They have a Sorted by Trending feature BTW on each question, it's just not the default sort method.

Nowadays at least, wonder if they could just pick a few of the most popular unblocked HTTPS websites with a private messaging system a la Twitter DM. Email possibly too. A GitHub private repo would be perfect for that as dictatorships relaly hate to block it and lose all the IT value. Maybe at the time things weren't so simple with less HTTPS adoption.

I suspect the agents knew little about the comms tech and were deeply reassured of their security.

I think the reason they should have feared as soon as they began to become familiar with the website would be that they could find the form too easily, that the website was too small-- i.e. that their visits to it would make them conspicuous once something was noticed.

If it were Google and it was a standard Google, or some kind of Github chat that was like Signal but in JavaScript embedded in a website it would become much more reasonable.

Definitely. An OPSEC is only secure relative to the appropriate thread model. If those disconnect, it spells disaster.

Author of the research article here. https://www.404media.co/the-cia-secretly-ran-a-star-wars-fan... published today which kicked off this thread has a good summary, but let me know if anything is unclear.

I half wish you could've been more succint. I'm about 5% through according to my scrollbar, but citating every single thing you found on the topic makes for very tedious reading...

It is hard to balance both aspects. I tried to summarize more interesting things on initial sections and from "Methodology" downwards it is definitely not for casual reading. Also huge images and table, so don't be afraid of the bar.

Is this where we are intellectually? Complaining about too much proof and rigor? Just run it through chatGPT or something and ask it to read it for you

Hi, BTW

I wanted to ask you, do you know the RSS feed link for ourbigbook.com ?

Ah, I didn't implement RSS unfortunately. What you can do now is if you follow a user when they announce an article (there's an announce button), you get an email with a link. I suppose it could be modified to also put announced articles in an RSS feed. I never did much RSS for whatever reason. PRs open :-)

The problem was called "Antihydra" by discoverers. This could mean that we might never be able to determine BB(6), and that it might be undecidable.

Thank for the submission! This was also previously posted at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36279375 from before my recent update that added ~75 new websites with a new technique: https://twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1717445686214504830

Except the previous one was at: https://cirosantilli.com/cia-2010-covert-communication-websi... which is the corresponding static website version of https://ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/cia-2010-covert-communic...

I started this research after YouTube suggested me that video. I knew about the sites, but I had missed the Reuters articles that gave the 7 starting points.

I would love to know... even finding the source of those stock photos would be awesome. My initial suspicion is that the image split is just an ancient webdev thing (which they used much after it was popular) to reduce the size of each individual image. But who knows!

The ultimate compliment.

Yeah. They just didn't have the patience to setup separate ranges for each of their ~900 sites. It's quite sad.