Incoming links: Gmail
How to contact Ciro Santilli Updated 2025-12-25
Ciro Santilli is very happy to meet people with related interests, he really loves his like-minded online friends. Even if you don't have something a specific goal in mind for the contact, please just say hi.
To contact Ciro publicly about any general subject that is not covered in a more specific GitHub repository, including saying hi or suggestions about his website either:
- create a GitHub issue at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/new or Giscus thread
- at mention Ciro's main Twitter account
For comments about China, first read:
and then create a GitHub issue at: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/new
Publicly viewable contact is preferred if possible to more effectively share Ciro's wisdom with the world.
But if you feel more comfortable with private contact, no problem, either:
- email: username
cirosantilliwith provider ProtonMail which has domain nameproton.me. Note that Ciro also controls the Gmail address with that same username, and keep in mind that dots are ignored in Gmail addresses. But ProtonMail preferred because why should we give our private minds to the CIA by default? Push notifications disabled. - Signal: username
cirosantilli.89signal.me/#eu/BuJjV0enXYTOnFFc1FZV5LFcWodL1a2Oy9VZ5uyQU7xrYxqw+npIcaHBqghWudrI. 89 is a reference to Ciro Santilli's birth year 1989. Push notifications enabled, but treat like email unless we are actively chatting back and forth.
For other less good methods that will also likely work, use direct messages of the following profiles from under Section "Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli":Ciro's Twitter DMs are also open, but note that Ciro receives endless Chinese language SPAM there which Twitter is doing nothing to combat, so it's not as reliable.
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cirosantilli
- Reddit: www.reddit.com/user/cirosantilli
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/cirosantilli
- Telegram: telegram.me/cirosantilli. Note that end-to-end encryption is present on secret chats only, which don't have device sync. Ridiculous.
If you are a privacy freak or are going to tell Ciro state secrets Ciro has this GNU Privacy Guard public key: pubkey.gpg, but it's not something that he has ever really used.
Disqus comments were removed from his website in 2019-05-04, a manual dump is available here, removal rationale at: why Ciro Santilli removed Disqus comments from his website in 2019-05-04.
Mailing list Updated 2025-07-16
The only explanation is that the dinosaurs who created the projects are unable to adapt to new superior technologies.
Yes, Ciro is talking to you, big fundamental projects from last century: Linux kernel, GNU Compiler Collection (gcc.gnu.org/lists.html), Binutils (sourceware.org/binutils/), etc.
Some of you are already using Bugzilla for the bugs, so kudos. But if you've seen their benefit, why you still use the mailing list for patches?
Advantages of mailing lists:
- threaded replies, which almost no issue tracker has. GitHub feature request: github.com/isaacs/github/issues/837
Disadvantages: everything else:
- cannot subscribed to a single thread. Which forces you to create an email filter for each one of them you subscribe to.
- no metadata, notably the notion of closing / merging, but also upvotesYou have to read thirty messages before you can know if the bug was solved or not.
- it is insanely hard to reply to messages from before you were subscribed: webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/23197/reply-to-mailman-archived-message/115088#115088
- hard to apply patches locally to test them out: stackoverflow.com/questions/5062389/how-to-use-git-am-to-apply-patches-from-email-messages/49082916#49082916Unless they use Patchwork, which adds one more website on top of the mess.And then Gmail corrupts your patches, and you are forced to use
git send-email, which does not work on some network configurations: stackoverflow.com/questions/28038662/how-to-solve-unable-to-initialize-smtp-properly-when-using-using-git-send-ema or setup ThunderBird. - often have to subscribe to post at all, thus cluttering your inbox further
- you can edit posts to make them clearer.Yes, people could vandalize their answers when they get mad, and threads might stop making sense after edits. But this can be solved with an undeletable post history like Stack Overflow has (but not any other tracker does).Or archive.org :-)In any case, what do you think will happen more often and have greater impact:
- people vandalize their posts
- people fix their silly typos and improve content
- searchable by author, keyword, etc. without Google. Yes, mailing list trackers could have decent implementations to overcome that. But no, GNU Mailman which everyone uses does not have it. Google barely indexes it.
- people have to learn about top posting vs inline posting, and this requires infinite education of new users
- On mailing lists: either put a comment in the middle of a huge patch and let other people find it, or (more likely) copy paste the part of the patch that you are talking about.
- most mail web UIs suck.OK, this is not an unsolvable or intrinsic problem, but still a problem.E.g.:
ezmlmit is not possible to see the entire content in a single page: gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2015-07/threads.html.The alternative: do like LLVM and send attachments. Yes, I we all love opening up attachments on our browsers.The real solution: everyone can create branches and pull requests. Also has the benefit of running CI on the pull requests.
Not sure:
- you can have infinitely many trackers to replicate data in case apocalypse happens in some part of the world.Although I'm not sure this is an advantage, as you don't know anymore which one is the canonical trackers an advantage, as you don't know anymore which one is the canonical tracker.And all web interfaces already have an API to export messages, and someone has already scripted it to import from any web UI to any web UI for you.
SendGrid Updated 2025-07-16
You can either verify your sending domain by adding 3 DNS records.
Saw the email on Gmail, but Microsoft Outlook did put it into junk though. Yahoo mail also worked fine.
Updates Link to CIA website autism-news.org found on Wikipedia from back in 2011 Created 2026-06-14 Updated 2026-06-14 2026-06-14
Imagine that it is 2011 and you are editing the linked to it back in 2011 in a Talk of the "Causes of autism" Wikipedia page. You are researching about the far fetched theory that it was Neanderthal mixture with earlier humans which led to the appearance of autism. You Google it up and list some links. One of them happens to be
autism-news.org. This is how it would have looked like at the time according to archive.org. You mark it as "non-legitimate" and move on.And imagine that, unknown to you however, this page was actually created by CIA employees as of of many to allow their agents to communicate information back to the CIA! These pages would later be discovered by the target countries such as China and Iran, leading to the imprisonment and execution of many agents!
Well, this is exactly what happened to Wikipedia user Slartibartfastibast!
After the revelations of CIA 2010 covert communication websites, security researcher Ellie intentionally registered the domain autism-news.org, and she found out that Wikipedia Slartibartfastibast had linked to it back in 2011 in a Talk of the "Causes of autism" page discussing the legitimacy of the "Neanderthal Admixture Hypothesis".
Ellie created a Accidentally found a CIA covert communications website badge for them which his exceedingly cute.
Attempts to reach Slartibartfastibast to ask how he found the website failed, x.com/Slartibartfas12 is a possible account, and there is also a known similar Gmail address from a data leak which might match.
It is almost certain that they just happened to find the website while Googling for it, since we know that the websites were Googleable because it has been reported that the Iranians used Google dorking to find some of them.[ref] This is presumably because Google had access to zone files, which are big dumps of registered domains that some registrars make available to some organizations.
Ciro Santilli subsequently searched for any more hits of the Websites on the Wikipedia dumps by grepping gives a few dozen hits, all legit. The next step would be to try and download full Wikipedia history for the period, but that would require more patience and would likely not yield anything of much interest either.
enwiki-latest-externallinks.sql which contains all live external links outgoing from Wikipedia. The only two hits were autism-news.org itself and inkfreenews.com which became a legitimate local news website for Northern Indiana as early as 2013. Inspection of:grep -Po "inkfreenews.*?'.*?'.*?'" enwiki-latest-externallinks.sqlIt is understandable why
autism-news.org is would be one of the few websites most prone to being randomly Googled: unlike most websites which are quite generic news aggregator websites, this one contains a surprising amount of text. Much like the Star Wars website starwarsweb.net, we would like to think that the contractor who made this one up actually put their hearts into it, and might have had a real personal interest in the matter. The quotes about Neanderthal Admixture Hypothesis are in the Causes subpage:The Neanderthal Theory is that autism and other psychiatric conditions evolved from interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. This interbreeding is believed to have caused genetic material from the Neanderthals to enter the Homo Sapiens genome. Whether such interbreeding ever actually occurred is controversial, and this theory is extremely speculative.
The username "Slartibartfastibast" seems to be a variation of Slartibartfast, a character from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who according to Gemini is a:So it's probably an autistic dude from the UK. Their Wiki homepage says simply however:and as of writing their latest contribution was from 2014 and they are typical STEM nerd based on their edits.
venerable "planetary designer" from the planet Magrathea, most famously known for his award-winning work designing coastlines and his deep, personal passion for creating fjords
2011 Wayback Machine archive of autism-news.org
. Source.