Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli controls the following accounts.
With non-trivial activity:
Trivial or no activity:
Profiles without URLs (OMG...):
  • Discord: username cirosantilli, previously cirosantilli#8921
Accounts in Chinese websites. These accounts might be banned or altered or offer other limitations, so Ciro only communicates briefly through them. All communication through those channels should obviously be assumed to be compromised:
American Intercontinental ballistic missile Updated +Created
alcpress.org/military/icbm/index.html has a Google Maps overlay with all of the American ICBM sites, spread out across three centers. It is cute to see how they are very evenly spread out to make it hard to take them out at once.
uploads.fas.org/sites/4/NotebookMap.pdf summarizes all ICBM and also other delivery methods as of 2006.
CEA Paris-Saclay Updated +Created
Centerpiece of the CEA since the beginning of the French nuclear weapons program, headquarters since 2006.
As of 2023 the place was blurred on Google Maps satellite view, no wonder.
Ciro Santilli's minor projects Updated +Created
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:
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain / Base58 messages Updated +Created
Bitcoin addresses are by convention expressed in Base58, which is a human readable binary-to-text encoding invented by Bitcoin.
It is a bit like Base64, but obsessed with eliminating characters that look like one another in popular but stupid fonts like capital "I" and lower case ell "l". As such, any embedded text is rather obfuscated due to this limitations, and people often resort to leet-like replacements such as '1' to represent 'I'.
This seems to be one of the earliest strategies used to encode messages into the Bitcoin blockchain. The first known example appears in 2011. Then starting November 2011, a large number of messages were inscribed n short successsion, presumably by a single person or small group.
The interest in Base58 encoding might have initially arisen with people's desire to have "vanity addresses", that is Bitcoin addresses that have real words in them, much like vanity plates or vanity numbers. Such addresses with long words in them are hard to find while keeping the address spendable, because they have to correspond to a private key. An extreme notable example is:which contains the awkward 13 letter word:
embarrassable
in it. TODO: proof that it is pendable?
Perhaps inspired by this, some people also decided to use Base58 addresses as a way to create more general unspendable inscriptions, even even though the method is much more clumsy and complicated than P2FKHS. There is however a certain art to working under limitations.
Figure 1.
Total burn addresses as a function of time found by Bitcoin Burn Addresses: Unveiling the Permanent Losses and Their Underlying Causes
. Although it is not solely focused on inscriptions and may also contain functional burn addresses, it is likely that the methods of Khatib/Legout capture the overall trend of base58 inscription counts.
These messages were originally found with: github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-inscription-indexer#payload-size-out-utxo-2vals which tracks the largest transactions with unspent outputs.
Bitcoin Burn Addresses: Unveiling the Permanent Losses and Their Underlying Causes later revealed many new ones.
Finding Base58 messages is intrinsically hard for a few reasons
The interesting following transactions contain base58 encoded messages on addresses, sorted chronologically, and heighlighted either due to their earliness or historical or artistic quality:
Related:
Counties of the United Kingdom Updated +Created
There are few different versions. The most important as of 2020 are:
No one is capable of offering an official/more generalized (why can't Google Maps do this properly?) map than these people: wikishire.co.uk/map/#/centre=54.004,-4.500/zoom=7 So so be it.
Video 1.
English counties explained by Jay Foreman (2021)
Source.
GCHQ Updated +Created
Fun fact: you can see they "No photography" signs on GCHQ's gates from Google Street View, but super low resolution, making them unreadable. They must have made a deal: Google gives its Street View data with uncensored plate numbers/faces, and GCGQ allows them to film in front of their building at low resolution! The sign actually shows up on their first Instagram post when they created one in 2018 www.gchq.gov.uk/news/gchq-joins-instagram | inews.co.uk/news/uk/gchq-instagram-puzzles-photography-hobbies-216444 Just passing in front of the damn place with Google Maps on must increase your "interest score"!
Hanford site Updated +Created
The B Reactor of the facility produced the plutonium used for Trinity and Fat Man, and then for many more thousand bombs during the Cold War. More precisely, this was done at
Located in Washington, in a dry place the middle of the mountainous areas of the Western United States, where basically no one lives. The Columbia river is however nearby, that river is quite large, and provided the water needed by their activities, notably for cooling the nuclear reactors. It is worth it having look on Google Maps to get a feel for the region.
Unlike many other such laboratories, this one did not become a United States Department of Energy national laboratories. It was likely just too polluted.
Figure 1.
Aerial image of the Hanford site in 1960
. Source.
Keyhole Markup Language Updated +Created
Originally by Keyhole Inc., which the nbecame Google Maps, but the format seems standardized and has non-Google support, so should be OK.
National Cycle Network Updated +Created
Great set of long distance routes.
They are very well chosen for their high safety and level interest, so you can just go into them without putting much thought into it.
Sometimes they go a bit too much on the side of safety, making certain transitions annoying, but in general the selection is spot on.
The routes do sometimes go on a bit of gravel, so they are most adequate for hybrid bikes rather than road bikes, although road bikes would be able to to much of them. A more road-bike dedicated possibility is the The National Byway.
Note however that there are many many other local routes which are not in the network, but arguably equally, or more worthwhile.
Their diginal map distribution mechanisms are a bit shitty and sometimes asks you to pay for certain formats, which is hard to understand given that the maintainer of those maps, the Ordnance Survey appears to be public... github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/61 "How to see the Sustrans National Cycle Network on Google maps?"
Googling "National Cycle Netowrk KML" leads to: data-sustrans-uk.opendata.arcgis.com/ from which we can download the KML. gis.stackexchange.com/questions/216770/how-to-open-kml-file-in-google-maps-for-android then shows how to make that viewable on Google Maps by going through www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/?hl=en on the browser. TODO 2021-11:
  • KML: nothing happens after the upload finishes, the "Select button remains grayed out
  • CSV: you need to "Choose a column to title your markers", but all I tried give "Oops! We're having trouble finding those locations. Did you pick the correct location columns?"
"Ralph Hughes" www.linkedin.com/in/ralph-hughes-501474121 is listed as the creator/responsible of the exports, but can't find his email. Sent an email to gissupport@sustrans.org.uk and he did reply a few days later that they are aware of the issue, and are particularly trying to reach out to Google about it. Great news!
GPSPrune 20.2-1 can open the KML however, so that file can't be entirely wrong.
OpenStreetMaps has them on by default though if you just click "Cycle Map" layer. It is not as incredibly detailed as the Ordnance Survey one, e.g. does not show which side of the street to ride on, but still, is very good.
The best cycling map app Updated +Created
  • Google Maps download offline maps. This works very reliably, you can select the area you want to download. The only downside is that Google maps can't reliably show a route offline, and it does not contain national cycle route routes. Or those features are impossible for a software engineer to get working after trying for about 2 hours.
  • OpenStreetMap on browser with cycling layer: www.openstreetmap.org/#map=5/49.582/1.934&layers=C This is the best visualization of cycling routes I've found so far, contains both National Cycle Network and National Byway and a few others, and they are shown extremely clearly. But as a website it doesn't reliably work offline
  • the OsmAnd app for Android is the best offline free-ish OpenStreetMap viewer I've found so far. You only have to pay after reaching 5 region downloads, and it is very cheap if you want to do so. The cycle route view is not amazing, the routes are not so clearly marked and mixed with very similarly colored big roads, but with a bit of effort you can make them out. No routing though
  • I've heard Komoot can keep a predefined route (possibly auto planed) reliably offline, but haven't used it myself. I was not able to see National Cycle Route clearly marked anywhere on it