{created=2026-06-12}

Imagine that it is 2011 and you are editing the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Causes_of_autism/Archive_2#h-Neanderthal_Admixture_Hypothesis-2011-06-09T20:06:00.000Z[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`. https://web.archive.org/web/20110624175332/http://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, <CIA 2010 covert communication websites>[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 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Slartibartfastibast[Wikipedia user Slartibartfastibast]!

After the revelations of <CIA 2010 covert communication websites>, security researcher Ellie intentionally registered the domain https://autism-news.org[autism-news.org], and she found out that Wikipedia Slartibartfastibast had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Causes_of_autism/Archive_2#h-Neanderthal_Admixture_Hypothesis-2011-06-09T20:06:00.000Z[linked to it back in 2011 in a Talk of the "Causes of autism" page] discussing the legitimacy of the "Neanderthal Admixture Hypothesis".

Slartibartfastibast placed the website under a list:
> Non-legitimate source(s) that propose hominid admixture is behind autism
"Non-legitimate" it was!

Ellie created a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Slartibartfastibast#h-Accidentally_found_a_CIA_covert_communications_website_barnstar-20260113013600[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, https://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.<CIA 2010 covert communication websites/Timeline of public disclosures>{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 `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.sql
``
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.

It 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 https://web.archive.org/web/20101230033220/http://starwarsweb.net/[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 https://web.archive.org/web/20110703222306/http://autism-news.org/causes.htm[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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slartibartfast[Slartibartfast], a character from <#The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy> who according to <Gemini> is a:
> 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
So it's probably an autistic dude from the <UK>. Their Wiki homepage says simply however:
> I live in <NYC>.
and as of writing their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Slartibartfastibast[latest contribution was from 2014] and they are typical STEM nerd based on their edits.

\Image[https://github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/screenshots/autism-news.org.jpg?raw=true]
{title=2011 <Wayback Machine> archive of https://web.archive.org/web/20110624175332/http://autism-news.org/[autism-news.org]}
{height=1122}
{source=https://web.archive.org/web/20110624175332/http://autism-news.org/}

Link to CIA website autism-news.org found on Wikipedia from back in 2011

Updates / Link to CIA website autism-news.org found on Wikipedia from back in 2011

But I don't know what's more interesting... 

The fact that this theory about autism exists or the creativity of the CIA?

It's in good hands now, I guess.


Interesting

Ciro Santilli's Homepage

 Home

What is your email so I can contact you about private tutoring?


Interested in Tutoring

I shouldn't be doing this on funded <OurBigBook> time which is until the end of May, but I was getting too nervous and decided to start a casual job search to test the waters.

In particular I want to see if I can get past the HR lady step without toning down my online profiles. If nothing works out for the next round I'll be hiding anything too spicy like:
* prominently seeking funding for <OurBigBook> on my <LinkedIn> profile
* <CIA 2010 covert communication websites> references. This will be my first job hunt since I have published that article. Wish me luck.
* https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/gay-putin[gay Putin] profile picture on <Stack Overflow>
Another interesting point is to see if French companies are more likely to reply given that <Ciro Santilli> studied at <École Polytechnique> which the French worship.

\Image[https://web.archive.org/web/20240707132335im_/https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/images/methode/2017/04/06/0a2ae706-1a94-11e7-b4ed-ac719e54b474_1280x720_145124.jpg?itok=1PDxSxTA]
{title=https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/gay-putin[Gay Putin], currently used in <Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow profile>}
{description=Ciro's profiles may be a bit too much for the HR ladies who reject his job applications on the spot. To be fair, perhaps not enough years of experience for certain applications and job hopping may have something to do with it too. But since they don't ever tell you anything not to get sued, we'll never know.}

I'm looking in particular either for:
* <machine learning>-adjacent jobs in companies that seem to be doing something that could further <AGI>, e.g. <automatic code generation> or <robotics> would be ideal
* <quantum computing>
* <systems programming>, which is what I actually have work experience with

I spent the last two weeks doing that:
* one week browsing everything of interest in <London> and <Paris> and sending applications to anything that seemed both relevant and interesting. Maintaining an application list at: <Job application by Ciro Santilli>{full}.
* one week on a very laborious but somewhat interesting take home exercise for <Linux kernel> engineer a <Canonical (company)>, makers of <Ubuntu>.

 I had a week to finish 5 practical coding and packaging questions, and I tried to do everything as perfectly as possible, but I somewhat underestimated the amount of work and wait needed to do everything and didn't manage to finish question 4 and missed 5. Oops let's see how that goes.

 At least this had a few good outcomes for the Internet as I tried to document things as nicely as I could where they were missing from <Google> as usual:
 * I re-tested <Linux Kernel Module Cheat> and made some small improvements. Things still worked from a <Ubuntu 24.10> host (using Docker to <Ubuntu 22.04>), and I also checked that kernel 6.8 builds and GDB step debugs after adding the newly required config `CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_DWARF_TOOLCHAIN_DEFAULT`, also mentioned that at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5416406/why-are-there-no-debug-symbols-in-my-vmlinux-when-using-gdb-with-proc-kcore/79598380#79598380[Why are there no debug symbols in my vmlinux when using gdb with /proc/kcore?]
 * I contributed some simple updates to https://github.com/martinezjavier/ldd3 getting it closer to work on Linux kernel v6.8. That repository aims to keep the venerable examples from Linux kernel module book <LDD3> alive on newer kernels, and is a very good source for kernel module developers.
 * https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37507320/how-to-compile-a-linux-kernel-module/79594642#79594642[How to compile a Linux kernel module?]: wrote a quick Ciro-approved tutorial
 * https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6034745/dynamic-array-in-linux-kernel-module/79601790#79601790[Dynamic array in Linux kernel module]: I gave an educational example of a dynamic byte array (like std::string) using the kvmalloc family of allocators
 * <quickemu>: this is a good <emulator manager> and I think I'll be using it for <Ubuntu> images when needed from now on. I wrote:
 * https://askubuntu.com/questions/884534/how-to-run-ubuntu-desktop-on-qemu/1545712#1545712[How to run Ubuntu desktop on QEMU?]: an introductory tutorial to the software as their README is not that good as is often the case. It's hard for project authors to predict what new users want or not. This is my second answer to this question, the https://askubuntu.com/questions/884534/how-to-run-ubuntu-desktop-on-qemu/1046792#1046792[previous one] focusing on a more manual approach without third party helpers.
 * https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/v85fmx/how_to_share_folder_between_guesthost_quickemu/[How to share folder between guest/host? (Quickemu)]: I explained how to setup a 9p mount to share a directory between guest and host
 * https://askubuntu.com/questions/496549/error-you-must-put-some-source-uris-in-your-sources-list/857433#857433[Error :: You must put some 'source' URIs in your sources.list]: updated this answer for <Ubuntu 24.04>. This issue comes up when you want to do either of:
 ``
 sudo apt build-dep
 sudo apt source
 ``
 which don't work by default, and my answer explains how to do it from the GUI and CLI. The CLI method is specially important for <Docker> images. Since Ubuntu doesn't offer a stable CLI method for this, the method breaks from time to time and we have to find the new config file to edit.
 * https://askubuntu.com/questions/248914/what-is-hardware-enablement-hwe/1546835#1546835p[What is hardware enablement (HWE)?]: I learned a bit better how Ubuntu structures its kernel releases for each <Ubuntu release>

 \Image[https://web.archive.org/web/20250506101112if_/https://i.sstatic.net/3sqTiQlD.png]
 {title=Linux kernel version used for each <Ubuntu release>}
 {description=
 In particular, Ubuntu has HWE kernels which are updated kernels for older releases. E.g.
 * 24.04.0 and 24.04.1 had kernel 6.8
 * 24.04.2 moved up to kernel 6.11, the same one used in 24.10, to support newer hardware
 }
 {height=600}
 {source=https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle}

 Some of the main issues I had were:
 * <compiling Linux kernel for Ubuntu> is extremely slow. I was used to compiling for embedded system with <Buildroot>, which finishes in minutes, but for Ubuntu is hours, presumably because they enable as many drivers as possible to make a single ISO work on as many different computers as possible, which makes sense, but also makes development harder
 * my <QEMU> setup for Ubuntu was not quite as streamlined and I relearned a few things and set up <quickemu>. By chance I had recently come across <quickemu> for testing <OurBigBook> on <MacOS>, but I had to learn a bit how to set it up reasonably too

I'll make sure to add two weeks of OurBigBook work after May to make up for this.

Post OurBigBook job search round 2025

Updates / Post OurBigBook job search round 2025

I see you're job searching. That makes the two of us. I'm looking to get into systems programming, although I don't have as much experience as you. I'm fresh out of college too 😔

Good luck to the both of us then. \i[Cheers].


Good Luck!

{c}

Maybe <Ciro Santilli> should do something useful and remarkable so that someone might actually want to read his biography in the first place. But hey, <effortless effort>[procrastination].

<Ciro Santilli> was born in <Brazil> in the small/medium city of <Rio Claro, São Paulo> (~200k people in 2020) in the <State of São Paulo> in 1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini[AD].

The family then moved to <Jundiaí> in 1995, and then finally to <Santos, São Paulo, Brazil> in 1997.

At the age of 10, <Ciro Santilli's 10 month stay in Coventry, United Kingdom, in the year 2000>[Ciro Santilli spent 10 months in Coventry, United Kingdom, where he greatly improved his English].

After Coventry, Ciro's family went back to <Santos, São Paulo, Brazil>[Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, which made a deep impression on Ciro], until he <Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo> in 2007.

In 2010, as mentioned at <Ciro Santilli's formal education>{full}, Ciro as admitted in a double degree program at the <École Polytechnique>, France, where he stayed until 2013. Going to France was a <mind blowing>, life changing event.

Ciro Santilli's biography

Wow, i really don't know what rabbit hole brought me to your site, but I'm really impressed. You've put together a Masterpiece


Fascinating 

Didn't know that crypto bots finally arrived...
o_O


# id	 Title	 Comments	Created	Updated
cirosantilli/updates/link-to-cia-website-autism-news-org-found-on-wikipedia-from-back-in-2011#1	Interesting	2	2026-06-17	2026-06-17
cirosantilli#4	Interested in Tutoring	1	2025-12-19	2025-12-19
cirosantilli/updates/post-ourbigbook-job-search-round-2025#1	Good Luck!	2	2025-05-08	2025-05-08
cirosantilli/ciro-santilli-s-biography#1	Fascinating	1	2025-05-01	2025-05-01
cynthiajoe6912#1	I am Pioyi and I approve this message	1	2025-01-25	2025-01-25

Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40