Home Updated +Created
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: 100k USD = I quit me job and work on it one year full time. Status: ~144k / 200k USD reached: 1st year locked-in, 2nd year stretch goal open at 200k USD. 1M USD = I retire and do it forever. How to donate: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
I reached 100k USD after a 1000 Monero donation, so I quit my job for 1 year starting 1st June 2024 to solve as many STEM courses as I can from a world leading university to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. If I reach 200k USD, then I'll do it for two years instead. A second year greatly improve chances of success: year one I solve a bunch of courses, year two I come guns blazing with the content 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.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/ID_photo_of_Ciro_Santilli_taken_in_2013.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/Ciro_Santilli's_learn_teach_apply_logo.png
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.
I offer:
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.
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:
Figure 1.
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".
Video 1.
Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
. Source.
Video 2.
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.
Video 3.
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.
Video 4.
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.
Video 5. 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.
Figure 3. . Source code: github.com/cirosantilli/x86-bare-metal-examples. Ciro's Linux Kernel Module Cheat is a closely related and much more important project that covers the Linux kernel and assembly language.
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|  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               |
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Code 1. .
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?".
Figure 4.
YellowRobot.jpg
. Source.
JPG 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:
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
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.
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.
Figure 5. .
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.
Figure 6. .
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.
Video 8. . 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.
Figure 10.
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 Updated +Created
This talk was presented on 24 September 2024 as part of the 2024 Aratu Week, a small online conference by Brazilian hacker interest group Boitatech.
Video 1.
Self-recorded presentation VOD
. Source.
Video 2.
Presentation upload by the organizers
. Source.
CIA 2010 covert communication websites Updated +Created
This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in many countries from the late 2000s until the early 2010s, when they were uncovered by counter intelligence of the targeted countries circa 2011-2013. This discovery led to the imprisonment and execution of several assets in Iran and China, and subsequent shutdown of the channel.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/CIA_Star_Wars_website_promo.jpg
Video 1.
How I found a Star Wars website made by the CIA by Ciro Santilli
. Source. Slightly edited VOD of the talk Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects.
The existence of such websites was first reported in November 2018 by Yahoo News: www.yahoo.com/video/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html.
Previous whispers had been heard in 2017 but without clear mention of websites: www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-espionage.html:
Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.
[...]
From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, [...] the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources. [...] One was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/Yahoo_CIA_website_article.png
Then in September 2022 a few specific websites were finally reported by Reuters: www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spies-iran/, henceforth known only as "the Reuters article" in this article.
Figure 2.
Reuters reconstruction of what the applet would have looked like
. Source.
Figure 3.
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.
Ciro Santilli heard about the 2018 article at 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: www.quora.com/What-were-some-examples-of-the-websites-that-the-CIA-used-around-2010-as-a-communication-mechanism-for-its-spies-in-China-and-Iran-but-were-later-found-and-used-to-take-down-their-spy-networks 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.
So when Ciro Santilli heard about the 2022 article almost a year after publication, and being a half-arsed web developer himself, he 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. The thing is, everyone who has ever developed a website knows that its attack surface is about the size of Texas, and the potential for fingerprinting is off the charts with so many bits and pieces sticking out. Chris, get fucked.
Figure 4.
"Seriously a dumb question" Quora answer by Chris from the US Navy
. Source.
In particular, it is fun to have such a clear and visible to anyone examples of the USA spying on its own allies in the form of Wayback Machine archives.
Given that it was reported that there were "more than 350" such websites, it would be really cool if we could uncover more of those websites ourselves beyond the 9 domains reported by Reuters!
This article documents the list of extremely likely candidates Ciro has found so far, mostly using:
more details on methods also follow. It is still far from the 885 websites reported by citizenlabs, so there must be key techniques missing. But the fact that there are no Google Search hits for the domains or IPs (except in bulk e.g. in expired domain trackers) indicates that these might not have been previously clearly publicly disclosed.
If anyone can find others, or has better techniques: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". The techniques used so far have been very heuristic, and that added to the limited amount of data makes it almost certain that several IP ranges have been missed. There are two types of contributions that would be possible:
Perhaps the current heuristically obtained data can serve as a good starting for a more data-oriented search that will eventually find a valuable fingerprint which brings the entire network out.
Disclaimer: the network fell in 2013, followed by fully public disclosures in 2018 and 2022, so we believe it is now more than safe for the public to know what can still be uncovered about the events that took place. The main author's political bias is strongly pro-democracy and anti-dictatorship.
May this list serve as a tribute to those who spent their days making, using, and uncovering these websites under the shadows.
If you want to go into one of the best OSINT CTFs of your life, stop reading now and see how many Web Archives you can find starting only from the Reuters article as Ciro did. Some guidelines:
  • there was no ultra-clean fingerprint found yet. Some intuitive and somewhat guessy data analysis was needed. But when you clean the data correctly and make good guesses, many hits follow, it feels so good
  • nothing was paid for data. But using cybercafe Wifi's for a few extra IPs may help.
Figure 5.
viewdns.info activegameinfo.com domain to IP
. Source.
Figure 6.
viewdns.info aroundthemiddleeast.com IP to domain
. Source.
Figure 7. . 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
Figure 8.
The four communication mechanisms used by the CIA websites
. Java Applets, Adobe Flash, JavaScript and HTTPS
Figure 9.
Expired domain names by day 2011
. Source. The scraping of expired domain trackers to Github was one of the positive outcomes of this project.
Video 2.
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/
Dan Abramson Updated +Created
Dan, if you ever Google yourself here, please contact Ciro Santilli: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli" to do something with OurBigBook.com. Cheers.
Discord (software) Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's discord ID: cirosantilli#8921. See also: how to contact Ciro Santilli.
You gotta be born after the year 2000 to understand it.
This is becoming more and more popular as a group chat with channels and threads possibility as of 2020.
Very similar to Slack.
Not possible to anonymously join just one server without creating a new account? What's the point of servers then! www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6gmjl7/changing_nick_before_joining_a_new_server/ Oh, also nicks don't hide your username from the server in any way, you can get the original username by just clicking on the person's username.
No proper threaded discussion without creating new channels? As of 2022 there is kind of a way, but it was a bit obtuse.
As of 2022 they also have a school hub: support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-Discord-Student-Hubs-FAQ which auto creates groups by university email access. Good idea, and shows popularity amongst that user group.
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli is actively looking for donations and contracts so he can continue to work full time on OurBigBook.com sustainably, and develop free hardcore university-level STEM education for all ages!
At 100k USD, I quit my job to work full time on it for one year. During this year I will use my contacts with STEM students of a world leading university near where I live and solve as many of their problem sheets as possible, mostly by referring to OurBigBook.com articles I'll be writing. The goal is to get as much STEM knowledge as possible into the world, and highlight how flawed presencial and sequential Higher Education is, while positioning OurBigBook.com as an alternative way to organize humanity's knowledge. Quite grand.
Status: ~144k / 200k USD reached. 1st year locked in and started 1st June 2024 to 31st May 2025[ref], 2nd year stretch goal open. A second year greatly improve chances of success: year one I solve a bunch of courses, year two I come guns blazing with the content and expand further. Donation breakdown:
  • 2024-03-18: $126,352 (!!!): anonymous 1000 Monero donation to self-custody wallet. Further comments: 1000 Monero donation.
  • 2024-03-13: $1,375: anonymous 10 Monero donation to self-custody wallet
  • 2023-11-20: $14.563: anonymous 100 Monero donation to Binance wallet
  • 2023-09: $810: anonymous 0.032 Bitcoin donation to Coinbase wallet
  • subscriptions up to 2024-01: $143,795
More details: Section "Accounting method"
At 1M USD I retire and work on open STEM education forever.
Note to potential anonymous crypto donors: anonymous donations incur a regulatory risk. I cash out most of such donations and announce it very clearly to the government and banks. For example, at one point Barclays even froze my UK account. But things seem manageable for now. On one hand, such donations serve as a fun test of the financial system. But on the other, if all banks reject my money or if the government decides to take it, I will write off the anonymous donation at zero.
How to give:
  • one time donations:
    • cryptocurrency: note that Ciro is not a regular crypto user, so you might want to make a smaller test donation and confirm that it worked by contacting Ciro before going for colossal amounts (one can dream):
      • Monero address: 4A1KK4uyLQX7EBgN7uFgUeGt6PPksi91e87xobNq7bT2j4V6LqZHKnkGJTUuCC7TjDNnKpxDd8b9DeNBpSxim8wpSczQvzf. Secret view key: 7ccaf885ff5540b0ff18927e6ac5da30130afb1eaee09ad95d3c4536a6337e0f. This is a self-custody wallet on a "clean" dedicated Monero laptop connected the Internet. I check for incoming transactions from my dirty main laptop via a view-only wallet each weekend. The cash out method used is latest simplest thing that wasn't yet blocked in my country on a given week, the last time that was centralized swappers[ref]. The fact that the cash out method changes weekly confirms that Monero privacy hadn't yet been broken by countries and that Monero is still one of the most useful cryptocurrencies: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?". For transparency, I announce all non-trivial transactions on social media, and the full list of transactions can be seen by anyone with the secret view key provided. I previously had different addresses, so pre-existing donations on older addresses will not be visible there.
      • Bitcoin address: 3KRk7f2JgekF6x7QBqPHdZ3pPDuMdY3eWR. This is a Coinbase wallet, off-chain transactions with no transaction fees accepted from other Coinbase users. This method has been tested, I have been able to receive funds from this address in 2023. Fees: non-fixed trading fees[ref] + 0% withdrawal fee on top of any Bitcoin network for on-chain transactions[ref]
      • Ethereum address: 0x44cF8C9C015F46d3b2Df730b6492823FD7A91044. Test transaction recommended.
      • Solana address: DjdaGawoVFdqxJEqpBGsSWuR4G4MVFNiNkAEu89HuKcE. Test transaction recommended.
    • TransferWise tag: wise.com/pay/me/cirod3. It shows as "Ciro Duran Santilli" and that's correct. No fees apparently? Love it!
    • PayPal: paypal.me/cirosantilli. Note that dots in Gmail address are ignored, and it is perfectly normal if the email you see has some extra dots in it. Fees: 2.9% + 0.30 GBP[ref].
  • monthly subscriptions of 1$/month or more on either:
    Symbolic 1 dollar/month donation are extremely welcome to signal your interest! This way if a certain critical mass of sponsors is ever reached (~100?), Ciro can start to more actively asking slightly higher amounts to really try to achieve full time self sufficiency.
  • larger grants/contracts from filthy rich individuals or organizations: contact Ciro as mentioned at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli" to discuss.
    Ciro is interested in contracts/voluntary work that would be compatible/synergic with the OurBigBook.com project. Some possibilities include:
    • interacting directly with classes of university students to help them learn the class subject, while at the same time spreading the university knowledge outside of the university walls
    • one-to-one mentoring of individuals of any age that are looking to make an impact in the world, and not just pass their exams
    • fixing specific bugs in related projects Ciro has experience in. These could be either via one-off contracts, or on platforms such as:
And if you have a different preferred payment mechanism not listed above, please contact Ciro, and he will set it up.
Ciro's current ambitions require him to remain in developed countries, because Ciro wants to document advanced science and technology by liaising with top universities, and there is not nearly as much high technology in poor countries. Remaining in developed countries is also a required due to family reasons.
If you would like public acknowledgement for your support, Ciro will very gladly give it, just let Ciro know how you'd prefer it. Due to Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, many supporters have chosen to be anonymous, and that is totally fine, not everyone is interested in politics, or has a situation where going public is acceptable, so we don't have a standard setup yet, let's build it together. A acknowledgement section at the bottom of this page would be a minimum, but I for larger donations we could add a your advertisement in a locations such as:
100k USD/year is a semi arbitrary amount that sounds nice. My last day job total compensation as of 2024 was about 150k USD/year.
Video 2.
OpenGL GPU GLSL fragment shader real time v4l2 Linux webcam computer vision box blur vs CPU
. Source.
Figure 1.
Ciro Santilli playing with a pipette at the University of Cambridge circa 2017
. Although totally disqualified for it, Ciro would really like to understand and explain cool scientific experiments in insane detail much as he does with computer software, related:Maybe if he ever gets enough credibility, such opportunities would actually materialize. It could be a bit like Periodic Videos, but for molecular biology and physics, and backed by OurBigBook text/tree with minimal openly licensed videos. The fact that such opportunities are essentially impossible outside of the boredom of the university system is something we should really change about education.