Lightweight markup, and then publish that to either OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features, or as a static website where you are in full control. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/publish-your-content.Top Down 2D continuous game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)
Source. More information: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games". This is Ciro's underwhelming stab at the fundamental question: Can AGI be trained in simulations?. This project could be taken much further.Water Margin tribute to Chinese dissidents by Ciro Santilli (2022)
Source. Part of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, see also: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/water-margin.
Lenovo ThinkPad T430 running a BIOS hello world
. This uses Ciro Santilli's project x86 bare metal examples with source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/x86-bare-metal-examplesLinux Kernel Module Cheat presentation
. Source. This project, with source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat, aims to be the perfect emulation setup to study and develop the Linux kernel, kernel modules, QEMU, gem5 as well as x86_64, ARM userland and baremetal assembly and more.My Bitcoin inscription museum by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Introductory video to Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain". -------------------------------------
| Force of Will 3 U U |
| --------------------------------- |
| | //////////// | |
| | ////() ()\////\ | |
| | ///_\ (--) \///\ | |
| | ) //// \_____///\\ | |
| | ) \ / / / / | |
| | ) / \ | | / _/ | |
| | ) \ ( ( / / / / \ | |
| | / ) ( ) / ( )/( ) \ | |
| | \(_)/(_)/ /UUUU \ \\\/ | | |
| .---------------------------------. |
| Interrupt |
| ,---------------------------------, |
| | You may pay 1 life and remove a | |
| | blue card in your hand from the | |
| | game instead of paying Force of | |
| | Will's casting cost. Effects | |
| | that prevent or redirect damage | |
| | cannot be used to counter this | |
| | loss of life. | |
| | Counter target spell. | |
| `---------------------------------` |
| l
| Illus. Terese Nelsen |
-------------------------------------Code 1.
ASCII art of a Force of Will Magic: The Gathering card inscribed in the Bitcoin blockchain
. Artist unknown, uploaded December 2014. Part of Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" where Ciro Santilli maintains a curated list of such interesting inscriptions.
This was a small project done by Ciro for artistic purposes that received some attention due to the incredible hype surrounding cryptocurrencies at the time. Ciro Santilli's views on cryptocurrencies are summarized at: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?".
YellowRobot.jpgJPG image fully embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain depicting some kind of cut material art depicting a yellow robot, inscribed on January 29, 2017.
Ciro Santilli found this image and others during his research for Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" by searching for image fingerprints on every transaction payload of the blockchain with a script.
The image was uploaded by EMBII, co-creator of the AtomSea & EMBII upload mechanism, which was responsible for a large part of the image inscriptions in the Bitcoin blockchain.
The associated message reads:This is one of Ciro Santilli's favorite AtomSea & EMBII uploads, as it perfectly encapsules the "medium as an art form" approach to blockchain art, where even non-novel works can be recontextualized into something interesting, here depicting an opposition between the ephemeral and the immutable.
Chiharu [EMBII's Japanese wife] and I found this little yellow robot while exploring Chicago. It will be covered by tar or eventually removed but this tribute will remain. N 41.880778 E -87.629210
At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1615389973343268871 EMBII announced that he would be giving off shares of that image on Sup!?, a Bitcoin-backed NFT system he was; making. In December 2023, he gave some shares of the robot to Ciro Santilli.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of starwarsweb.net
. This website was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites, a covert system the CIA used to communicate with its assets. More details at: Section "CIA 2010 covert communication websites".
Ciro Santilli had some naughty OSINT fun finding some of the websites of this defunct network in 2023 after he heard about the 2022 Reuters report on the matter, which for the first time gave away 7 concrete websites out of a claimed 885 total found. As of November 2023, Ciro had found about 350 of them.
2010 Wayback Machine archive of noticiasmusica.net
. This is another website that was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites. This website is written in Brazilian Portuguese, and therefore suggests that the CIA had assets in Brazil at the time, and thus was spying on a "fellow democracy".
Although Snowden's revelations made it extremely obvious to the world that the USA spies upon everyone outside of the Five Eyes, including fellow democracies, it is rare to have such a direct a concrete proof of it visible live right on the Wayback Machine. Other targeted democracies include France, Germany, Italy and Spain. More details at: USA spying on its own allies.
This investigative report by Ciro Santilli was featured on the Daily Mail after 404 Media reported on it in 2025.
Diagram of the fundamental theorem on homomorphisms by Ciro Santilli (2020)
Shows the relationship between group homomorphisms and normal subgroups.
Used in the Stack Exchange answer to What is the intuition behind normal subgroups? One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Spacetime diagram illustrating how faster-than-light travel implies time travel by Ciro Santilli (2021)
Used in the Stack Exchange answer to Does faster than light travel imply travelling back in time?. One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Average insertion time into heaps, binary search tree and hash maps of the C++ standard library by Ciro Santilli (2015)
Source. Used in the Stack Overflow answer to Heap vs Binary Search Tree (BST). One of Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture in two minutes by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Quick and direct explanation of the statement of the BSD conjecture for people who know basic university mathematics. This is one of the Millennium Prize Problems, and you will get a million dollars if you can solve it! This therefore falls in the Simple to state but hard to prove of Ciro Santilli's the beauty of mathematics aesthetics.
Top view of an open Oxford Nanopore MinION
. Source. This is Ciro Santilli's hand on the Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Nanopore_Technologies. He put it there after working a bit on Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it" :-) And he would love to document more experiments like that one Section "Videos of all key physics experiments", but opportunities are extremely rare.A quick 2D continuous AI game prototype for reinforcement learning written in Matter.js, you can view it on a separate page at cirosantilli.com/_raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport. This is a for-fun-only prototype for Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, C++ or maybe Python (for the deep learning ecosystem) seems inevitable for a serious version of such a project. But it is cute how much you can do with a few lines of Matter.js!
HTML snippet:
<iframe src="_raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport" width="1000" height="850"></iframe> Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects Other projects Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 2024-09-03
CIA 2010 covert communication websites Overview of Ciro Santilli's investigation Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 2025-05-07
Ciro Santilli hard heard about the 2018 Yahoo article around 2020 while studying for his China campaign because the websites had been used to take down the Chinese CIA network in China. He even asked on Quora about it, but there were no publicly known domains at the time to serve as a starting point. Chris, Electrical Engineer and former Avionics Tech in the US Navy, even replied suggesting that obviously the CIA is so competent that it would never ever have its sites leaked like that:
Seriously a dumb question.
In 2023, one year after the Reuters article had been published, Ciro Santilli was killing some time on YouTube when he saw a curious video: Video 1. "Compromised Comms by Darknet Diaries (2023)". As soon as he understood what it was about and that it was likely related to the previously undisclosed websites that he was interested in, he went on to read the Reuters article that the podcast pointed him to.
Being a half-arsed web developer himself, Ciro knows that the attack surface of a website is about the size of Texas, and the potential for fingerprinting is off the charts with so many bits and pieces sticking out. And given that there were at least 885 of them, surely we should be able to find a few more than nine, right?
In particular, it is fun how these websites provide to anyone "live" examples of the USA spying on its own allies in the form of Wayback Machine archives.
Given all of this, Ciro knew he had to try and find some of the domains himself using the newly available information! It was an irresistible real-life capture the flag.
Chris, get fucked.
Compromised Comms by Darknet Diaries (2023)
Source. It was the YouTube suggestion for this video that made Ciro Santilli aware of the Reuters article almost one year after its publication, which kickstarted his research on the topic.
Full podcast transcript: darknetdiaries.com/transcript/75/
Ciro Santilli pinged the Podcast's host Jack Rhysider on Twitter and he ACK'ed which is cool, though he was skeptical about the strength of the fingerprints found, and didn't reply when clarification was offered. Perhaps the material is just not impactful enough for him to produce any new content based on it. Or also perhaps it comes too close to sources and methods for his own good as a presumably American citizen.
The first step was to try and obtain the domain names of all nine websites that Reuters had highlighted as they had only given two domains explicitly.
Thankfully however, either by carelessness or intentionally, this was easy to do by inspecting the address of the screenshots provided. For example, one of the URLs was:which corresponds to
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/usa-spies-iran/screencap-activegaminginfo.com.jpg?v=192516290922activegaminginfo.com.
Inspecting the Reuters article HTML source code
. Source. The Reuters article only gave one URL explicitly: iraniangoals.com. But most others could be found by inspecting the HTML of the screenshots provided, except for the Carson website.Once we had this, we were then able to inspect the websites on the Wayback Machine to better understand possible fingerprints such as their communication mechanism.
The next step was to use our knowledge of the sequential IP flaw to look for more neighbor websites to the nine we knew of.
This was not so easy to do because the websites are down and so it requires historical data. But for our luck we found viewdns.info which allowed for 200 free historical queries (and they seem to have since removed this hard limit and moved to only throttling), leading to the discovery or some or our own new domains!
This gave us a larger website sample size in the order of the tens, which allowed us to better grasp more of the possible different styles of website and have a much better idea of what a good fingerprint would look like.
The next major and difficult step would be to find new IP ranges.
This was and still is a hacky heuristic process for us, but we've had the most success with the following methods:
- step 1) get huge lists of historic domain names. The two most valuable sources so far have been:
- step 2) filter the domain lists down somehow to a more manageable number of domains. The most successful heuristics have been:
- for 2013 DNS Census which has IPs, check that they are the only domain in a given IP, which was the case for the majority of CIA websites, but was already not so common for legitimate websites
- they have the word
newson the domain name, given that so many of the websites were fake news aggregators
- step 3) search on Wayback machine if any of those filtered domains contain URL's that could be those of a communication mechanism. In particular, we've used a small army of Tor bots to overcome the Wayback Machine's IP throttling and greatly increase our checking capacity
DNS Census 2013 website
. Source. This source provided valuable historical domain to IP data. It was likely extracted with an illegal botnet. Data excerpt from the CSVs:amazon.com,2012-02-01T21:33:36,72.21.194.1
amazon.com,2012-02-01T21:33:36,72.21.211.176
amazon.com,2013-10-02T19:03:39,72.21.194.212
amazon.com,2013-10-02T19:03:39,72.21.215.232
amazon.com.au,2012-02-10T08:03:38,207.171.166.22
amazon.com.au,2012-02-10T08:03:38,72.21.206.80
google.com,2012-01-28T05:33:40,74.125.159.103
google.com,2012-01-28T05:33:40,74.125.159.104
google.com,2013-10-02T19:02:35,74.125.239.41
google.com,2013-10-02T19:02:35,74.125.239.46
The four communication mechanisms used by the CIA websites
. Java Applets, Adobe Flash, JavaScript and HTTPS
Expired domain names by day 2011
. Source. The scraping of expired domain trackers to Github was one of the positive outcomes of this project.
Ciro Santilli has enjoyed doing projects dealing with with lots of data! They usually have a large overlap with Ciro Santilli's naughty projects, but not always!
Major projects can be seen at: Section "The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli".
These are some smaller projects that Ciro Santilli carried out. They are all either for fun, or misguided use of his time done by an younger self:
- small naughty stuff is listed at: Section "Ciro Santilli's naughty projects"
- Because Ciro cares about education, around 2014 he looked into markup languages and version control for books, before he noticed that this approach was useless and that ranking algorithms are all that matter:
- He implemented some large features and several smaller improvements.
- Markdown Style Guide
- karlcow/markdown-testsuite improvements: Ciro has implemented the test runner a few months before CommonMark left stealth mode and killed it instantaneously.At least MacFarlane was able to reuse part of the HTML normalizer he wrote, and he extracted the multi-engine comparison to: CommonMark Implementation Compare.Playing with this project has led Ciro to find and report many Markdown bugs/bad behavior on other software, e.g. GitHub and MultiMarkdown-4.
- isaacs/github public unofficial GitHub issue tracker: he has commented there so often that he was made a collaborator
- Node Express Sequelize Next.js realworld example app
- VCDVCD: value change dump command-line pretty printer!!! The type of thing that a billion dollar EDA tool vendor will never implement ;-)
0 time 1 counter_tb.clock 2 counter_tb.enable 3 counter_tb.out[1:0] 4 counter_tb.reset 5 counter_tb.top.out[1:0] 0 1 2 3 4 5 =========== 0 1 0 x 0 x 1 0 0 x 1 x 2 1 0 0 1 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 4 1 0 0 0 0 5 0 1 0 0 0 - Vim: sometimes Ciro want crazy and wasted his time with Vimscript:
- Vim Markdown: the owner
plasticboywas really nice and made Ciro a collaborator for his contributions, notably a live ToC outline and the header mappings - Vundle Plugin Tester, which he used to start the testing system of Vim Markdown
- Vim Markdown: the owner
- Breakthrough Message: aliens!!! Creative/media project, powered by some Python scripts.
- making Google Maps reviews of places he's visited to help other people. Ciro's photos reached 1 million views in 2019: www.google.com/maps/contrib/106598607405640635523/photos (archive)
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com 1000 Monero donation Anonymity of the donation Updated 2025-07-01 +Created 1970-01-01
The first sensation Ciro Santilli got was as if God himself had come down from heaven to toy with an unsuspecting human being. God running an experiment. Or perhaps an AGI that had already secretly taken over. Not very different.
Like with God, this was the answer to Ciro's prayers on Twitter. A one way conversation that leaves you uncertain of the details.
Whichever the case, Ciro is going to put on the best show he possibly can for your money, documenting every step along the way in usual fashion!
Ciro ran this over and over in his head, and the only big risk of anonymity is that if this money is ever proven to be from the proceeds of crime, he would have to give it back to the government and "lose one year's salary he would have otherwise gained".
However, that worst case scenario is not bad enough. If anything, it was a great excuse to quit his job for his family and wife is already worth it. Ciro could do it and survive, though situation would deteriorate slowly. But he was a coward previously.
Ciro does however feel that there is good chance that it is legitimate.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions are exceptional, he's amazing right! He deserves this! Of course, there is danger in this rationale which scammers could exploit. But bro, if scammers are going to send 100k USD to me, then please continue to do so!
Also which criminal would be stupid enough to donate proceeds of crime to a highly public person who is going to clearly announce it?
Just be warned, if you come with a baseball bat trying to get the money back by force, I will call the police immediately and by God you will not get it!!
Given this, Ciro just keeps thinking about the likely profile of the donor:
But the "why anonymous if not criminal" question remains. Generally rich people want recognition both for:Two options that come to mind:
- reputation washing
- to make their donation mechanisms higher profile which allows raising more and attracting better candidates and reach greater impact
- rich crypto dude that doesn't want thieves to know he is rich
- more public rich person that doesn't want association with Ciro Santilli's naughty projects, notably Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, but perhaps also CIA 2010 covert communication websites, which could hurt business.
- crazy rich person with a philosophy of "if they knew who I was it might interfere with what they do". AKA a God.