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.

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:

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:

For other less good methods that will also work, use direct messages of the following profiles from under Section "Accounts controlled by Ciro Santilli":

If you are a privacy freak or are going to tell Ciro state secrets Ciro has this GNU Privacy Guard public key: pubkey.gpg.

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.

Chat programs that don't have a proper web-only operation and force you to have a mobile phone, e.g. WhatsApp.

Heck, even Signal, which is supposed to be super secure and good for your privacy, forces you to disclose your freaking cell phone to all contacts! lifehacker.com/how-to-use-signal-without-revealing-your-private-phone-1818996580

What is my phone breaks? What if I don't want to have a fucking phone? What if I move countries and have to change the fucking number? Also evil but less because done by all: chat programs that can't send you an email if you don't see the message in X minutes.

European Union, time to force those evil companies to use support open standards like XMPP?

The solution to "how to prevent spam" is simple: your ID is a public key that you own the private key for. If you start getting spammed, generate a new public key, and send it to all contacts, and dump the previous ID.

Not end-to-end encrypted by default, WTF... you have to create "secret chats" for that:

You can't sync secret chats across devices, Signal handles that perfectly by sending E2EE messages across devices:This is a deal breaker because Ciro needs to type with his keyboard.

Desktop does not have secret chats: www.reddit.com/r/Telegram/comments/9beku1/telegram_desktop_secret_chat/ This is likey because it does not store chats locally, it just loads from server every time as of 2019: www.reddit.com/r/Telegram/comments/baqs63/where_are_chats_stored_on_telegram_desktop/ just like the web version. So it cannot have a private key.

Allows you to register a public username and not have to share phone number with contacts: telegram.org/blog/usernames-and-secret-chats-v2.

Has Reproducible builds on Android and iOS: core.telegram.org/reproducible-builds

Self deleting messages added to secret chats in Q1 2021: telegram.org/blog/autodelete-inv2

Can delete messages from the device of the person you sent it to, no matter how old.